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Delaware Disappearance, A: The Riddle of Little Horace Marvin Jr. (True Crime)
By Brian G. Cannon. 2022
In early March 1907, young Horace Marvin Jr., just a few weeks shy of his fourth birthday, was playing in…
the yard of his father's new farm in a sparsely populated area near Dover, Delaware. The family had just moved from Iowa, and this was the first day Horace had to explore their new home. In the farmyard with Horace were his brother John and cousin Rose, all visible to neighbors helping the previous owner move off the farm. Then Horace disappeared without a trace. Within two weeks, this heartbreaking event was being reported to hundreds of other families in newspapers across the country and around the world. Young Horace's disappearance would be the most publicized missing child story until the Lindbergh kidnapping exactly twenty-five years later. Local author Brian G. Cannon tells the full story of this tragedy for the first time.American Civil War For Dummies
By Keith D. Dickson. 2022
Take a walk through history with this guide for lifelong learners The American Civil War is one of the most…
fascinating and impactful periods in American history. Besides bringing about the end of slavery, the war had many important economic and social effects that continue to shape the history and present-day realities of the American people. In American Civil War For Dummies, you'll get an accessible, bird's-eye view of one of history's greatest conflicts. All the must-know details of the war are covered here, from the Battle of Gettysburg to the Emancipation Proclamation. You'll also find: Descriptions of the experiences of Black Americans, in both the North and the South, during the war Explorations of how slavery and civil rights fit into the social, political, and economic context of the time Profiles of some of the most famous generals in the war, including Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant Take a moment to get a hands-on education in this critical point in American history. Get American Civil War For Dummies now!Travels in American Iraq
By John Martinkus. 2004
SBS journalist John Martinkus provides a riveting portrait of a country on the brink of civil war. When the Coalition…
of the Willing liberated Iraq from the yoke of Saddam in early 2003, George W. Bush announced that the Second Gulf War was over. John Martinkus's account of seven weeks spent travelling independently around Iraq in early 2004 shows just the opposite. He takes us into the key places of the new Iraq - from Abu Gharib prison to the Coalition's sealed-off security zone. He provides an eye-witness account of the March 2004 Karbala bombings, and vivid accounts of meetings with ordinary Iraqis, religious leaders, insurgents and occupying troops - the events that take place beyond the official perspective. Tracing the ever-widening gap between rhetoric and reality, he shows that, amidst a developing guerrilla war and a chaotic reconstruction, the line between liberation and occupation has become thin indeed.The USS Monitor famously battled the CSS Virginia (the armored and refitted USS Merrimack) at Hampton Roads in March 1862.…
This updated edition of David A. Mindell's classic account of the ironclad warships and the human dimension of modern warfare commemorates the 150th anniversary of this historic encounter.Mindell explores how mariners—fighting "blindly," below the waterline—lived in and coped with the metal monster they called the "iron coffin." He investigates how the ironclad technology, new to war in the nineteenth century, changed not only the tools but also the experience of combat and anticipated today’s world of mechanized, pushbutton warfare. The writings of William Frederick Keeler, the ship’s paymaster, inform much of this book, as do the experiences of everyman sailor George Geer, who held Keeler in some contempt. Mindell uses their compelling stories, and those of other shipmates, to recreate the thrills and dangers of living and fighting aboard this superweapon. Recently, pieces of the Monitor wreck have been raised from their watery grave, and with them, information about the ship continues to be discovered. A new epilogue describes the recovery of the Monitor turret and its display at the USS Monitor Museum in Newport News, Virginia.This sensitive and enthralling history of the USS Monitor ensures that this fateful ship, and the men who served on it, will be remembered for generations to come.Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir
By Sharon Harrigan. 2017
Sharon Harrigan’s father was larger than life, a brilliant but troubled man who blew off his hand with dynamite before…
she was born and died in a mysterious and bizarre accident when she was seven. The story of his death never made sense. How did he really die? And why was she so sure that asking would be dangerous? A series of events compel her to find the answers, collecting other people’s memories and uncovering her own. Her two-year odyssey takes her from Virginia to Detroit to Paris and finally to the wilds of northern Michigan where her father died. There, she discovers the real danger and has to confront her fear. Playing with Dynamite is about the family secrets that can distance us from each other and the honesty that can bring us closer. It’s about a daughter who goes looking for her father but finds her mother instead. It’s about memory and truth, grieving and growing, and what it means to go home again.See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era
By Tara T. Green. 2022
Pleasure refers to the freedom to pursue a desire, deliberately sought in order to satisfy the self. Putting pleasure first…
is liberating. During their extraordinary lives, Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, Yolande DuBois, and Memphis Minnie enjoyed pleasure as they gave pleasure to both those in their lives and to the public at large. They were Black women who, despite their public profiles, whether through Black society or through the world of entertainment, discovered ways to enjoy pleasure.They left home, undertook careers they loved, and did what they wanted, despite perhaps not meeting the standards for respectability in the interwar era. See Me Naked looks at these women as representative of other Black women of the time, who were watched, criticized, and judged by their families, peers, and, in some cases, the government, yet still managed to enjoy themselves. Among the voyeurs of Black women was Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter was clearly a work of fiction inspired by women he observed in public and knew personally, including Black clubwomen, blues performers, and his mother. How did these complicated women wrest loose from the voyeurs to define their own sense of themselves? At very young ages, they found and celebrated aspects of themselves. Using examples from these women’s lives, Green explores their challenges and achievements.Originally published in 1967. Jane Addams was one of the most creative thinkers and activists in the history of American…
social reform. She pioneered the settlement house movement. She was a leader in the attempt to relate education to the new urban environment for millions of Americans in the early twentieth century. She was a vocal advocate of the Progressive movement and active in the drive for women's rights. She was also an outstanding spokesman for international understanding and world peace. Although Jane Addams is well known as one of the originators of social work in the United States, as an early advocate of a "War on Poverty," and as the proponent of ideas that led to the creation of the modern welfare state, the convictions that motivated her prodigious energy had not, prior to Dr. Farrell's investigation, been carefully examined. He traces the relation between her philanthropic principles and her Progressive politics, her feminism, and her efforts to achieve world peace. He shows how her association with John Dewey and her acceptance of pragmatism changed her thinking and also how her later pacifism alienated her from many progressives of various persuasions. Before his sudden and untimely death at the age of thirty-two, John C. Farrell had just completed this study, based on his examination of virtually every important writing by and about Jane Addams. It is not a full-fledged biography but rather an intellectual history that seeks to explain the origins and relevance of Jane Addams' ideas and activities to the first half of the twentieth century. The manuscript for this book, complete but unrevised, was edited for publication by two of Farrell's colleagues who prefer to remain unidentified. Charles C. Barker, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, wrote an introduction that places Beloved Lady in the context of scholarly literature on Jane Addams.Originally published in 1965. The Right to Vote covers the immediate background, passage, and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Gillette…
contends that the Fifteenth Amendment was intended to give voting rights to African Americans in the north, sidelining those in the south. African American suffrage, in other words, had the pragmatic effect of bringing power to the Republicans of the north. In short, the Fifteenth Amendment was not a radical document but rather was pushed by Republican moderates in an effort to consolidate their power.Originally published in 1979. The idea of the "South" has its roots in Romanticism and American culture of the nineteenth…
century. This study by Michael O'Brien analyzes how the idea of a unique Southern consciousness endured into the twentieth century and how it affected the lives of prominent white Southern intellectuals. Individual chapters treat Howard Odum, John Donald Wade, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Frank Owsley, and Donald Davidson. The chapters trace each man's growing need for the idea of the South—how each defined it and how far each was able to sustain the idea as an element of social analysis. The Idea of the American South moves the debate over Southern identity from speculative essays about the "central theme" of Southern history and, by implication, past the restricted perception that race relations are a sufficient key to understanding the history of Southern identity.The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870
By Daniel R. Mandell. 2021
An important examination of the foundational American ideal of economic equality—and how we lost it.Winner of the Missouri Conference on…
History Book Award for 2021The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person's right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a "rough" or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government.Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved "rough" equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits. This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.The Adams Federalists
By Manning J. Dauer. 1953
Originally published in 1953. Between 1789 and 1803, the United States existed as a developing national state, sparsely settled. The…
de facto precedents of America's nascent political system had not yet been fleshed out by the generation of statesmen who paved its political way. Historians have examined the rise of the party system in US politics by emphasizing the Jeffersonians, who—led by Thomas Jefferson—helped to develop an agrarian voting bloc. In The Adams Federalists, Manning J. Dauer attends to Adams's struggles with the Federalist Party, arguing that his term is the key to understanding the success of the Jeffersonians in promoting their own democratic ideals. Dauer attributes the fall of Federalism to Adams's failure to maintain a moderate cohort in the White House. The Federalist Party's leadership increasingly adopted policies that isolated the Federalists' agrarian supporters, who in turn found support in the Jeffersonians' archaic politics. Professor Dauer provides an alternative explanation for the popularity of Jefferson's political faction and argues that economic factors undergirded the political organization of early America's voting base. Since its publication, scholars have recognized The Adams Federalists as a definitive study of the Federalist Party during the Adams administration.Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Studies in Industry and Society #14)
By Pamela Walker Laird. 1998
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleOriginally published in 1998. Drawing on both documentary and pictorial evidence, Pamela…
Walker Laird explores the modernization of American advertising to 1920. She links its rise and transformation to changes that affected American society and business alike, including the rise of professional specialization and the communications revolution that new technologies made possible. Laird finds a fundamental shift in the kinds of people who created advertisements and their relationships to the firms that advertised. Advertising evolved from the work of informing customers (telling people what manufacturers had to sell) to creating consumers (persuading people that they needed to buy). Through this story, Laird shows how and why—in the intense competitions for both markets and cultural authority—the creators of advertisements laid claim to "progress" and used it to legitimate their places in American business and culture.Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865
By Robert J. Cook. 2017
Why has the Civil War continued to influence American life so profoundly?Winner of the 2018 Book Prize in American Studies…
of the British Association of American StudiesAt a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors’ memory of the "War of the Rebellion" drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. It also touches on the leading role southern white women played in the development of the racially segregated South’s "Lost Cause"; explores why, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had embraced a powerful reconciliatory memory of the Civil War; and details the failed efforts to connect an emancipationist reading of the conflict to the fading cause of civil rights.Part Two demonstrates the Civil War’s capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war’s vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Finally, Cook argues that the massacre of African American parishioners in Charleston in June 2015 highlighted the continuing relevance of the Civil War by triggering intense nationwide controversy over the place of Confederate symbols in the United States. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today.The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama
By Claude A. Clegg III. 2021
The first sweeping, legacy-defining history of the entire Obama presidency.In The Black President, the first interpretative, grand-narrative history of Barack…
Obama's presidency in its entirety, Claude A. Clegg III situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. He captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while insightfully rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors. In elucidating the Obama moment in American politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidency's historical environment, impact, and meaning for African Americans—the tens of millions of people from every walk of life who collectively were his staunchest group of supporters and who most starkly experienced both the euphoric triumphs and dispiriting shortcomings of his years in office. In Obama's own words, his White House years were "the best of times and worst of times" for Black America. Clegg is vitally concerned with the veracity of this claim, along with how Obama engaged the aspirations, struggles, and disappointments of his most loyal constituency and how representative segments of Black America engaged, experienced, and interpreted his historic presidency. Clegg draws on an expansive archive of materials, including government records and reports, interviews, speeches, memoirs, and insider accounts, in order to examine Obama's complicated upbringing and early political ambitions, his delicate navigation of matters of race, the nature and impacts of his administration's policies and politics, the inspired but also carefully choreographed symbolism of his presidency (and Michelle Obama's role), and the spectrum of allies and enemies that he made along the way. The successes and the aspirations of the Obama era, Clegg argues, are explicitly connected to our current racist, toxic political discourse. Combining lively prose with a balanced, nonpartisan portrait of Obama's successes and failures, The Black President will be required reading not only for historians, politics junkies, and Obama fans but also for anyone seeking to understand America's contemporary struggles with inequality, prejudice, and fear.Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War
By Ludwell H. Johnson. 1959
Originally published in 1958. Johnson tells the story of the Red River Campaign, which took place in Louisiana and Arkansas…
in the spring of 1864. In response to the demands of Union Free-Soil interests in Texas, and the need of New England textile manufacturers for cotton, an expedition was undertaken to open the way to Texas. General Nathaniel Banks conducted a combined military and naval expedition up the Red River in a campaign that lasted only from March 23 to May 20, 1864, but was one of the most destructive of the Civil War. The campaign ended in Banks's defeat at the Battle of Sabine Crossroads. This book illustrates how military operations during the Civil War were often intimately interwoven with political, economic, and ideological factors, which frequently determined the time and place of a Union offensive. The author describes the desires and opinions of the public, the press, and Lincoln's administration regarding an invasion of Texas, as well as the motivation of the officers themselves, such as Banks's aspiration for the 1864 presidential nomination. Johnson relates vividly the various battles of the expedition and the problems posed by mustering undisciplined troops, by having to procure supplies in poor country with insufficient supply lines, and by contending with bad weather and rough terrain.American Iron, 1607-1900 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology #19)
By Robert B. Gordon. 1996
Winner of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for General Engineering from the Association of American PublishersOriginally published in 1996.…
By applying their abundant natural resources to ironmaking early in the eighteenth century, Americans soon made themselves felt in world markets. After the Revolution, ironmakers supplied the materials necessary to the building of American industry, pushing the fuel efficiency and productivity of their furnaces far ahead of their European rivals. In American Iron, 1607-1900, Robert B. Gordon draws on recent archaeological findings as well as archival research to present an ambitious, comprehensive survey of iron technology in America from the colonial period to the industry's demise at about the turn of the twentieth century. Closely examining the techniques—the "hows"—of ironmaking in its various forms, Gordon offers new interpretations of labor, innovation, and product quality in ironmaking, along with references to the industry's environmental consequences. He establishes the high level of skills required to ensure efficient and safe operation of furnaces and to improve the quality of iron product. By mastering founding, fining, puddling, or bloom smelting, ironworkers gained a degree of control over their lives not easily attained by others.Going to College in the Sixties
By John R. Thelin. 2018
The 1960s was the most transformative decade in the history of American higher education—but not for the reasons you might…
think.Picture going to college in the sixties: the protests and marches, the teach-ins and sit-ins, the drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll—hip, electric, psychedelic. Not so fast, says bestselling historian John R. Thelin. Even at radicalized campuses, volatile student demonstrations coexisted with the "business as usual" of a flagship state university: athletics, fraternities and sororities, and student government.In Going to College in the Sixties, Thelin reinterprets the campus world shaped during one of the most dramatic decades in American history. Reconstructing all phases of the college experience, Thelin explores how students competed for admission, paid for college in an era before Pell Grants, dealt with crowded classes and dormitories, voiced concerns about the curriculum, grappled with new tensions in big-time college sports, and overcame discrimination. Thelin augments his anecdotal experience with a survey of landmark state and federal policies and programs shaping higher education, a chronological look at media coverage of college campuses over the course of the decade, and an account of institutional changes in terms of curricula and administration.Combining student memoirs, campus publications, oral histories, and newsreels, along with archival sources and institutional records, the book goes beyond facile stereotypes about going to school in the sixties. Grounded in social and political history, with a scope that will appeal both to a new generation of scholars and to alumni of the era, this engaging book allows readers to consider "going to college" in both the past and the present.A deep and timely account of how American newspapers were produced and distributed on paper.Winner of the Best Book in…
Canadian Business History by the Canadian Business History AssociationPopular assessments of printed newspapers have become so grim that some have taken to calling them "dead tree media" as a way of invoking the medium’s imminent demise. There is a literal truth hidden in this dismissive expression: printed newspapers really are material goods made from trees. And, throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of trees cut down in the service of printing newspapers in the United States came from Canada. In Dead Tree Media, Michael Stamm reveals the international history of the commodity chains connecting Canadian trees and US readers. Drawing on newly available corporate documents and research in archives across North America, Stamm offers a sophisticated rethinking of the material history of the printed newspaper. Tracing its industrial production from the forest to the newsstand, he provides an account of the obscure and often hidden labor involved in this manufacturing process by showing how it was driven by not only publishers and journalists but also lumberjacks, paper mill workers, policymakers, chemists, and urban and regional planners. Stamm describes the 1911 shift in tariff policy that gave US publishers duty-free access to Canadian newsprint, providing a tremendous boost to Canadian paper manufacturers and a significant subsidy to American newspaper publishers. He also explains how Canada attracted massive American foreign investment in paper mills around the same time that US publishers were able to gain greater access to Canada’s vast spruce forests. Focusing particularly on the Chicago Tribune, Stamm provides a new history of the rise and fall of both the mass circulation printed newspaper and the particular kind of corporation in the newspaper business that had shaped many aspects of the cultural, political, and even physical landscape of North America. For those seeking to understand the travails of the contemporary newspaper business, Dead Tree Media is essential reading.Originally published 1982. Bodnar's central concern in Workers' World is with the working people of Pennsylvania prior to World War…
II. He examines how ordinary people throughout the state navigated the changing set of industrial relations that fanned out across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since workers could not rely on unionism or government-sponsored safety nets, workers in Pennsylvania relied on kinship ties, job structures, and community relationships. In the past, Bodnar contends, American labor historians have focused mainly on the history of strikes, the rise of unionism, and the struggle for control over the workplace. In an effort to mitigate historians' flattening of workers into the two-dimensional plane of politics and protest, Bodnar revives workers and the world in which they lived by conducting oral interviews with textile workers, coal miners, steelworkers, and others in Pennsylvania.Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
By Paul A. Lombardo. 2022
This updated edition includes a new afterword that identifies the role the Buck story plays in the Supreme Court's review…
of emerging state laws that seek to limit access to abortion."Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from U.S. Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. It has been more than a decade since Paul A. Lombardo's classic Three Generations, No Imbeciles first exposed the Buck case's fraudulent roots. During that time, several of the remaining twentieth-century eugenic sterilization statutes have finally been repealed, and reparations to sterilization survivors have been paid in two states. Discussion of the Buck case has once again engendered controversy in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court invoked Buck most recently in a debate over the power of the state to enact restrictions on citizens and businesses during the COVID-19 crisis, and the US Supreme Court cited Three Generations, No Imbeciles in arguments over the newest state laws seeking to limit access to abortion. This updated edition collects and analyzes information related to events and trends discussed in the earlier volume and includes a completely new afterword, "Looking Back at Buck," that explains how the case remains a key feature of public discourse about disability, government power, and reproductive rights. It also presents restored copies of the letters of Carrie Buck and points readers to an online archive of legal documents, images, and other material relevant to the case. The book remains a key resource for law school faculties, legal and medical historians, and anyone with an interest in the history of reproduction in the United States."Startling."—Reason"Compelling and well-researched... Three Generations, No Imbeciles gives Carrie Buck's long-untold story the attention it deserves."—Harvard Law Review"Three Generations provides valuable, new, and timely revelations for students and professional scholars across many disciplines."—Disability Studies Quarterly"Meticulously detailed and researched history... this book is enjoyable, thought provoking, and troubling in equal measure. I highly recommend it."—Psychiatric Services