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The Georgetown Set
By Gregg Herken. 2014
A fascinating, behind-the-scenes history of postwar Washington--a rich and colorful portrait of the close-knit group of journalists, spies, and government…
officials who waged the Cold War over cocktails and dinner. In the years after World War II, Georgetown's leafy streets were home to an unlikely group of Cold Warriors: a coterie of affluent, well-educated, and connected civilians who helped steer American strategy from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Watergate, and the endgame of Vietnam. The Georgetown set included Phil and Kay Graham, husband-and-wife publishers of The Washington Post; Joe and Stewart Alsop, odd-couple brothers who were among the country's premier political pundits; Frank Wisner, a driven, manic-depressive lawyer in charge of CIA covert operations; and a host of other diplomats, spies, and scholars responsible for crafting America's response to the Soviet Union from Truman to Reagan. This was a smaller, cozier Washington--utterly unlike today's capital--where presidents made foreign policy in consultation with reporters and professors over martinis and hors d'oeuvres, and columnists like the Alsops promoted those policies in the next day's newspapers. Together, they navigated the perilous years of the Cold War, yielding triumphs--and tragedies--with very real consequences for present-day America and the world. Gregg Herken captures their successes and failures and gives us intimate portraits of these dedicated and talented, if deeply flawed, individuals. Throughout, he illuminates the drama of those years, bringing this remarkable roster of men and women and their world not only out into the open but vividly to life.From the Hardcover edition.Tales From a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation Of Early America
By James D. Rice. 2012
In the spring of 1676, Nathanial Bacon, a hotheaded young newcomer to Virginia, led a revolt against the colony's Indian…
policies. Bacon's Rebellion turned into a civil war within Virginia - and a war of extermination against the colony's Indian allies - that lasted into the following winter,sending shock waves throughout the British colonies and into England itself. James Rice offers a colorfully detailed account of the rebellion, revealing how Piscataways, English planters, slave traders, Susquehannocks, colonial officials, plunderers and intriguers were all pulled into an escalating conflict whose outcome, month by month, remained uncertain. In Rice's richnarrative, the lead characters come to life: the powerful, charismatic Governor Berkeley, the sorrowful Susquehannock warrior Monges, the wiley Indian trader and tobacco planter William Byrd, the regal Pamunkey chieftain Cockacoeske, and the rebel leader himself, Nathanial Bacon. The dark, slenderBacon, born into a prominent family, soon earned a reputation in America as imperious, ambitious, and arrogant. But the colonial leaders did not foresee how rash and headstrong Nathaniel Bacon could be, nor how adept he would prove to be at both inciting colonists and alienating Indians. As thetense drama unfolds, it becomes apparent that the struggle between Governor Berkeley and the impetuous Bacon is nothing less than a battle over the soul of America. Bacon died in the midst of the uprising and Governor Berkeley shortly afterwards, but the profoundly important issues at the heart ofthe rebellion took another generation to resolve. The late seventeenth century was a pivotal moment in American history, full of upheavals and far-flung conspiracies. Tales From a Revolution brilliantly captures the swirling rumors and central events of Bacon's Rebellion and its aftermath, weaving them into a dramatic tale that is part of thefounding story of America.Onward Christian Soldiers?
By Carin Robinson. 2011
Are groups such as the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the religious right the greatest threat to liberty since…
Hitler or the last defenders of religious freedom and family values in America? Clyde Wilcox tells us who they are, what their history has been in 20th-century American politics, and how they might organize themselves for future political effectiveness. He tackles the political dilemma of the proper role of religious groups in American politics and government while showing how the contemporary religious right does - and does not - fit into that context. They have money, influence, power - and they turn out to vote. They are credited with delivering a significant part of the Republicans' 1994 electoral success, foreshadowing their status as major players in the elections of 1996.Betsy Mix Cowles
By Stacey M. Robertson. 1975
Betsy Mix Cowles--a champion of equality whose circle of acquaintances included Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, and William Lloyd Garrison--is a…
brilliant example of what an educated and independent woman can accomplish. A staunch defender of abolitionism, Cowles also took up the cause of women’s rights and dedicated her life to the advocacy of women’s access to education, equal rights, and independence in the pre-Civil War era. The life of this devoted social reformer illuminates the struggles and historical developments relating to abolitionism and the fledgling women’s movement during one of the most contentious periods in American history. About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women’s historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women’s life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a "good read,” featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject’s perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.TOPGUN on Wall Street
By Patrick Robinson, Lieutenant Commander Jeffery Lay. 2012
A revolutionary business approach by Lt. Col. Jeffery Lay and #1 "New York Times" bestselling author Patrick Robinson, describing one…
manOCOs journey from the cockpit of F-14 fighter bombers to the scandalous boardrooms on Wall Street and why military practices can help stabilize corporate America. "The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson
By Joseph A. Califano. 2000
OC My effort here is to give firsthand testimony on the man and president I saw, OCywith bark off, OCO…
as he used to say when he wanted me to describe a difficult situation cold and true, with no punches pulled. OC The Lyndon Johnson I knew was brave and brutal, compassionate and cruel, incredibly intelligent and infuriatingly insensitive, with shrewd and uncanny instinct for the jugular of his allies and adversaries. He could be altruistic and petty, caring and crude, generous and petulant, bluntly honest and calculatingly deviousOCoall within the same few minutes. OCOOCoJoseph A. Califano, Jr. Joe CalifanoOCoLyndon JohnsonOCOs closest domestic adviser during the White House yearsOCohas created a remarkable presidential portrait, a frank, tough-minded memoir that reveals not only the singular personality of LBJ, but the rough grain of American politics. More than previous biographers, scholars, or reporters, CalifanoOCowho worked day and night in the trenches with LBJOCoshows us who Johnson really was and recreates life in the White House at the height of the turbulent sixties. aaLyndon Johnson was bigger than lifeOCoand no one who worked for him ever forgot it. Writing with perception and energy, Califano captures his mentorOCOs lively, irascible spirit as he puts us in the White House alongside LBJ during such momentous events as the assassination of Martin Luther King and the wrenching violence that followed, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the national trauma surrounding the Vietnam War. We see Johnson manipulate the economy and the Supreme Court; confront race riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit; and deal with the Arab-Israeli Six Day War. We witness his achievements in the areas of education, health care, consumer safety, civil rights, environmental protection, and the arts. And we watch him squander his credibility, as he doggedly wages both his warsOCothe one against poverty and the one in VietnamOCodetermined to prevent the blood-shed in Southeast Asia from spoiling his dream of a Great Society at home. a"The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson" is an intimate portrait of a president who towering ambition for his country and himself ultimately led to his decision to surrender the arena in which he fought so hard. Joe Califano has added uniquely to our understanding of LBJ, whose achievements and mistakes mirror his own complex and contradictory nature. a"The Last Best League
By Jim Collins. 2004
Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes…
of making it to ?The Show. OCO The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball L"Rebecca Dickinson
By Marla R. Miller. 1975
Rebecca Dickinson’s powerful voice, captured through excerpts from the pages of her journal, allows colonial and revolutionary-era New England to…
come alive. Dickinson’s life illustrates the dilemmas faced by many Americans in the decades before, during, and after the American Revolution, as well as the paradoxes presented by an unmarried woman who earned her own living and made her own way in the small town where she was born. Rebecca Dickinson: Independence for a New England Woman, uses Dickinson’s world as a lens to introduce readers to the everyday experience of living in the colonial era and the social, cultural, and economic challenges faced in the transformative decades surrounding the American Revolution. About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women’s historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a women’s life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a "good read,” featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject’s perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.Philip Sparrow Tells All
By Samuel Steward, Jeremy Mulderig, Justin Spring. 2015
Samuel Steward (1909-93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the…
considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics. In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward's life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field's (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men's fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig's entertaining annotations explain the essays' wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists. The first collection of any of Samuel Steward's writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.Onward Christian Soldiers?
By Clyde Wilcox, Carin Robinson. 2011
Are groups such as the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the religious right the greatest threat to liberty since…
Hitler or the last defenders of religious freedom and family values in America? Clyde Wilcox tells us who they are, what their history has been in 20th-century American politics, and how they might organize themselves for future political effectiveness. He tackles the political dilemma of the proper role of religious groups in American politics and government while showing how the contemporary religious right does - and does not - fit into that context. They have money, influence, power - and they turn out to vote. They are credited with delivering a significant part of the Republicans' 1994 electoral success, foreshadowing their status as major players in the elections of 1996.The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders
By Edward E Leslie. 1996
Brilliantly weaving together eyewitness accounts, letters, memories, newspaper articles, and military reports into a riveting narrative, this definitive biography reveals…
the personality of William Clarke Quantrill (18371865) and the events that transformed a quiet Ohio schoolteacher from a staunchly Unionist family into a virulent pro-slavery Confederate soldier and the most feared and despised guerrilla chieftain of the Civil War. This groundbreaking work includes the most accurate account ever written of the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas massacre (the greatest atrocity of the Civil War), when Quantrill and 450 raiders torched the Unionist town and executed roughly 200 unarmed, unresisting men and teenage boys. It also details the postwar outlaw careers of those who rode with himFrank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger. No other history so fully penetrates the myth of a cardboard-cutout psychopath to expose Quantrill in all his brutality and human complexity.Philip Sparrow Tells All
By Jeremy Mulderig, Justin Spring. 2015
Samuel Steward (1909-93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, a sexual adventurer who shared the…
considerable scope of his experiences with Alfred Kinsey, and a prolific writer whose publications ranged from scholarly articles to gay erotica (the latter appearing under the pen name Phil Andros). Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics. In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward's life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field's (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men's fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig's entertaining annotations explain the essays' wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists. The first collection of any of Samuel Steward's writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.The Half Has Never Been Told
By Edward E. Baptist. 2014
Americans tend to assume that modern historiography has produced a full and complete understanding of slavery in the United States,…
as a shameful pre-modern institution, existing in isolation from America’s later success. But while we have long since rejected the idealistic depiction of happy slaves and paternalistic masters, we have not yet begun to grapple with the full extent of slavery’s horrors--or its link to the expansion of the country, the political battles that caused the Civil War, or the growth of our modern capitalist economy. . As historian Edward Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, slavery and its expansion were central to the evolution and modernization of our nation in the 18th and 19th centuries, catapulting the US into a modern, industrial and capitalist economy. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a sub-continental cotton empire. By 1861 it had five times as many slaves as it had during the Revolution, and was producing two billion pounds of cotton a year. It was through slavery and slavery alone that the United States achieved a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and was transformed into a global power rivaled only by England. The Half Has Never Been Told begins in 1787, when Northern emancipation and falling profits from Southern tobacco threatened the future of American slavery. Seeking desperately to prevent this collapse, innovative Southern enslavers brought slavery out of the Southeast’s decaying coastal plantation belts, leading trains of men, women, and children to the frontier states where the labor-intensive cotton crop beckoned. By 1860, their empire of cotton and labor camps stretched all the way to Texas. During America’s formative years, Baptist explains, our chief form of innovation was slavery, and ways to make slavery increasingly profitable. Through forced migration, quotas, and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves making competition with American cotton fields near impossible. Financial innovations and banks, meanwhile, helped feed credit to the cotton plantations, spurring on economic expansion and confirming for enslavers and their political leaders that their livelihood, and the American economy, depended on cotton. Despite the mayhem wreaked upon them, enslaved African-Americans survived, clinging desperately to the ability to name the evil they confronted. By the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election, the stories they smuggled out of the whipping-machine had helped to put the North and South on the collision course that led to the Civil War, national emancipation, and the collapse of the Southern slave industry--a system that, Baptist suggests, might otherwise have gone on indefinitely. Using thousands of interviews with former slaves, hundreds of plantation records, newspapers, and the personal papers of dozens of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told unveils, at last, the most savage secrets at the heart of American history. These intimate stories of survival and tragedy transform our understanding of the rise of the American nation, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the birth of entrepreneurial capitalism. A much-needed challenge to the reigning narratives of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told reveals the alarming extent to which our country’s success was irrevocably tied to the institution of slavery.A Most Imperfect Union
By Ilan Stavans. 2014
Enough with the dead white men! The true story of the United States lies with its most overlooked and marginalized…
peoples; the workers, immigrants, housewives, and slaves who built America from the ground up, and who made this country what it is today. In A Most Imperfect Union, cultural critic Ilan Stavans and award-winning cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz present a vibrant history of these unsung Americans. In an irreverent, fast-paced narrative that challenges the conventional narrative of American history, Stavans and Alcaraz offer a fresh, controversial take on the philosophies, products, practices, and people, from Algonquin and African royals to early feminists, Puerto Rican radicals, and Arab immigrants, that have made America such an outsized and extraordinary land. Advisory: Bookshare has learned that this book offers only partial accessibility. We have kept it in the collection because it is useful for some of our members. To explore further access options with us, please contact us through the Book Quality link on the right sidebar. Benetech is actively working on projects to improve accessibility issues such as these.The Past Is Never Dead
By Harry N. Maclean. 2009
On May 2, 1964, Klansman James Ford Seale picked up two black hitchhikers and drowned both young men in the…
Mississippi River. Seale spent more than forty years a free man, before finally facing trial in 2007. There could have been two defendants in the resulting case: James Ford Seale for kidnapping and murder, and the State of Mississippi for complicityknowingly aiding, abetting, and creating men like Seale. In The Past Is Never Dead, best-selling author Harry MacLean follows Seale’s trial, the legal difficulties of prosecuting kidnapping and murder charges decades after the fact, and the strain on a state contending with a past that can’t be forgiven. MacLean’s narrative is at once the account of a gripping legal battle and an acute meditation on the possibility of redemption.Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center
By Eric Darton. 1999
When the World Trade Towers in New York City were erected at the Hudson’s edge, they led the way to…
a real estate boom that was truly astonishing. Divided We Stand reveals the coming together and eruption of four volatile elements: super-tall buildings, financial speculation, globalization, and terrorism. The Trade Center serves as a potent symbol of the disastrous consequences of undemocratic planning and development. This book is a history of that skyscraping ambition and the impact it had on New York and international life. It is a portrait of a building complex that lives at the convergence point of social and economic realities central not only to New York City but to all industrial cities and suburbs. A meticulously researched historical account based on primary documents, Divided We Stand is a contemporary indictment of the prevailing urban order in the spirit of Jane Jacobs’s mid-century classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.Something That Will Surprise the World
By Susan Dunn. 2006
The Founding Fathers: subject of hundreds of biographies, they are rarely allowed to speak to us in their own words.…
But it was their words and ideas that mattered most to them. Here, finally, these towering figures come together in one volume-in dialogue with one another, and with us. The Founders were thinking revolutionaries-they read, questioned, debated, and, most of all, wrote. They theorized about government and political institutions; considered the problem of parties and factions; and reflected on religion, education, happiness, and even on love. In this volume, distinguished historian Susan Dunn brings together the Founders’ most important letters, speeches, and essays and sets them in the context of their lives and times.Battles Of The Revolutionary War
By W. J. Wood. 1990
American Cultural Studies
By Neil Campbell, Alasdair Kean. 2012
This third edition of American Cultural Studies has been updated throughout to take into account the developments of the last…
six years, providing an introduction to the central themes in modern American culture and explores how these themes can be interpreted. Chapters in the book discuss the various aspects of American cultural life such as religion, gender and sexuality, and regionalism. Updates and revisions include: discussion of Barack Obama's rise to power and the end of the 'Bush Years', consideration of 'Hemispheric American Studies' and the increasing debates about globalisation and the role of the USA, up-to-date case-studies, such as The Wire and Nurse Jackie, more on suburbia, the Mexican-border crossing, the Twilight phenomena etc, updated further-reading lists. Accompanying website. American Cultural Studies is a core text and an accessible introduction to the interdisciplinary study of American culture.Federalism and the Making of America
By David Brian Robertson. 2012
Though Americans rarely appreciate it, federalism has profoundly shaped their nation's past, present, and future. Federalism--the division of government authority…
between the national government and the states--affects the prosperity, security, and daily life of every American. In this nuanced and comprehensive overview, David Brian Robertson shows that past choices shape present circumstances, and that a deep understanding of American government, public policy, political processes, and society requires an understanding of the key steps in federalism's evolution in American history. The most spectacular political conflicts in American history have been fought on the battlefield of federalism, including states' rights to leave the union, government power to regulate business, and responses to the problems of race, poverty, pollution, abortion, and gay rights. Federalism helped fragment American politics, encourage innovation, foster the American market economy, and place hurdles in the way of efforts to mitigate the consequences of economic change. Federalism helped construct the path of American political development. Federalism and the Making of America is a sorely needed text that treats the politics of federalism systematically and accessibly, making it indispensible to all students and scholars of American politics. Chosen as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.