Best of
American-History

1981

The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World


W. Cleon Skousen - 1981
    The truth is that the solutions have been available for a long time -- in the writings of our Founding Fathers -- carefully set forth in this timely book.In The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Discover the 28 Principles of Freedom our Founding Fathers said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desire peace, prosperity, and freedom. Learn how adherence to these beliefs during the past 200 years has brought about more progress than was made in the previous 5000 years. These 28 Principles include The Genius of Natural Law, Virtuous and Moral Leaders, Equal Rights--Not Equal Things, and Avoiding the Burden of Debt. Published by the National Center for Constitut

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor


Gordon W. Prange - 1981
    This gripping study scrupulously reconstructs the Japanese attack, from its conception (less than a year before the actual raid) to its lightning execution; & it reveals the true reason for the American debacle: the insurmountable disbelief in the Japanese threat that kept America from heeding advance warnings & caused leaders to ignore evidence submitted by our own intelligence sources. Based on 37 years of intense research & countless interviews, & incorporating previously untranslated documents, At Dawn We Slept is history with the dramatic sweep of a martial epic.

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta


Robert Palmer - 1981
    In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago's South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation.Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show and brought blues to the airwaves; and John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, B. B. King, and many others.

Lee The Last Years


Charles Bracelen Flood - 1981
    Lee lived only another five years - the forgotten chapter of an extraordinary life. These were his finest hours, when he did more than any other American to heal the wounds between North and South. Flood draws on new research to create an intensely human and a "wonderful, tragic, and powerful . . . story for which we have been waiting over a century" (Theodore H. White).

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald


Matthew J. Bruccoli - 1981
    Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fundamentalism and American Culture


George M. Marsden - 1981
    Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power.For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt


David McCullough - 1981
    Hailed as a masterpiece by Newsday, it also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Now with a new introduction by the author, Mornings on Horseback is reprinted as a Simon & Schuster Classic Edition. Mornings on Horseback is about the world of the young Theodore Roosevelt. It is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household (and rarefied social world) in which he was raised. His father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, "Greatheart," a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. His mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, Teddy Roosevelt's first love. And while such disparate figures as Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and Senator Roscoe Conkling play a part, it is this diverse and intensely human assemblage of Roosevelts, all brought to vivid life, which gives the book its remarkable power. The book spans seventeen years � from 1869 when little "Teedie" is ten, to 1886 when, as a hardened "real life cowboy," he returns from the West to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin anew, a grown man, whole in body and spirit. The story does for Teddy Roosevelt what Sunrise at Campobello did for FDR � reveals the inner man through his battle against dreadful odds. Like David McCullough's The Great Bridge, also set in New York, this is at once an enthralling story, with all the elements of a great novel, and a penetrating character study. It is brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship, which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. For the first time, for example, Roosevelt's asthma is examined closely, drawing on information gleaned from private Roosevelt family papers and in light of present-day knowledge of the disease and its psychosomatic aspects. At heart it is a book about life intensely lived...about family love and family loyalty...about courtship and childbirth and death, fathers and sons...about winter on the Nile in the grand manner and Harvard College...about gutter politics in washrooms and the tumultuous Republican Convention of 1884...about grizzly bears, grief and courage, and "blessed" mornings on horseback at Oyster Bay or beneath the limitless skies of the Badlands. "Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough," Roosevelt once wrote. It is the key to his life and to much that is so memorable in this magnificent book.

Flames Across the Border: 1813-1814


Pierre Berton - 1981
    border was in flames as the War of 1812 continued. York's parliament buildings were on fire, Niagara-on-the-Lake burned to the ground and Buffalo lay in ashes. Even the American capital of Washington, far to the south, was put to the torch. The War of 1812 had become one of the nineteenth century's bloodiest struggles.Flames Across the Border is a compelling evocation of war at its most primeval level — the muddy fields, the frozen forests and the ominous waters where men fought and died. Pierre Berton skilfully captures the courage, determination and terror of the universal soldier, giving new dimension and fresh perspective to this early conflict between the two emerging nations of North America.

In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s


Clayborne Carson - 1981
    This sympathetic yet evenhanded book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white oppression.At its birth, SNCC was composed of black college students who shared an ideology of moral radicalism. This ideology, with its emphasis on nonviolence, challenged Southern segregation. SNCC students were the earliest civil rights fighters of the Second Reconstruction. They conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, spearheaded the freedom rides, and organized voter registration, which shook white complacency and awakened black political consciousness. In the process, Clayborne Carson shows, SNCC changed from a group that endorsed white middle-class values to one that questioned the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and raised the fist for black power. Indeed, SNCC's radical and penetrating analysis of the American power structure reached beyond the black community to help spark wider social protests of the 1960s, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement.Carson's history of SNCC goes behind the scene to determine why the group's ideological evolution was accompanied by bitter power struggles within the organization. Using interviews, transcripts of meetings, unpublished position papers, and recently released FBI documents, he reveals how a radical group is subject to enormous, often divisive pressures as it fights the difficult battle for social change.

There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America


Vincent Harding - 1981
    Harding resurrects forgotten heroes and traces the struggle of their descendants to keep the spirit and dreams of an uprooted people alive.

Grant: A Biography


William S. McFeely - 1981
    The seminal biography of one of America's towering, enigmatic figures. From his boyhood in Ohio to the battlefields of the Civil War and his presidency during the crucial years of Reconstruction, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traces the entire arc of Grant's life (1822-1885).Author Biography: William S. McFeely is the author of Yankee Stepfather, Frederick Douglass, Sapelo's People, and, most recently, Proximity to Death. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Occupied America: A History of Chicanos


Rodolfo F. Acuña - 1981
    This comprehensive overview of Chicano history is passionately written and extensively researched.With a concise and engaged narrative, and timelines that give students a context for pivotal events in Chicano history, Occupied America illuminates the struggles and decisions that frame Chicano identity today.

The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience


J.S. Holliday - 1981
    As the San Francisco Examiner noted, “It is not often that a work of history can be said to supplant every book on the same subject that has gone before it.”Through the diary and letters of William Swain--augmented by interpolations from more than five hundred other gold seekers and by letters sent to Swain from his wife and brother back home--the complete cycle of the gold rush is recreated: the overland migration of over thirty thousand men, the struggle to “strike it rich” in the mining camps of the Sierra Nevadas, and the return home through the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama.In a new preface, the author reappraises our continuing fascination with the “gold rush experience” as a defining epoch in western--indeed, American--history.

Land of Enchantment: Memoirs of Marian Russell Along the Santa Fe Trail


Marion Sloan Russell - 1981
    Hence women travelers were few on the Santa Fe Trail, and Land of Enchantment is one of the few firsthand accounts by a woman of life on the trail. The author, Marian Russell (1845-1936), dictated her story to her daughter-in-law in the 1930s. Published in a limited edition in 1954 and highly praised by scholars, that edition has become virtually impossible to obtain.This forgotten classic paints a vivid picture of nineteenth-century New Mexico as seen by a bright young girl from the age of seven on. Mrs. Russell's memories of several well-known western figures are not only delightful reading but make this book a useful addition to the region's history.

Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign Of France And Germany, 1944-1945


Russell F. Weigley - 1981
    The year was 1940, the occasion a preparedness parade, the helmets actually those of the 1917-1918 style. Yet to a small boy catching his first glimpse of Americas army as well as the metallic headgear seemed to represent old wars rather than new, a military past yet more remote than the Mexican border skirmishes for which the troopers in fact were outfitted.Thus begins this brilliant study of the American-led campaign for Europe in World War II. It is an analysis of command at both the strategic and the tactical level. All the complex ingredients of nations at war the burdens of history, the impact of technology, the roles of personalities, the confusions of the battlefield are presented in a powerful narrative which is as pleasurable to read as it is deeply founded in scholarship.The portraits of Field Marshal Montgomery and of Iikes lieutenants Omar N. Bradley, Jacob L. Devers, Courtney H. Hodges, George S. Patton, Jr., Alexander M. Patch, William H. Simpson, Leonard T. Gerow, J. Lawton Collins, and Matthew B. Ridgway, among others are the first detailed treatments that many of these leaders have received. Every major strategic and tactical decision in every battle of the American offensive is covered in detail with maps and careful descriptions of key terrain features, including many personal insights drawn from diaries kept at the American army group and army headquarters.This is a major and grippingly told reassessment of the leadership and the fighting capabilities of the Allied forces in climactic battles of World War II.Contents:PrefacePart One: The Armies1. The American Army2. Weapons and Divisions3. The View of the Far Shore4. By Air and by SeaPart Two: Normandy5. The Beach6. Cherbourg and Caumont7. The Bocage8. Cobra9. The Crossroads South of AvranchesPart Three: France10. The Short Envelopment11. The Riviera the the Rhone12. The Seine13. The Meuse14. The Twin Tyrants: Logistics...15...and TimePart Four: The Disputed Middle Ground16. Holland17. Attack in the Ardennes (I)18. Lorraine (I)19. The Reich Frontiers20. Autumn Interlude21. Lorraine (II)22. Alsace23. Huertgen Forest and Roer Plain24. On the Eve of a Breakthrough25. The Breakthrough26. The Doctrinal Response27. The Precarious Balance28. The Battles of Christmastide29. Attack in the Ardennes (II)30. "Inadequate Means’Part Five: Germany31. The Eifel32. Two Tumors Excised: Colmar and the Roer Dams33. To the Rhine34. The Crossing of the Rhine35. Eastward from the Rhine36. The Legions on the Rhine37. The Ruhr38. Berlin39. The National Redoubt40. The Elbe, the Moldau, and the Brenner PassEpilogueNotes and SourcesIndexReviews:“The publication of Eisenhower's Lieutenants is an event of significance in American military writing. . . . admirable . . . clearly the product of exhaustive, painstaking research." —The New York Times Book Review " . . . the best account we have of the World War II campaigns from Normandy to the Elbe." —American Historical Review " . . . precisely informative and broadly rewarding." — Kirkus Reviews " . . . an outstanding and highly recommended work." —Journal of American History " . . . by the dean of American military historians . . . " — Washington Post Bookworld” “I had thought I knew everything about World War II that I would ever want to know. I was wrong. Reading Eisenhower's Lieutenants was a wonderfully enriching experience. I learned more than I ever would have thought possible. This will unquestionably become one of the great classics of American military history.” — Stephen E. Ambrose

Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries


David Dary - 1981
    Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of cowboy life and legend is now available in a trade paperback edition. It's the 500-year saga of the real cowboy--from fifteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century American West.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War


C. Vann Woodward - 1981
    Vann Woodward won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for History, drawn from the diaries of a Southern aristocrat, records the disintegration and final destruction of the Confederacy.

Everest: A Mountaineering History


Walt Unsworth - 1981
    This complete history tells the truth about many of those who have attempted to climb to the roof of the world.

Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound


Murray Morgan - 1981
    Drawing upon the original journals and reports, Morgan tells his story largely in terms of individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but who have a special significance.Journalist and historian Murray Morgan (1916-2000) was the author of more than twenty books, including Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and The Last Wilderness. He worked for Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, and CBS News before returning to Washington where he taught at Tacoma Community College and for fifteen years hosted the early morning radio show "Our Town, Our World."

Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development


Mel King - 1981
    Mel King shows how black consciousness and power have developed through the struggles around jobs, housing, education, and politics. For the future he proposes a strategy of community controlled economic development and political representation which is relevant to any major city.

Lincoln's Mothers


Dorothy Clarke Wilson - 1981
    Their story is one of survival on the early American frontier, and of the unique love they held for their family, especially son Abraham.

Louis D. Brandeis


Melvin I. Urofsky - 1981
    Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit. Louis Dembitz Brandeis had at least four "careers." As a lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he pioneered how modern law is practiced. He, and others, developed the modern law firm, in which specialists manage different areas of the law. He was the author of the right to privacy; led the way in creating the role of the lawyer as counselor; and pioneered the idea of "pro bono publico" work by attorneys. As late as 1916, when Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court, the idea of pro bono service still struck many old-time attorneys as somewhat radical. Between 1895 and 1916, when Woodrow Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court, he ranked as one of the nation's leading progressive reformers. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts (he considered it his most important contribution to the public weal) and was a driving force in the development of the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission. Brandeis as an economist and moralist warned in 1914 that banking and stock brokering must be separate, and twenty years later, during the New Deal, his recommendation was finally enacted into law (the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933) but was undone by Ronald Reagan, which led to the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s and the world financial collapse of 2008. We see Brandeis, who came from a family of reformers and intellectuals who fled Europe and settled in Louisville. Brandeis the young man coming of age, who presented himself at Harvard Law School and convinced the school to admit him even though he was underage. Brandeis the lawyer and reformer, who in 1908 agreed to defend an Oregon law establishing maximum hours for women workers, and in so doing created an entirely new form of appellate brief that had only a few pages of legal citation and consisted mostly of factual references. Urofsky writes how Brandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the early twentieth century and, though not an observant Jew, with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, became at age fifty-eight head of the American Zionist movement. During the next seven years, Brandeis transformed it from a marginal activity into a powerful force in American Jewish affairs. We see the brutal six-month confirmation battle after Wilson named the fifty-nine-year-old Brandeis to the court in 1916; the bitter fight between progressives and conservative leaders of the bar, finance, and manufacturing, who, while never directly attacking him as a Jew, described Brandeis as "a striver," "self-advertiser," "a disturbing element in any gentleman's club." Even the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, signed a petition accusing Brandeis of lacking "judicial temperament." And we see, finally, how, during his twenty-three years on the court, this giant of a man and an intellect developed the modern jurisprudence of free speech, the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy, and suggested what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. Brandeis took his seat when the old classical jurisprudence still held sway, and he tried to teach both his colleagues and the public- especially the law schools-that the law had to change to keep up with the economy and society. Brandeis often said, "My faith in time is great." Eventually the Supreme Court adopted every one of his dissents as the correct constitutional interpretation. A huge and galvanizing biography, a revelation of one man's effect on American society and jurisprudence, and the electrifying story of his time.

A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875-1905


Tom D. Crouch - 1981
    For decades prior, a small community of engineers, scientists, and dreamers—men named Chanute and Langley and Herring—had tried to make the ascent in every conceivable craft, from kites and gliders to an assortment of powered flying models.These imaginative people and their wonderful contraptions are brought to life in Tom Crouch's classic A Dream of Wings. In the quest for flight, aeronautical societies were formed and broke apart, successes were celebrated, hopes rose and fell, and lessons were learned and built upon. The dreamers who blazed the path to a flying machine are bravely realized in these delightful pages.

John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy


Samuel Flagg Bemis - 1981
    

The Guise of Every Graceless Heart


Terrill Irwin Elniff - 1981
    

Red Sun Setting: The Battle of the Philippine Sea


William T. Y'Blood - 1981
    Y'Blood leads the reader through every stage of the battle, from the dogfights to the persistent attacks on the Japanese carriers to the frantic efforts of the returning fliers to land on friendly carriers. He takes the battle from the initial planning through the invasion of the Marianas and the recriminations that followed, describing Admiral Spruance's decision to allow U.S. forces to remain on the defensive and giving blow-by-blow details of the action. This intensive study of what many believe to be a major turning point in the Pacific War has remained an important reference since it was first published in 1981. 272 pages. 25 photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Paperback. 6 x 9 inches.

Tidewater Dynasty: A Biographical Novel Of The Lees Of Stratford Hall


Carey Roberts - 1981
    Lee, who made the fateful decision to turn from the nation he loved to defend the state he loved more, the Lees of Virginia dominated both their local and our national landscape.

Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier


Joanna L. Stratton - 1981
    Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience. These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men—and at last that partnership has been recognized.

The Complete Anti-Federalist


Herbert J. Storing - 1981
    Storing’s work includes introductions to each entry, along with his own consideration of the Anti-Federalist thought. This new three-volume set includes all the contents of the original seven-volume publication in a convenient, manageable format. “A work of magnificent scholarship. Publication of these volumes is a civic event of enduring importance.”—Leonard W. Levy, New York Times Book Review

The Miracle of America Study Guide


W. Cleon Skousen - 1981
    A study of the American heritage and the Constitution of the United States.

No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920


T.J. Jackson Lears - 1981
    He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.

Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930


Estelle B. Freedman - 1981
    This study of prison reform adds a new chapter to the history of women's struggle for justice in America

Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States


Erna O. Hellerstein - 1981
    

The Timetables of American History: History and Politics, the Arts, Science and Technology, and More in America and Elsewhere


Laurence Urdang - 1981
    From breakthroughs in the sciences to breakdowns in international relations, from the heroes who mastered the playing fields to masterpieces of art and literature, The Timetables provides a comprehensive account of the march of civilization. The Timetables of American History is an invaluable resource for serious students and dabblers alike.

Heber C. Kimball: MORMON PATRIARCH AND PIONEER


Stanley B. Kimball - 1981
    Kimball was Mormonism's most colorful leader and a major force in shaping, sustaining, and spreading the Mormon faith. Only Joseph Smith and Brigham Young wielded as much authority or had as much influence during the first four decades of the Mormon church. This is the first comprehensive and objective biography of Kimball since 1888. Stanley B. Kimball, Heber's great-great-grandson, shows us the man in all of his many dimensions---missionary, pioneer, preacher, politician, farmer, father, and husband. "Superb! This is a superior biography, based almost entirely on manuscript sources, few of which have been used or even examined by other scholars. It is new, it is fresh, it is fast-moving, it has the ring of truth, there is little editorializing, and it is written with economy, clarity, and balance." -- Leonard J. Arrington, author of Brigham Young: American Moses

Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex


Thomas Farel Heffernan - 1981
    A thrilling narrative that inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick.

The Growth of American Thought


Merle Curti - 1981
    With his elaboration of the complex interrelationships between the growth of American thought and the whole American social milieu, Curti creates not only an intellectual history, but a social history of American thought.

Unlikely Heroes


Jack Bass - 1981
    Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals-who vigorously and skillfully implemented Brown v. Board of Education in six southern states. The rich profiles show the character of the men who gave up prosperous lives, popularity, and friends to see that the constitutional rights of all citizens were protected.

Oversexed, Overpaid and Over Here: Americans in Australia, 1941-45


John Hammond Moore - 1981
    

The People's Railway: The History of the Municipal Railway of San Francisco


Anthony Perles - 1981
    

294 Glimpses of Historic Seattle : Its Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Businesses


Paul Dorpat - 1981
    294-Glimpses of Historic Seattle in photographs, laid out by the many neighborhoods and districts throughout the city from it's early beginning through this publishing- 1981.

Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empire from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s


Angus Calder - 1981
    Calder interweaves English, Irish, Scottish and colonial events into a single pattern. He concerns himself with social and intellectual history, as well as with political and economic developments.

Buffalo Architecture: A Guide


Reyner Banham - 1981
    H. Richardson's massive Buffalo State Hospital, Richard Upjohn's Sr. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, five prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, and building by Daniel Burnham, Albert Kahn, and the firms of McKim, Mead, and White, and Lockwood, Green and Company, among others.These structures by prominent outsiders served to spur the efforts of local architects, builders, and craftsmen, and all of them built within the context of the city-wide park and parkway system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. In addition, the city and its environs exhibit representative works by more recent architects, among them Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Walther Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudloph, Minoru Yamasaki, and the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill.Buffalo's rich architectural and planning heritage has attracted the attention of several prominent historians, capable of the challenge of evaluating its significance. Reyner Banham is one of the world's leading authorities on the theory and practice of architecture, and he has written extensively on design in the industrial age (and Buffalo's innovative manufacturing plants and grain elevators are important exemplars of such design). Charles Beveridge, whose essay covers the park and parkway system, is editor of the Olmsted papers at The American University. And Henry Russell Hitchcock is the dean of American architectural historians, and the organizer of a 1940 exhibition on Buffalo's built environment.Their essays are followed by seven sections that delineate the city's neighborhoods, each provided with a map, neighborhood history, and a full complement of photographs with descriptive building captions. An eighth section, Lost Buffalo, describes demolished buildings, chief among them Wright's great Larkin administration building, while the remaining sections venture out of town, exploring Erie and Niagara Counties, other parts of Western New York, and southern Ontario.

Desert Wife


Hilda Faunce - 1981
    No other book about life at such trading posts equals its revealing portrayal of the land and the people, and its implication of the racial differences still confronting us today."—From the introduction by Frank Waters

Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition


Peter Nabokov - 1981
    The book describes many Indian running traditions and includes historical photos and 1980 photos by Karl Kernberger. Anthropologist Nabokov's books include "Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior and "Native American Testimony.

Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties


Harris Wofford - 1981
    Attorney General Dick Thornburgh for the U.S. Senate in a 1991 special Pennsylvania election, it made national and international news, but few Pennsylvanians or Americans recognized his name.Yet Wofford had been a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy and was one of the founders of the Peace Corps.  During the decade of struggle from Montgomery to Memphis, he was and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.  With independent views of his own, Harris Wofford was witness from within the White House to the bright and the dark side of the Kennedy administration.  Focusing on how the politics and ideas came together to shape critical decisions, Wofford’s memoir captures the personal drama of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King as their characters were tested.  Of Kennedys and Kings not only makes sense of the sixties, but gives us a glimpse into the issues closest to the heart of one of America’s most interesting senators.Wofford’s vivid recollections and reflections shed light on the sixties and on the dramatic domestic and international politics of the era. Of Kennedys and Kings provides a timely reminder of what can be accomplished with leaders who are, with all their human feelings, committed to public service and responsible political action.

"One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964


Aleksandr Fursenko - 1981
    John F. Kennedy did not live to write his memoirs; Fidel Castro will not reveal what he knows; and the records of the Soviet Union have long been sealed from public view: Of the most frightening episode of the Cold War--the Cuban Missile Crisis--we have had an incomplete picture. When did Castro embrace the Soviet Union? What proposals were put before the Kremlin through Kennedy's back-channel diplomacy? How close did we come to nuclear war? These questions have now been answered for the first time. This important and controversial book draws the missing half of the story from secret Soviet archives revealed exclusively by the authors, including the files of Nikita Khrushchev and his leadership circle. Contained in these remarkable documents are the details of over forty secret meetings between Robert Kennedy and his Soviet contact, records of Castro's first solicitation of Soviet favor, and the plans, suspicions, and strategies of Khrushchev. This unique research opportunity has allowed the authors to tell the complete, fascinating, and terrifying story of the most dangerous days of the last half-century.

Waheenee: An Indian Girl's Story


Gilbert Livingstone Wilson - 1981
    In 1906 Gilbert L. Wilson first visited the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and began to study the remnants of the Hidatsa tribe. He returned in 1908, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, and for every summer of the next ten years he worked among the Hidatsas, making notes of all he saw. One of his chief informants was Waheenee-wea, or Buffalo-Bird Woman, who told him this, her life story.

Windigo Psychosis: The Anatomy of an Emic-etic Confusion


Louis Marano - 1981
    This thesis explores the movement of Algonkian peoples in response to the fur trade, the disruption of their food supply by the fur trade, and the efforts of the European Americans, specifically the Hudson Bay Company to stop migration in search of food. This is a well thought and plausible theory. It is also a very sad story.

History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener (1897)


Charles Ebert Orr - 1981
    The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. At the end, about seven hundred Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes. The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in Southern New England. The colonial authorities classified them as extinct. Survivors remained in the area but were absorbed into other local tribes. In the late 20th century, people claiming to be descended from the Pequot tribe gained federal recognition as a modern-day tribe, and were given reserves of land along the Thames and Mystic rivers in southeastern Connecticut. In 1897 Charles Orr (1858-1927) a book merchant and librarian published a "History of the Pequot War" which provides interesting contemporary accounts of this war.

The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South


John Ettling - 1981
    The Sanitary Commission was not John D. Rockefeller's first philanthropic venture, and certainly not his most ambitious; it was, however, one of his more interesting creations, later becoming the prototype for the Rockefeller Foundation's early public health programs around the world. Ettling skillfully places this medical concern in the context of the history of public health and education and against the backdrop of American reform in the progressive years.

The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, 1906


Eric Saul - 1981
    

Custer Legends


Lawrence A. Frost - 1981
    The older officers over whom he had jumped in rank soon displayed their animosity. From them, and many others, a series of charges against him were circulated; from these grew the innumerable Custer legends. This volume includes many interesting and unusual Custer legends, which include the alleged fathering of Monahseetah’s Indian son; the Annie Jones story buried in the National Archives; Custer’s capture of Lee’s supply trains at Appomattox Court House that caused Lee to surrender—and much more.

Brainpower For The Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis And National Defense Education Act Of 1958


Barbara Barksdale Clowse - 1981
    

Land of Savagery Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier


Ray Allen Billington - 1981
    

The Iroquois and the New Deal


Laurence M. Hauptman - 1981
    

Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959


Tony Dunbar - 1981