Best of
American-History

1999

The Civil War Trilogy: Gods and Generals / The Killer Angels / The Last Full Measure


Michael Shaara - 1999
    Jeff Shaara continued his father’s legacy with a series of centuries-spanning New York Times bestsellers. This volume assembles three Civil War novels from America’s first family of military fiction: Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure. Gods and Generals traces the lives, passions, and careers of the great military leaders—Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Chamberlain—from the gathering clouds of war. The Killer Angels re-creates the fight for America’s destiny in the Battle of Gettysburg, the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history. And The Last Full Measure brings to life the final two years of the Civil War, chasing the escalating conflict between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—complicated, heroic, and deeply troubled men—through to its riveting conclusion at Appomattox.

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power


Timothy B. Tyson - 1999
    Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating armed self-reliance by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast Radio Free Dixie, a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.Stunning. . . . Radio Free Dixie presents an engaging portrait of one man's continuous struggle to resist political and social oppression.--Emerge[A] radiant biography. . . . Tyson is that rarest of writers: a successful scholar who can actually tell a compelling story in clear, even handsome language.--Village Voice Literary SupplementTyson's firecracker text crackles with brilliant and lasting images of black life . . . across the South in the '40s, '50s and '60s. . . . Tyson successfully portrays Williams as a troubled visionary, a strong, stubborn and imperfect man, one who greatly influenced what became the Black Power Movement and its young leaders.--Publishers WeeklyThis book tells the riveting story of controversial black activist Robert F. Williams (1925-1996). In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP, Williams organized armed resistance to KKK terrorists--in the process challenging not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. As Radio Free Dixie reveals, however, the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and were much closer than traditional portrayals suggest. In the civil rights-era South, independent black politics, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protests in the quest for African American freedom.

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War


Eileen Welsome - 1999
    Fearful that plutonium  might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen unsuspecting patients in  hospital wards throughout the country were secretly injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them.Now, in The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections, as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted on American citizens in the postwar years. Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war. Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project. Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments, demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less enlightened era. Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound humanity as well as major historical significance.From the Hardcover edition.

The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers


Alexander Hamilton - 1999
    The texts of the chief constitutional documents of the early Republic are included as well.David Wootton's illuminating Introduction examines the history of such "American" principles of government as checks and balances, the separation of powers, representation by election, and judicial independence—including their roots in the largely Scottish, English, and French "new science of politics." It also offers suggestions for reading The Federalist, the classic elaboration of these principles written in defense of a new Constitution that sought to apply them to the young Republic.

Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision


H.W. Crocker III - 1999
    Lee was a leader for the ages. The man heralded by Winston Churchill as "one of the noblest Americans who ever lived" inspired an out-manned, out-gunned army to achieve greatness on the battlefield. He was a brilliant strategist and a man of unyielding courage who, in the face of insurmountable odds, nearly changed forever the course of history. "A masterpiece—the best work of its kind I have ever read. Crocker's Lee is a Lee for all leaders to study; and to work, quite deliberately, to emulate." — Major General Josiah Bunting III, superintendent of the Virginia Military InstituteIn this remarkable book, you'll learn the keys to Lee's greatness as a man and a leader. You'll find a general whose standards for personal excellence was second to none, whose leadership was founded on the highest moral principles, and whose character was made of steel. You'll see how he remade a rag-tag bunch of men into one of the most impressive fighting forces history has ever known. You'll also discover other sides of Lee—the businessman who inherited the debt-ridden Arlington plantation and streamlined its operations, the teacher who took a backwater college and made it into a prestigious university, and the motivator who inspired those he led to achieve more than they ever dreamed possible. Each chapter concludes with the extraordinary lessons learned, which can be applied not only to your professional life, but also to your private life as well. Today's business world requires leaders of uncommon excellence who can overcome the cold brutality of constant change. Robert E. Lee was such a leader. He triumphed over challenges people in business face every day. Guided by his magnificent example, so can you.

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market


Walter Johnson - 1999
    Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market's slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by "feeding them up," dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism


Mark Curriden - 1999
    Two black lawyers, not even part of the original defense, appealed to the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, and the stay, incredibly, was granted. Frenzied with rage at the deision, locals responded by lynching Johnson, and what ensued was a breathtaking whirlwind of groundbreaking legal action whose import, Thurgood Marshall would claim, "has never been fully explained." Provocative, thorough, and gripping, Contempt of Court is a long-overdue look at events that clearly depict the peculiar and tenuous relationship between justice and the law.

Letters of the Century: America 1900-1999


Stephen J. Adler - 1999
    Letters chronicle a century of life in the United States, from Mark Twain's humorous letter to the head of Western Union to Einstein's warning to Roosevelt about atomic warfare and a young Bill Gates begging hobbyists not to share software.

The Making of Milwaukee


John Gurda - 1999
    It's true that Milwaukee's German accent was unmistakable in the 1880s; it was the Beer Capital of the World; and it's the home of the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal the engines that powered the New York City subway system, and the motorcycles that made Harley-Davidson an American legend.But the stereotypes don't begin to convey the richness of Milwaukee's past. They don't describe the five citizens killed by the state militia as they marched for the eight-hour day. The Jewish community leader who wrote The Settlement Cookbook. The Italian priest who led the local crusade for civil rights in the 1960s. The railroad promoter who bribed an entire state legislature. The Socialists who made Milwaukee the best-governed big city in America. Allis-Chalmers and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Summerfest and Irish Fest. Golda Meir. Carl Sandburg. Robin Yount.The Making of Milwaukee tells all those stories and a great many more. Well-written, superbly organized, and lavishly illustrated, it is sure to be the standard reference for many years to come.

Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks


Mark David Spence - 1999
    While visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the creation of these parks, they also inspired policies of Indian removal. By contrasting the native histories of these places with the links between Indian policy developments and preservationist efforts, this work examines the complex origins of the national parks and the troubling consequences of the American wilderness ideal. The first study to place national park history within the context of the early reservation era, it details the ways that national parks developed into one of the most important arenas of contention between native peoples and non-Indians in the twentieth century.

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President


Allen C. Guelzo - 1999
    Written with passion and dramatic impact, Guelzo's masterful study offers a revealing new perspective on a man whose life was in many ways a paradox. Since its original publication in 1999, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President has garnered numerous accolades, not least the prestigious 2000 Lincoln Prize. As journalist Richard N. Ostling has noted, "Much has been written about Lincoln's belief and disbelief," but Guelzo's extraordinary account "goes deeper."

For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer


Chana Kai Lee - 1999
    The powerful story of Fannie Lou Hamer, who grew up among "the poorest of the poor" in rural Mississippi and became a national figure in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History


Erik Larson - 1999
    Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history--and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy.Using Cline's own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man's heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac's Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

The Irish Soldiers Of Mexico


Michael Hogan - 1999
    It has been the basis of an MGM feature film and two documentaries; it has also been used in many history classes both in the United States and abroad. Includes new historical material such as the location of what purported to be a death certificate for John Riley located in a church in Veracruz. The edition includes updated "After the War" and "Commemorations" sections. Many positive changes in public perception of the San Patricios have taken place since the first publication of this book in 1997. In addition, there have been a number of new vehicles for dissemination of the history, not the least of which was the production of "One Man's Hero," starring Tom Berenger, three novels on the San Patricios, a new sculpture in Mexico City of John Riley donated by the people of Ireland, and the Chieftains new CD with songs commemorating the Irish battalion.

A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution


Peter Irons - 1999
    In the tradition of Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, Peter Irons chronicles the decisions that have influenced virtually every aspect of our society, from the debates over judicial power to controversial rulings in the past regarding slavery, racial segregation, and abortion, as well as more current cases about school prayer, the Bush/Gore election results, and "enemy combatants." To understand key issues facing the supreme court and the current battle for the court's ideological makeup, there is no better guide than Peter Irons. This revised and updated edition includes a foreword by Howard Zinn.

James Madison: Writings


James Madison - 1999
    Arranged chronologically, it contains almost 200 documents written between 1772, the year after Madison's graduation from Princeton, and his death in 1836. Included are all 29 of Madison's contributions to The Federalist as well as speeches and letters that illuminate his role in framing and ratifying the Constitution. Also represented are early writings on religious freedom; correspondence with figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Monroe; writings from his terms as secretary of state and president; and letters and essays written during retirement.

In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century


Robert G. Torricelli - 1999
    Decade by decade, generation to generation, history unfolds in the famous and infamous expressions of Americans from all walks of life: poets and politicians, artists and astronauts, soldiers and sports legends, preachers and pacifists, humorists and hell-raisers. In Our Own Words bears witness to the forces that swept our nation -- two World Wars, Prohibition, the Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights era, Vietnam, the Reagan era, and beyond -- and features the voices of Theodore Roosevelt * Booker T. Washington * Mark Twain * Emma Goldman * Woodrow Wilson * Marcus Garvey * Oliver Wendell Holmes * George S. Patton * Pearl Buck * Orson Welles * Jackie Robinson * Joseph McCarthy * Rachel Carson * Vince Lombardi * Barry Goldwater * John F. Kennedy * J. Edgar Hoover * Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. * Malcolm X * Richard M. Nixon * Frank Zappa * Elie Wiesel * Charlton Heston * Ryan White * Duke Ellington * Billy Graham * Barbara Jordan * Bill Clinton * Cesar Chavez * Helen Keller...and dozens of others who tell the story of their age from their podiums and soapboxes, courtrooms and convention halls.

Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier


James H. Merrell - 1999
    It is also a reflection on the meanings of wilderness to the colonists and natives of the New World. From the Quaker colony's founding in the 1680s into the 1750s, Merrell shows us how the go-betweens survived in the woods, dealing with problems of food, travel, lodging, and safety, and how they sought to bridge the vast cultural gaps between the Europeans and the Indians. The futility of these efforts became clear in the sickening plummet into war after 1750. "A stunningly original and exceedingly well-written account of diplomacy on the edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness."--Publishers Weekly

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow


Richard Wormser - 1999
    During these times, characterized by some as “worse than slavery,” African Americans fought the status quo, acquiring education and land and building businesses, churches, and communities, despite laws designed to segregate and disenfranchise them. White supremacy prevailed, but did not destroy, the spirit of the black community.Incorporating anecdotes, the exploits of individuals, first-person accounts, and never- before-seen images and graphics, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is the story of the African American struggle for freedom following the end of the Civil War. A companion volume to the four-part PBS television series, which took seven years to write, research, and edit, the book documents the work of such figures as the activist and separatist Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. It examines the emergence of the black middle class and intellectual elite, and the birth of the NAACP.The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow also tells the stories of ordinary heroes who accomplished extraordinary things: Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a teacher who founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, a private black high school in North Carolina; Ned Cobb, a tenant farmer in Alabama who became a union organizer; Isaiah Montgomery, who founded Mound Bayou, an all-black town in Mississippi; Charles Evers, brother of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who fought for voter registration in Mississippi in the 1940s. And Barbara Johns, a sixteen-year-old Virginia student who organized a student strike in 1951. The strike led to a lawsuit that became one of the five cases the United States Supreme Court reviewed when it declared segregation in education illegal.As the twenty-first century rolls forward, we are losing the remaining survivors of this pivotal era. Rich in historical commentary and eyewitness testimony by blacks and whites who lived through the period, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is a poignant record of a time when indignity and terror constantly faced off against courage and accomplishment.

First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History


Colin G. Calloway - 1999
    Written by a noted scholar and experienced textbook author, First Peoples combines documentary evidence with narrative that can anchor a course whether assigned alone or with a variety of supplements. Each chapter includes a brief narrative; primary-source documents, with headnotes and questions; and a topical picture essay.

Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era


Adolph L. Reed Jr. - 1999
    He examines the rise of a new black political class in the aftermath of the civil rights era, and bluntly denounces black leadership that is not accountable to a black constituency; such leadership, he says, functions as a proxy for white elites. Reed debunks as myths the 'endangered black male" and the "black underclass, " and punctures what he views as the exaggeration and self-deception surrounding the black power movement and the Malcolm X revival. He chastises the Left, too, for its failure to develop an alternative politics, then lays out a practical leftist agenda and reasserts the centrality of political action.

The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest


Ellen Meloy - 1999
    It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference, lush textures and inscrutable tensions. Here violence can push beauty to the edge of a razor blade. . . . Thus Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value—a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home.

Stephen F Austin: Empresario of Texas


Gregg Cantrell - 1999
    He was an American who moved to Mexico and figured out how to live and work with Mexican Authorities. He wanted to populate Texas, but did not want to do so as invaders, but as migrants. He played within the rules. Other Texas migrants, not so much. Here is his story and the origins of Texas as an independent Republic.

The Women Who Wrote the War


Nancy Caldwell Sorel - 1999
    Louis; from San Francisco and points east. They left comfortable homes and safe sourroundings for combat-zone duty. They were women war correspondants, bringing to the battlefields of World War II a fresh perspective, reporting what they witnessed with a new sensiblity.The women who wrote the war include world-famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only Western photgrapher to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR; writer Martha Gelhorn, wife of Ernest Heminghway and one of the first reporters to document the menace of fascism; Lee Miller, the legendary photographer who took a bath in Hitler's tub; and dozens more gutsy women whose devastating and heartwarming reports are captured in this seemless narrative that assures them, at last, their rightful place in history.

Our Nation's Archive: The History of the United States in Documents


Erik Bruun - 1999
    Fascinating articles, history-making speeches, moving personal letters, momentous court cases etc. paint an in-depth portrait of American life in all arenas: political, social, religious & cultural. Brief introduction by the authors give background information for each document. Every issue is covered from the Declaration of Independence & the Bill of Rights to Brown vs. the Board of Education & Roe vs. Wade.Browsers will discover entertaining & informative writings not found in history books, including the 1st American cookbook, Andrew Carnegie's business advice, poems that inspired the Chicano Movement, Mario Cuomo's 1984 convention speech, the environmental movement manifestoes & the Starr Report. Organized chronologically & divided by subject (The Civil War, The Cold War etc.), all documents are cross referenced in indexes so history buffs can find their favorite documents by author, document name & 1st line.

Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves


Gregory A. Freeman - 1999
    Williams plantation in Georgia was operated largely with the labor of slaves—and this was in 1921, 56 years after the Civil War. Williams was not alone in using “peons,” but his reaction to a federal investigation was almost unbelievable: he decided to destroy the evidence. Enlisting the aid of his trusted black farm boss, Clyde Manning, he began methodically killing his slaves. As this true story unfolds, each detail seems more shocking, and surprises continue in the aftermath, with a sensational trial galvanizing the nation and marking a turning point in the treatment of black Americans.

Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862


Joseph L. Harsh - 1999
    It focuses on military policy and strategy, examining the context necessary to understand that strategy and the circumstances under which the two commanders, Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan, laboured.

Mapping Boston


Alex Krieger - 1999
    Mapping Boston is an exemplar of such creative attentiveness--bringing the history of one of America's oldest and most beautiful cities alive through the maps that have depicted it over the centuries.The book includes both historical maps of the city and maps showing the gradual emergence of the New England region from the imaginations of explorers to a form that we would recognize today. Each map is accompanied by a full description and by a short essay offering an insight into its context. The topics of these essays by Anne Mackin include people both familiar and unknown, landmarks, and events that were significant in shaping the landscape or life of the city. A highlight of the book is a series of new maps detailing Boston's growth.The book also contains seven essays that explore the intertwining of maps and history. Urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., starts with a capsule history of Boston. Barbara McCorkle, David Bosse, and David Cobb discuss the making and trading of maps from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Historian Nancy S. Seasholes reviews the city's remarkable topographic history as reflected in maps, and planner Alex Krieger explores the relation between maps and the physical reality of the city as experienced by residents and visitors. In an epilogue, novelist James Carroll ponders the place of Boston in contemporary culture and the interior maps we carry of a city.

Voices of Our Time: The Original Live Interviews


Studs Terkel - 1999
    This nationally syndicated, Peabody Award-winning program was an ideal showcase for his curmudgeonly wit, his maverick opinions, and his genius as an interviewer. The 48 interviews in this collection, span Terkel’s five decades on radio and encompass a wide range of entertainers, scientists, writers and thinkers, including Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, Bob Woodward, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions


David M. Harland - 1999
    This unique insight into the three Apollo missions (15, 16 and 17) answers all these questions and much more. Using the actual transcripts of what the astronauts said to each other whilst carrying out their duties, and numerous photographs taken at each step of the exploration, this book provides a graphic illustration of what can arguably be described as Mankinds greatest feat of exploration.

Controversies & Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac


Stephen W. Sears - 1999
      From an award-winning military historian and the bestselling author of Gettysburg, this is a wide-ranging collection of essays about the Army of the Potomac, delving into such topics as Professor Lowe’s reconnaissance balloons; the court-martial of Fitz John Porter; the Lost Order at Antietam; press coverage of the war; the looting of Fredericksburg; the Mud March; the roles of volunteers, conscripts, bounty jumpers, and foreign soldiers; the notorious Gen. Dan Sickles, who shot his wife’s lover outside the White House; and two generals who were much maligned: McClellan (justifiably) and Hooker (not so justifiably).   This lively book follows the Army of the Potomac throughout the war, from 1861 to 1865, painting a remarkable portrait of the key incidents and personalities that influenced the course of our nation’s greatest cataclysm.

Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself


Jerome Loving - 1999
    Jerome Loving makes use of recently unearthed archival evidence and newspaper writings to present the most accurate, complete, and complex portrait of the poet to date. This authoritative biography affords fresh, often revelatory insights into many aspects of the poet's life, including his attitudes toward the emerging urban life of America, his relationships with his family members, his developing notions of male-male love, his attitudes toward the vexed issue of race, and his insistence on the union of American states. Virtually every chapter presents material that was previously unknown or unavailable, and Whitman emerges as never before, in all his complexity as a corporal, cerebral, and spiritual being. Loving gives us a new Poet of Democracy, one for the twenty-first century.Loving brings to life the elusive early Whitman, detailing his unhappy teaching career, typesetting jobs, quarrels with editors, and relationships with family and friends. He takes us through the Civil War—with Whitman's moving descriptions of the wounded and dying he nursed, the battlegrounds and camps he visited—demonstrating why the war became one of the defining events of Whitman's life and poetry. Loving's account of Whitman's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most complete and fascinating available. He also draws insights from new material about Whitman's life as a civil servant, his Lincoln lectures, and his abiding campaign to gain acceptance for what was regarded by many as a "dirty book." He examines each edition of Leaves of Grass in connection with the life and times that produced it, demonstrating how Whitman's poetry serves as a priceless historical document—marking such events as Grant's death, the completion of the Washington monument, Custer's defeat, and the Johnstown flood—at the same time that it reshapes the canon of American literature.The most important gap in the Whitman record is his journalism, which has never been completely collected and edited. Previous biographers have depended on a very incomplete and inaccurate collection. Loving has found long-forgotten runs of the newspapers Whitman worked on and has gathered the largest collection of his journalism to date. He uses these pieces to significantly enhance our understanding of where Whitman stood in the political and ideological spectra of his era.Loving tracks down the sources of anecdotes about Whitman, how they got passed from one biographer to another, were embellished and re-contextualized. The result is a biography in which nothing is claimed without a basis in the factual record. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself will be an invaluable tool for generations to come, an essential resource in understanding Leaves of Grass and its poet—who defied literary decorum, withstood condemnation, and stubbornly pursued his own way.

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation


John Hope Franklin - 1999
    A sweeping panorama of plantation life before the Civil War, this book reveals that slaves frequently rebelled against their masters and ran away from their plantations whenever they could. For generations, important aspects about slave life on the plantations of the American South have remained shrouded. Historians thought, for instance, that slaves were generally pliant and resigned to their roles as human chattel, and that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration. In this precedent setting book, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did in fact frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, this book shows how slaves resisted, when, where, and how they escaped, where they fled to, how long they remained in hiding, and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshaled considerable effort to prevent runaways, meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves. Reflecting a lifetime of thought by our leading authority in African American history, this book provides the key to truly understanding the relationship between slaveholders and the runaways who challenged the system--illuminating as never before the true nature of the South's most peculiar institution.

Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign


Kathleen Ernst - 1999
    Facing the aftermath were the men, women, and children living in the village of Sharpsburg and on surrounding farms. In Too Afraid to Cry, Kathleen Ernst recounts the dramatic experiences of these Maryland citizens--stories that have never been told--and also examines the complex political web holding together Unionists and Secessionists, many of whom lived under the same roofs in this divided countryside.

A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the Wpa, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Other Voices of a Generation


Lionel C. Bascom - 1999
    From the "rent party" described by Frank Byrd, where paying guests "partook freely of fried chicken, pork chops, pigs feet, and potato salad, not to mention homemade "crawn liquor" to Dorothy West's portrayal of Amateur Night at the Apollo, "A Renaissance in Harlem -- a work filled with humor, compassion, hope and outrage -- is an essential historical record of the African-American experience.

The Federalist Papers In Modern Language: Indexed for Today's Political Issues


Mary E. Webster - 1999
    The book includes the U.S. Constitution and Articles of Confederation. This was first published in 1999 and has been a great aid to students and citizens who want to understand the Founding Fathers' interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

A Christian Survey of World History


Rousas John Rushdoony - 1999
    From tape 3: "Can you see why a knowledge of history is importantso that we can see the issues as our Lord presented them against the whole backboard of history and to see the battle as it is again lining up?Because again we have the tragic view of ancient Greece; again we have the Persian view tolerate both good and evil; again we have the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian view of chaos as the source of regeneration. And we must therefore again find our personal and societal regeneration in Jesus Christ and His Word all things must be made new in terms of His Word." Twelve taped lessons give an overview of history from ancient times to the 20th century as only Rev. Rushdoony could. Text includes fifteen chapters of class notes covering ancient history through the Reformation. Text also includes review questions covering the tapes and questions for thought and discussion. Album includes 12 tapes, notes, and answer key. 12 tapes in album, Set of A Christian Survey of World History." Tape 1 1. Time and History: Why History is Important Tape 2 2. Israel,Egypt, and the Ancient Near East Tape 3 3. Assyria,Babylon,Persia,Greece and Jesus Christ Tape 4 4. The Roman Republic and Empire Tape 5 5. The Early Church 6. Byzantium Tape 6 7. Islam 8. The Frontier Age Tape 7 9. New Humanism or Medieval Period Tape 8 10. The Reformation Tape 9 11. Wars of Religion So Called 12. The Thirty Years War Tape 10 13. France:Louis XIV through Napoleon Tape 11 14. England:The Puritans through Queen Victoria Tape 12 15. 20th Century: The Intellectual Scientific Elite

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century


Witold Rybczynski - 1999
    But Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as the executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make his book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

First Across the Rhine: The Story of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion in France, Belgium, and Germany


David E. Pergrin - 1999
    This book shows how this important division provided critical access over the Rhine in the face of enormous resistance.

Fifty Black Women Who Changed America


Amy Alexander - 1999
    Celebrates the lives of black women who have influenced and changed the course of history in America, including Harriet Tubman, Oprah Winfrey, Rosa Parks, Ella Fitzgerald, and Alice Walker.

Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945


Richard M. Sudhalter - 1999
    Now, with Lost Chords, musician-historian Richard M. Sudhalter challenges this narrow view, with a book that pays definitive tribute to a generation of white jazz players, many unjustly forgotten--while never scanting the role of the great black pioneers. Greeted enthusiastically by the jazz community upon its original publication, this monumental volume offers an exhaustively documented, vividly narrated history of white jazz contribution in the vital years 1915 to 1945. Beginning in New Orleans, Sudhalter takes the reader on a fascinating multicultural odyssey through the hot jazz gestation centers of Chicago and New York, Indiana and Texas, examining such bands such as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, the Original Memphis Five, and the Casa Loma Orchestra. Readers will find luminous accounts of many key soloists, including Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Red Norvo, Bud Freeman, the Dorsey Brothers, Bunny Berigan, Pee Wee Russell, and Artie Shaw, among others. Sudhalter reinforces the reputations of these and many other major jazzmen, pleading their cases persuasively and eloquently, without ever descending to polemic. Along the way, he gives due credit to Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and countless other major black figures. Already hailed as a basic reference book on the subject--and now incorporating information that has come to light since its first publication--Lost Chords is a ground-breaking book that should significantly alter perceptions about jazz and its players, reminding readers of this great music's multicultural origins.

Where Death and Glory Meet: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry


Russell Duncan - 1999
    Confederate defenders killed, wounded, or made prisoners of half the regiment. Only hours later, the body of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the regiment's white commander, was thrown into a mass grave with those of twenty of his men. The assault promoted the young colonel to the higher rank of martyr, ranking him alongside the legendary John Brown in the eyes of abolitionists.In this biography of Shaw, Russell Duncan presents a poignant portrait of an average young soldier, just past the cusp of manhood and still struggling against his mother's indomitable will, thrust unexpectedly into the national limelight. Using information gleaned from Shaw's letters home before and during the war, Duncan tells the story of the rebellious son of wealthy Boston abolitionists who never fully reconciled his own racial prejudices yet went on to head the North's vanguard black regiment and give his life to the cause of freedom. This thorough biography looks at Shaw from historical and psychological viewpoints and examines the complex family relationships that so strongly influenced him.

American Heritage's Great Minds of American History


Roger Mudd - 1999
    American Heritage® Great Minds of American History takes you there, imbuing the past with an immediacy that goes well beyond the scope of formal histories. Roger Mudd's highly knowledgable questions illuminate five truly first-rate minds: World War II and the Post-War Era Stephen Ambrose, biographer of Eisenhower and Nixon, bestselling author of Citizen Soldiers and Undaunted Courage, and adviser to Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan offers his expert insight into war and its aftermath. The American Revolution Gordon Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and renowned expert on the colonial era brings to life the birth of the first modern democracy. America's Forgotten Era: 1865-1914 David McCullough acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, offers his stunning perspective on the dawn of The American Century. The American West Richard White, MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of groundbreaking books on the American West, offers his challenging views on the winning and the losing of the West. The Civil War James McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry Of Freedom, and one of the foremost experts on the Civil War offers his compelling insight into our nation's darkest and bloodiest hour.

Chief Joseph's Own Story (1999 Edition)


Chief Joseph - 1999
    Without their assistance, the success of the expedition would have been much more questionable and difficult. These books will give you a better understanding of the later contacts with the Nez Perce.

Second Manassas: Longstreet's Attack and the Struggle for Chinn Ridge


Scott C. Patchan - 1999
    Lee ordered Maj. Gen. James Longstreet to conduct a reconnaissance and possible assault on the Chinn Ridge front in Northern Virginia. At the time Longstreet launched his attack, only a handful of Union troops stood between Robert E. Lee and Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia. Northern Virginia’s rolling terrain and Bull Run also provided Lee with a unique opportunity seldom seen during the entire Civil War—that of "bagging" an army, an elusive feat keenly desired by political leaders of both sides. Second Manassas: Longstreet’s Attack and the Struggle for Chinn Ridge details the story of Longstreet and his men’s efforts to obtain the ultimate victory that Lee desperately sought. At the same time, this account tells of the Union soldiers who, despite poor leadership and lack of support from Pope and his senior officers, bravely battled Longstreet and saved their army from destruction along the banks of Bull Run. Longstreet’s men were able to push the Union forces back, but only after they had purchased enough time for the Union army to retreat in good order. Although Lee did not achieve a decisive victory, his success at Chinn Ridge allowed him to carry the war north of the Potomac River, thus setting the stage for his Maryland Campaign. Within three weeks, the armies would meet again along the banks of Antietam Creek in western Maryland. Uncovering new sources, Scott Patchan gives a vivid picture of the battleground and a fresh perspective that sharpens the detail and removes the guesswork found in previous works dealing with the climactic clash at Second Manassas.

Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II


Maureen Honey - 1999
    This sea of white faces left for posterity images such as Rosie the Riveter, obscuring the contributions that African American women made to the war effort. In Bitter Fruit, Maureen Honey corrects this distorted picture of women's roles in World War II by collecting photos, essays, fiction, and poetry by and about black women from the four leading African American periodicals of the war period: Negro Digest, The Crisis, Opportunity, and Negro Story.Mostly appearing for the first time since their original publication, the materials in Bitter Fruit feature black women operating technical machinery, working in army uniforms, entertaining audiences, and pursuing a college education. The articles praise the women's accomplishments as pioneers working toward racial equality; the fiction and poetry depict female characters in roles other than domestic servants and give voice to the bitterness arising from discrimination that many women felt. With these various images, Honey masterfully presents the roots of the postwar civil rights movement and the leading roles black women played in it.Containing works from eighty writers, this anthology includes forty African American women authors, most of whose work has not been published since the war. Of particular note are poems and short stories anthologized for the first time, including Ann Petry's first story, Octavia Wynbush's last work of fiction, and three poems by Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Uniting these various writers was their desire to write in the midst of a worldwide military conflict with dramatic potential for ending segregation and opening doors for women at home.Traditional anthologies of African American literature jump from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s with little or no reference to the decades between those periods. Bitter Fruit not only illuminates the literature of these decades but also presents an image of black women as community activists that undercuts gender stereotypes of the era. As Honey concludes in her introduction, "African American women found an empowered voice during the war, one that anticipates the fruit of their wartime effort to break silence, to challenge limits, and to change forever the terms of their lives."

Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era


Brenda Dixon Gottschild - 1999
    The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.

A Noble Cause? America and the Vietnam War


Gerard J. DeGroot - 1999
    It's a powerful study which offers fresh insights into the communist revolution and military tactics, the flaws in US strategy and the legacy of the war both for Vietnam and America. An important new study on a subject often masked by sentiment and myth.

Science in Colonial America


Brendan January - 1999
    Science of the Past reveals the large debt owed by modern scientists to the healers, mathematicians, stargazers, explorers, and thinkers of the ancient world.

The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A.


William M. Lamers - 1999
    Rosecrans (1819-1898) was one of the most fascinating and tragic figures of the Civil War. In September 1863 President Lincoln and Congress considered him the most able general on the Union side, but only one month later "Old Rosy" was removed from his command and then quickly forgotten. With The Edge of Glory, William M. Lamers returns this imposing, colorful figure to his rightful place in history.Lamers examines Rosecrans's experiences at Iuka and Corinth during the Mississippi campaign, the strategic brilliance that led to the withdrawal of Bragg's men from Tullahoma and Shelbyville, and his role as commander of the Army of the Cumberland in the Tennessee battles of Stone's River and the disastrous Chickamauga. Yet the demise of Rosecrans's distinguished military career, Lamers illustrates, was not a result of his humiliating defeat at Chickamauga but of his difficult, uncompromising personality and the scorn he aroused in many of his superiors, including General Ulysses S. Grant and Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's secretary of war. Although Rosecrans fell short of greatness as a military commander, Lamers deftly shows that he did indeed reach "the edge of glory."

Confederate Admiral: The Life and Wars of Franklin Buchanan


Craig L. Symonds - 1999
    Naval Academy's first superintendent who went on to become the Confederate Navy's first admiral. Buchanan's resignation from the U.S. Navy in April 1861 as the nation teetered on the brink of Civil War is one of the many dramatic episodes in this revealing biography. Convinced that his native state of Maryland was about to secede from the Union, Buchanan gave up his commission but, when Maryland did not secede, desperately tried to get it back. Unsuccessful, he eventually went South where, as the Confederacy's only full admiral, he helped mold Southern naval strategy and took command of both the Virginia (Merrimack) in the battle of Hampton Roads in 1861, and the Tennessee in the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864 when Farragut damned the torpedoes. While Buchanan's Civil War experiences helped define the drama of the period, his fifty-year naval career illuminates the sweeping changes in the U.S. Navy of the antebellum years. This stimulating and authoritative biography chronicles Buchanan's life as a midshipman on the square-rigged sailing frigate Java and as a commander at the helm of the coal-burning side-wheel steamer Susquehanna. It examines his pivotal role in the establishment of the Naval Academy and his experiences as the first American to set foot in Japan and the first to command a U.S. Navy warship up the Yangtze River. More than a record of events in Buchanan's career, this biography helps readers understand Buchanan's character and appreciate the broader issues of politics, slavery, loyalty, and professionalism in the era of America's greatest national trauma.

Frontier Children


Linda Peavy - 1999
    From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, well known for their books on western women, have brought together stories and images that erase the stereotypes and bring to life the infinite variety of the experience of growing up in the American West.

In Honored Glory


Robert Vaughan - 1999
    Maine rests at anchor. Then America's most powerful battleship suddenly explodes, and the Spanish American War has begun... "Remember the Maine" was the battle cry that sent thousands of American soldiers on the adventure of a lifetime... war with Spain in Cuba. But for the soldiers who would face a barrage of Spanish gunfire, it would be a war like none other. A novel of men and women thrust into the heart of war. This is the saga of a nation doing battle for the first time since it's own Civil War, on a hot, exotic island where glory would only be earned in blood.

The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West


Michael Wallis - 1999
    Featuring countless cowboys and cowgirls, including such Western legends as Buffalo Bill, Geronimo, and Bill Picket, it was only a matter of time before it caught the glittering eye of Hollywood.From the legendary cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail to the origins of the mass entertainment industry, Michael Wallis masterfully tells the enthralling history of not only the 101 ranch, but the last days of the American Frontier.

Titanic: A Journey Through Time


John P. Eaton - 1999
    Eaton and Charles A. Haas. Based on research conducted on three continents and containing over 625 illustrations, many never published before, this splendid volume covers more than 250 important dates in the Titanic story, from the births of key players in the tragedy to the latest expedition to recover artifacts, and includes the first detailed accounts of how the public learned the news of the sinking as well as court hearings to establish ownership rights to the wreck.An exclusive selection of the authors' own photographs of recent expeditions, plus new material and artifact photographs, make this an essential book for both the serious historian and the casual reader.

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam


Lewis Sorley - 1999
    The first to set the record straight concerning the outcome of that conflict” (H. Norman Schwarzkopf, General, US Army, Retired).Neglected by scholars and journalists alike, the years of conflict in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 offer surprises not only about how the war was fought, but about what was achieved. Drawing from thousands of hours of previously unavailable (and still classified) tape-recorded meetings between the highest levels of the American military command in Vietnam, A Better War is an insightful, factual, and superbly documented history of these final years. Through his exclusive access to authoritative materials, Lewis Sorley highlights the dramatic differences in conception, conduct, and??—??at least for a time??—??results between the early and later years of the war. Among his most important findings is that while the war was being lost at the peace table and in the US Congress, the soldiers were winning on the ground. Meticulously researched and movingly told, A Better War sheds new light on the Vietnam War.

Booknotes Life Stories: Notable Biographers on the People Who Shaped America


Brian Lamb - 1999
    This informal dictionary of biography peers into the personalities who have left a mark on our world -- a Who's Who of American history, and the next best thing to chatting directly with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Elijah Muhammad, Amelia Earhart, Katharine Graham, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frank McCourt, Bill Clinton, and many others. Based on iSPAN's popular weekly Booknotes program, this absorbing collection of life stories presents illuminating profiles and often surprising details from our favorite biographers. Booknotes follows the evolution of American history chronologically, and covers the lives of writers and thinkers, inventors and scientists, politicians and soldiers. Lamb reacquaints us with the great figures of our times, in an engaging conversation about America.

Holding Stone Hands: On the Trail of the Cheyenne Exodus


Alan Boye - 1999
    Settled there against their will, they were making a peaceful attempt to return to their homeland in the Tongue River country of Montana. Despite earlier promises that the Cheyennes could choose to leave the reservation, government officials declared them renegades and sent thousands of soldiers in pursuit.In 1995 Alan Boye set out on foot to follow Dull Knife's thousand-mile flight through the sparsely populated wilderness of America's high plains. Along the way he was joined by descendents of Dull Knife. Holding Stone Hands is the tale of two journeys. Boye provides a vivid, moving account of the Cheyenne's struggle to return to Montana. At the same time, he details the trek he and his Cheyenne companions made through four states and his growing understanding of why the Cheyenne's longing for their homeland was stronger than their desire to live.

I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life


Theresa A. Singleton - 1999
    Today, the archaeological study of African-American life is no longer simply an effort to capture unrecorded aspects of black history or to exhume the heritage of a neglected community. Archaeologists now recognize that one cannot fully comprehend the European colonial experience in the Americas without understanding its African counterpart.This collection of essays reflects and extends the broad spectrum of scholarship arising from this expanded definition of African-American archaeology, treating such issues as the analysis and representation of cultural identity, race, gender, and class; cultural interaction and change; relations of power and domination; and the sociopolitics of archaeological practice. "I, Too, Am America" expands African-American archaeology into an inclusive historical vision and identifies promising areas for future study.

Honoring Our Ancestors: Stories and Paintings by Fourteen Artists


Harriet Rohmer - 1999
    Through stories, art, and photographs, it inspires children and their families to honor their own ancestors, so that we can gain strength from the past.

1863: The Rebirth of a Nation


Joseph E. Stevens - 1999
    During this crucial time the tide of the Civil War turned inexorably from the Confederacy to the Union, with momentous consequences that are still being felt today. It was a year of upheaval unparalleled in our national experience: twelve months of searing brutality and ennobling sacrifice, 365 stirring, dramatic days that changed our country forever. Integrating the events of this epochal year into a panoramic narrative, Joseph E. Stevens presents a grand portrait of the Union and Confederacy at war. He captures two nations struggling to define the American experiment and create a new understanding of freedom on the bloody battlefields of Stones River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. He also traces the astonishing political, economic, and social transformations that marked 1863 as a watershed.1863 features a remarkable cast of characters: larger-than-life leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; charismatic and controversial military commanders like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, Joseph Hooker, Stonewall Jackson, George Armstrong Custer, and Nathan Bedford Forrest; avaricious young capitalists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan; war-haunted writers like Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman; war-inspired painters like Winslow Homer and Conrad Wise Chapman.Here, too, is a host of less well known but no less fascinating personalities: soldiers and civilians, slaves and slave owners, farmers and city dwellers, politicians and profiteers, artistocrats and refugees. Theirstories--humorous and harrowing, inspiring and appalling--make 1863 not just a sweeping re-creation of events but a gripping human tale as well.1863 is popular history at its best--vivid, vibrant, and immensely readable. Written with dramatic intensity and impassioned humanity, it is a thrilling account of the pivotal year of the war that remains the central historical event in the life of our nation.

Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California


J.S. Holliday - 1999
    Holliday frames the gold rush years within the larger story of the state's transformation from the quietude of a Mexican hinterland in the 1840s to the forefront of entrepreneurial capitalism by the 1890s. No other state, no nation experienced such an adolescence of freedom and success. By 1883 California was hailed as "America, only more so."Holliday's boldly interpretive narrative has the authority and immediacy of an eyewitness account. This eminent historian recreates the masculine world of mining camps and rough cities, where both business and pleasure were conducted far from hometown eyes and conventional inhibitions. He follows gold mining's swift evolution from treasure hunt to vast industry; traces the prodigal plunder of California's virgin rivers and abundant forests; and describes improvised feats of engineering, breathtaking in their scope and execution.Holliday also conjures the ambitious, often ruthless Californians whose rush for riches rapidly changed the state: the Silver Kings of the Comstock Lode, the timber barons of the Sierra forests, the Big Four who built the first transcontinental railroad, and the lesser profit-seekers who owned steamboats, pack mules, gambling dens and bordellos—and, most important for California's future, the farmers who prospered by feeding the rapidly growing population. This wildly laissez-faire economy created California's image as a risk-taking society, unconstrained by fear of failure.The central theme of Rush for Riches is how, after decades of careless freedom, the miners were finally reined in by the farmers, and how their once mutually dependent relationship soured into hostility. This potential violence led to a dramatic courtroom decision in 1884 that shut down the mighty hydraulic mining operations—the end of California's free-for-all youthful exuberance.Unique in its format, this beautiful book offers not only a compelling narrative but also almost two hundred fifty illustrations, one hundred in full color, that richly illuminate the themes and details of the text: daguerreotypes, photographs, paintings, lithographs, sketches, and specially drawn maps.Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000

Great Minds of History


American Heritage - 1999
    In the book's casual forum, the legacies of history shine through with electric urgency as Roger Mudd's highly knowledgeable questions illuminate five truly first-rate minds: Stephen Ambrose, discussing the turbulent years between World War II and the world we inhabit today, eloquently underscores the immense achievement and consequence of D-day - "the pivot point of the twentieth century" - and candidly discusses history's complex assessments of Eisenhower and Nixon. David McCullough not only enlarges the traditional vision of the Industrial Era - that tumultuous epoch of brilliant lights and dark shadows that gave birth to the modern world - but goes beyond that to explain why he finds history intimate, compelling, and fresh: "There is no such thing as the past." James McPherson tells how his experience with the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to his career as a student of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and his examination of the ideology that drove the Confederacy enriches our understanding of how the bitter legacy of defeat has shaped events both North and South ever since. Richard White, discussing westward expansion, traces the evolution of how historians have viewed the American frontier, from a cherished national legend of intrepid pioneers taming an empty wilderness to a complex and often violent story of the melding of many different cultures. Gordon Wood takes our Revolution from its enshrinement as an inevitable civic event and shows what a chancy, desperate business it really was, along the way offeringcrisp, telling details about the very human Founding Fathers, and reminding us that, above all, the conflict was a sweeping social revolution whose consequences continue to remake the entire world.

Fanny and Joshua: The Enigmatic Lives of Frances Caroline Adams and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain


Diane M. Smith - 1999
    His story inspired Ken Burns to create his epic series for PBS The Civil War, and his primary role in Gettysburg, the movie adaptation of Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Killer Angels, has made him an American cult hero. Lost among the glow of his recent fame is some understanding of the relationship with his wife, the former Miss Frances Caroline Adams, known to family and friends as "Fanny." While numerous biographies of the legendary hero explain that Fanny had a profound, sometimes confounding effect on her husband, none have examined the relationship in enough depth to gain a better understanding of it, nor to learn more about Fanny the woman, not just the wife. After many years of intense research and analysis, Fanny and Joshua remedies these problems.

Faulkner, Mississippi


Édouard Glissant - 1999
    His visit spurred him to an original and powerful reappraisal of Faulkner's work.Like Faulkner's literary descendants in the United States, Glissant is fascinated by the stories of Yoknapatawpha County and disturbed by the author's equivocations about the racism there. Glissant, however, stands in a distinctive relation to Faulkner and his county: as a black Martinican, he is descended from slaves; as a native French speaker, he first encountered the great novelist's work in translation.Faulkner, Mississippi is a distinctive look at an American icon by a writer deeply involved in the issues of Faulkner's work. Glissant sees the racial complexities of Faulkner as the key to his influence in the next century, and presents Faulkner as the progenitor of Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Toni Morrison, who all write fiction in which the characters are implicated in a single multiracial calamity. He exhorts the reader to "Look him straight in the eyes, the son of the slave and the son of the slave owner" -- and Glissant's own clear-eyed gaze makes this book a revelation about the work of one of our greatest but still least-understood writers.

Quotations of George Washington


George Washington - 1999
    The new series look features a classic portrait of the author on the front cover with his signature printed below in gold foil.

The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48


Peter F. Stevens - 1999
    It takes a close look at the organized prejudice against Irish Catholic and German immigrants.

Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography


Adam Clymer - 1999
    Kennedy is one of the most influential senators in Congress. For the last 35 years, he′s played a major role in events ranging from the Vietnam War to Supreme Court confirmations. He′s also been closely associated with issues such as health care, civil rights and campaign finance reform. More than the foremost lawmaker and best orator in the Senate, he′s enthralled (and disappointed) a generation who saw him as the keeper of his famous brothers′ flame. He′s seen America -- and her politics -- change in drastic ways. In this definitive biography, New York Times Washington Editor Adam Clymer draws an in-depth portrait of this complex man. Through interviews with Kennedy, and the people close to him, he places Kennedy′s career in a historical perspective, and observes how Kennedy′s personal life has affected his political performance. The Senator has dealt with his infamous legacy, struggled to overcome the Chappaquiddick incident, and handled spectacular failures as well as many truimphs. He′s one of the few old-fashioned liberals who has held the Democratic Party to its principles, and is a hero to many. This is a unique, enormously readable chronicle of one of the most fascinating political figures of our time.

Weldon's Practical Needlework, Volume 1


PieceWork Magazine - 1999
    In this volume you'll find an abundance of simple, practical knitting patterns, with an emphasis on socks, mittens, and other small accessories, as well as several lovely counterpane squares. Patterns are exact replicas of the premier needlework magazine from turn-of-the-century England. Each volume is filled with hundreds of vintage projects, illustrations, information on little-known techniques, fashion as it was in the late 1800s and brief histories of needlework.

The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity


Debra L. Donahue - 1999
    The image of a herd grazing on Bureau of Land Management or U.S. Forest Service lands is so traditional that many view this use as central to the history and culture of the West. Yet the grazing program costs far more to administer than it generates in revenues, and grazing affects all other uses of public lands, causing potentially irreversible damage to native wildlife and vegetation.The Western Range Revisited proposes a landscape-level strategy for conserving native biological diversity on federal rangelands, a strategy based chiefly on removing livestock from large tracts of arid BLM lands in ten western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming.Drawing from range ecology, conservation biology, law, and economics, Debra L. Donahue examines the history of federal grazing policy and the current debate on federal multiple-use, sustained-yield policies and changing priorities for our public lands. Donahue, a lawyer and wildlife biologist, uses existing laws and regulations, historical documents, economic statistics, and current scientific thinking to make a strong case for a land-management strategy that has been, until now, "unthinkable."A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, The Western Range Revisited demonstrates that conserving biodiversity by eliminating or reducing livestock grazing makes economic sense, is ecologically expedient, and can be achieved under current law.

Father Mississippi: The Story of the Great Flood of 1927


Lyle Saxon - 1999
    Saxon's description of the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the delta combined with his collection of personal accounts makes for a compelling blend of personal, political, geographical, and historical facts. The book, considered as much a documentation of the disaster as an impassioned plea for help, demonstrates just how volatile an environment the Mississippi River region was and continues to be.

Handbook of Yokuts Indians


Frank F. Latta - 1999
    The Handbook of Yokuts Indians, the classic reference text for scholars studying area Indians, as well as collectors, has been re-released with a whole new look. Written by Frank F. Latta and originally published in 1949, the Handbook of the Yokuts Indians is considered by many historians and cultural anthropologists to be the single most important work on the lives and culture of the more than 60 tribes that made up the Yokuts. The book is the definitive reference on Yokuts Indians, said Chris Brewer, local historian, Exeter Sun columnist and publisher of the Handbook. It lives up to the name Handbook, and is the only major reference source on Yokuts. The original 1949 publication was enlarged and edited by Latta and his daughter, Monna Latta Olson. It was released in an enlarged second edition in 1977. The edition was soon sold out, and collectors and researchers found themselves paying up to 10 times the original cover price. Brewer felt it was time to republish the book as the price for the old edition was way too inflated. The inflated cost of the second edition, as well as its scarcity are what prompted Brewer to gain the rights from the Latta Family Trust to re-release the Handbook. The release of the 50-Year Anniversary Edition is priced at a more reasonable $75. The book's latest incarnation was published for collectors, and serious researchers, as well as for those interested in Native American culture and local history. People who are interested in local history or the history of the San Joaquin Valley will want this book, especially those who missed it last time. It is also felt to be a superb text book for anthropology, history, and archaeology students. Drawn from first hand interviews, the book contains literally hundreds of photographs of the Yokuts people demonstrating their traditions and artifacts. There are dozens of photographs in the book, many of rare Yokuts ceremonies and basket makers. This release is an early commemorative edition to mark the book's 50th anniversary next year. Little has been changed from the 1977 second edition. It is the 50th Anniversary Edition, with 1,000 copies, 100 of which are signed by Latta's daughter, who did all the editing and the proofing of the second edition. It has undergone cosmetic changes with a redesigned the cover, added dust wrapper, and minor updated book information. The book's quality has been upgraded with heavier paper and cover boards. The signed, numbered editions of the Handbook are available at $125 each from the publisher. Exeter residents in particular will notice the 50th anniversary edition has a very familiar look. It's dust jacket features a four-color reproduction of the original watercolor used for the Yokuts Harvest mural in Exeter, by artist Ben Barker of Susanville, now deceased. The new release also features a better overall appearance than the earlier editions.

A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters


Jeffrey D. Marshall - 1999
    An illustrated anthology of the most revealing Civil War letters by Vermont soldiers and homefront civilians.

Illustrated History of the Civil War 3V


Time-Life Books - 1999
    

Voices of Carolina Slave Children


Nancy Rhyne - 1999
    Elderly ex-slaves recounted memories of their childhood during their enslaved period to convey a powerful image of their lives and daily activities. They describe work, games, food, clothing, thoughts about their situation and the Civil War, and what freedom gave to each one of them. These stories present brief glimpses into the lives and customs of enslaved children on North and South Carolina plantations.

Queen Silver: The Godless Girl


Wendy McElroy - 1999
    A child prodigy and the daughter of famed socialist activist Grace Vern Silver, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Queen Silver was the subject of Cecil B. De Mille's film The Godless Girl. She matured to become an international feminist, atheist, and socialist, living a remarkable and inspiring life, of which few feminists today are aware.Queen Silver: The Godless Girl is a fiery and profound biography of one of America's most amazing feminist thinkers, a woman who remained an active advocate of intellectual independence to the moment of her death in 1998 at the age of 86. Prolific feminist writer Wendy McElroy sympathetically chronicles the life of Queen Silver from personal interviews with her friends, published reports, letters, and a vast library of the family's personal papers. What emerges is a life like none other. A well-known thinker by the time she was 11-years-old, giving speeches titled "Pioneers of Freethought," "The Rights of Children," and "Science and the Workers," Queen challenged three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to a debate on evolution (he declined); organized an atheist group at her high school; and left home at 15 to marry a doctor three-times her age, which later became the source of a highly publicized divorce.As a teenager, Queen once served as a defense lawyer for her mother and won. She founded the scholarly and well-reviewed Queen Silver Magazine, and overcame personal tragedy and political persecution during World War I's red scare. Queen worked as an extra in movies directed by D.W. Griffith, attended violent and controversial meetings of the IWW, and went into hiding at the advent of McCarthyism. In her later years, Queen received many freethought awards, remained active in the American Civil Liberties Union, and campaigned hard for public libraries.McElroy tells a complete story by profiling Queen's mother, lecturer and feminist writer Grace Vern Silver, whose struggles for justice in the IWW found her running for Congress, and whose personal education motivated her to inspire the genius in her daughter.

Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way


Thomas Jefferson - 1999
    Now, collected here for the first time, is this historical American document, as well as several of his other famous writings. Included in this book are excerpts from his only full-length book, Notes on the State of Virginia, letters to Samual Kercheval and Edward Carrington on liberal democracy and freedom, and an exchange with Danbury Baptists regarding the right to religious freedom to his manual on parliamentary policy. Jefferson provides excellent and timeless quotes on attaining freedom and living a democratic life.

When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession


Charles Adams - 1999
    Although conventional histories have taught generations of Americans that this was a war fought for lofty moral principles, Adams' eloquent history transcends simple Southern partisanship to show how the American Civil War was primarily a battle over competing commercial interests, opposing interpretations of constitutional rights, and what English novelist Charles Dickens described as a fiscal quarrel.

Ronald Reagan: Young Leader (Childhood of Famous Americans)


Montrew Dunham - 1999
    With these lively, inspiring, fictionalized biographies -- easily read by children of eight and up -- today's youngster is swept right into history.

Who Settled the West?


Bobbie Kalman - 1999
    In the latter part of the 19th century, more than half a million pioneers headed west to carve out a future on an unknown frontier. Some were drawn by the offer of cheap land and the promise of religious freedom while others had high hopes of finding gold. Thrilling, authentic photos and full-color illustrations recreate what life was really like for these cowboys, adventurers, and immigrants in this rough-and-ready era in our history.Immigration of the poor, starving, and persecuted to the unsettled North American West spelled opportunity for them but disaster for the Native peoples. Who Settled the West? takes a balanced look at the history and people describing: -- how the colonies changed hands between countries-- the dangerous journey by ocean and wagon train-- why different people left their homelands-- where certain ethnic groups settled in North America-- how they staked their claim and built their homes-- how Africans were captured in their home countries and forced to work on American plantations

Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front


Daniel E. Sutherland - 1999
    But as Daniel Sutherland reminds us, the impact of battles and elections cannot be properly understood without an examination of the struggle for survival on the home front, of lives lived in the atmosphere created by war. Sutherland gathers eleven essays by such noted Civil War scholars as Michael Fellman, Donald Frazier, Noel Fisher, and B. F. Cooling, each one exploring the Confederacy's internal war in a different state. All help to broaden our view of the complexity of war and to provide us with a clear picture of war's consequences, its impact on communities, homes, and families. This strong collection of essays delves deeply into what Daniel Sutherland calls "the desperate side of war," enriching our understanding of a turbulent and divisive period in American history.

Doniphan's Epic March: The 1st Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War


Joseph G. Dawson III - 1999
    There they handed the Mexican army one of its most demoralizing defeats and helped the United States win its first foreign war. Their leader Colonel Alexander Doniphan, also a volunteer, was a "natural soldier" of towering stature who became a national hero in the wake of his wartime exploits. Doniphan was a small-town Missouri lawyer untrained in military matters when he answered President Polk's call for volunteers in the war with Mexico. Working from a host of primary sources, Joseph Dawson focuses on Doniphan's extraordinary leadership and chronicles how the colonel and his 1st Missouri Mounted Regiment helped capture New Mexico and went on to invade Chihuahua. Contending with wildfires, sandstorms, poor provisions, and the threat of attack from Apaches, they eventually came face-to-face with the formidable cannon and cavalry of a much larger Mexican force. Yet, at the Battle of Sacramento, these hardy volunteers outflanked General Jose Heredia's army and claimed a stunning American victory on foreign soil. Dawson explores and analyzes the many facets of Doniphan's exploits, from the decision to proceed to Chihuahua in the wake of the Taos Revolt to the tactics that shaped his victory at Sacramento, describing that battle in heart-stopping detail. He tells how Doniphan's legal expertise enabled him to supervise America's first military government administering a conquered land at Santa Fe and highlights Doniphan's remarkable cooperation with U.S. Army officers at a time when antagonism typified relationships between volunteers and regulars. He also introduces readers to other key personalities of the campaign, from fellow officers Stephen W. Kearny and Meriwether L. Clark to James Kiker, the controversial scout whom Doniphan reluctantly trusted. Dawson's thorough account captures the expansionist mood of America in the mid-nineteenth century and helps us understand how American soldiers were motivated by the idea of Manifest Destiny. His portrait of Doniphan and his troops reinforces the importance of the citizen-soldier in American history and provides a new window on the war that changed forever the hopes and dreams of our border nations.

Jesse: A Novel of the Outlaw Jesse James


Max McCoy - 1999
    But what if Jesse somehow cheated the assassin's bullet and survived to tell his remarkable tale to Missouri's other famous son, Mark Twain? Consistent with historic record, JESSE presents a stunning scenario for the outlaw's survival and brings to life the fictional meeting of America's most celebrated folk hero and most beloved author -- in their own words.

Captain Blakeley and the Wasp: The Cruise of 1814


Stephen W.H. Duffy - 1999
    The first full biography of America's most accomplished naval commander in the Age of Sail, Johnston Blakeley.

The Sacrificial Years: A Chronicle of Walt Whitman's Experiences in the Civil War


John Harmon McElroy - 1999
    The unattended misery he found--rows of unburied corpses, piles of amputated limbs, wounded men lying on the frozen ground--moved him to a profound conviction of necessity that he had to help relieve it. Whitman spent the next four years, at great personal and professional sacrifice, working as a voluntary nurse at military hospitals in the frontline capital of Washington, tending the sick and wounded well past the war's end. The Sacrificial Year is Walt Whitman's story of his involvement in the Civil War, and of his thoughts and feelings about this great crisis. Whitman himself never kept a diary of his experiences--a fact he later regretted-- but he did write hundreds of letters, newspaper articles, and memoranda. While many of these works have been published individually, editor John Harmon McElroy is the first to select and arrange Whitman's prose writings on the war in chronological sequence--including previously unpublished extracts from his recently discovered Civil War notebook--thereby reconstructing a continuous narrative of his month-to-month experience in his own words. Poignant and powerful, encompassing all the horror and scope of that immense conflict, Walt Whitman's war chronicles are among the essential documents of those crucial years. This edition contains nearly 300 entries, and is further enhanced with over 50 compelling period photographs of the places, people, and events that Whitman captured so vividly in his prose.

Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning


Regina Lee Blaszczyk - 1999
    It relates the trials and tribulations of china and glassware producers in their contest for the hearts of the working- and middle-class women who made up more than eighty percent of those buying mass-manufactured goods by the 1920s.Based on extensive research in untapped corporate archives, Imagining Consumers supplies a fresh appraisal of the history of American business, culture, and consumerism. Case studies illuminate decision making in key firms -- including the Homer Laughlin China Company, the Kohler Company, and Corning Glass Works -- and consider the design and development of ubiquitous lines such as Fiesta tableware and Pyrex Ovenware.

The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates after West Point


Ralph Kirshner - 1999
    Through letters, journals, and published accounts, George Armstrong Custer, Adelbert Ames, and their classmates tell in their own words of their Civil War battles and of their varied careers after the war.Two classes graduated from West Point in 1861 because of Lincoln's need of lieutenants: forty-five cadets in Ames's class in May and thirty-four in Custer's class in June. The cadets range from Henry Algernon du Pont, first in the class of May, whose ancestral home is now Winterthur Garden, to Custer, last in the class of June. “Only thirty-four graduated,” remarked Custer, “and of these thirty-three graduated above me.” West Point's mathematics professor and librarian Oliver Otis Howard, after whom Howard University is named, is also portrayed.Other famous names from the class of 1861 are John Pelham, Emory Upton, Thomas L. Rosser, John Herbert Kelly (the youngest general in the Confederacy when appointed), Patrick O'Rorke (head of the class of June), Alonzo Cushing, Peter Hains, Edmund Kirby, John Adair (the only deserter in the class), and Judson Kilpatrick (great-grandfather of Gloria Vanderbilt). They describe West Point before the Civil War, the war years, including the Vicksburg campaign and the battle of Gettysburg, the courage and character of classmates, and the ending of the war.Kirshner also highlights postwar lives, including Custer at Little Bighorn; Custer's rebel friend Rosser; John Whitney Barlow, who explored Yellowstone; du Pont, senator and author; Kilpatrick, playwright and diplomat; Orville E. Babcock, Grant's secretary until his indictment in the "Whiskey Ring"; Pierce M. B. Young, a Confederate general who became a diplomat; Hains, the only member of the class to serve on active duty in World War I; and Upton, "the class genius." The Class of 1861, which features eighty-three photographs, includes a foreword by George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review and great-grandson of General Adelbert Ames.

The Ideals Guide to American Civil War Places


Ideals Publications Inc. - 1999
    Expert research, writing, and photography make this travel guide wonderfully informative.Twenty states are represented in the volume, forming the twenty divisions of the book. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the state's overall political and military position in the war, information that heightens one's appreciation of the site. Accompanying this introductory information is a map of the state that pinpoints the areas of interest. Major campaigns are outlined, with Union and Rebel commanders, strength of forces, and number of casualties listed. Battlegrounds, cemeteries, museums, homes, prisons, and monuments are visited, and each has a listing of addresses, hours of operation, admission fees, if any, and short descriptions of what can be found at the site.Each chapter boasts beautiful scenic photographs of the sites as they are today, while some Matthew Brady photos of the actual union camps add to the sense of history one feels when touring sites of our heritage. Portraits of the generals painted by their contemporaries heighten the awareness of real people having once lived, plotted, and fought on the ground now traveled.For a better understanding of the events that took place, a Chronology lists the dates of major events and battles, and for those new to the study of the Civil War, a glossary helps in understanding military terms. A complete index cross-references not only each place and site listed, but each person and event included in the book.The Ideals Guide toAmerican Civil War Places is remarkably comprehensive and detailed, yet remains small enough to be tucked into a travel bag or automobile compartment. This is a guidebook every travel department should have.

Red Grange and the Rise of Modern Football


John Martin Carroll - 1999
    Catapulted into the public eye in 1924 by scoring four touchdowns in twelve minutes for the University of Illinois, the "Galloping Ghost" went on to a trailblazing career as a professional player, Hollywood idol, and broadcaster. He ranked with Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in the 1920s as one of the heralded figures in America's "golden age of sport." Grange's spectacular performance as a college player coincided with football's evolution into a rallying point of university life boosted by post-World War I money, cars, roads, stadiums, and mass media. John Carroll depicts the life and career of the soft-spoken pioneer who helped lift pro football above its reputation as "a dirty little business run by rogues and bargain-basement entrepreneurs." A reluctant folk hero, Grange stood as a symbol of older, rural American values: an unpretentious self-made individual making a mark in a society increasingly controlled by machines, vast corporations, and stifling bureaucracies. His story is an essential element in understanding how football became central in American culture.

Defend the Valley: A Shenandoah Family in the Civil War


Margaretta Barton Colt - 1999
    In Defend the Valley, the story of the war is told through the letters and private papers of the Barton and Jones clans--two great limbs of one family tree with roots in Winchester. By collecting her ancestors' papers, Margaretta Barton Colt has done far more than provide a record of the Civil War. She has brought it to life with astounding clarity through the voices of those who experienced it. The Bartons and Joneses collectively sent eleven men into battle, most in the brigade led by Thomas Stonewall Jackson. Culled from the private papers of twenty family members, the material presented here includes many vivid recollections found in the soldiers' first-hand descriptions of the battles, as well as responses from the home front. The result is a fully rounded picture of the daily struggles of the Civil War, and a documentation of the passing of a way of life.

Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit


Lendol Calder - 1999
    The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end--undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth.Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources--including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P. T. Barnum--to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has eroded traditional values. Instead, he argues, monthly payments have imposed strict, externally reinforced disciplines on consumers, making the culture of consumption less a playground for hedonists than an extension of what Max Weber called the iron cage of disciplined rationality and hard work.Throughout, Calder keeps in clear view the human face of credit relations. He re-creates the Dickensian world of nineteenth-century pawnbrokers, takes us into the dingy backstairs offices of loan sharks, into small-town shops and New York department stores, and explains who resorted to which types of credit and why. He also traces the evolving moral status of consumer credit, showing how it changed from a widespread but morally dubious practice into an almost universal and generally accepted practice by World War II. Combining clear, rigorous arguments with a colorful, narrative style, Financing the American Dream will attract a wide range of academic and general readers and change how we understand one of the most important and overlooked aspects of American social and economic life.

Dreaming of America: An Ellis Island story


Eve Bunting - 1999
    A Caldecott award -- winning author tells the inspiring true story of the first Ellis Island immigrant, fifteen-year-old Annie Moore.

Fire on the Plateau: Conflict And Endurance In The American Southwest


Charles F. Wilkinson - 1999
    Examines the sometimes violent conflicts between indigenous populations and more recent settlers, the political machinations by industry and the legal establishment, the contentious disputes over resources and land use, and provides a compelling look at the epic events that have shaped the region.

Ansonia


Derby Historical Society - 1999
    This manufacturing village was named for its founder, Anson Phelps, a businessman who played a prominent role in the community. Ansonia shares its earliest history with the neighboring town of Derby, of which it was a part until 1889. Ansonia has been called the Industrial Heart of the Naugatuck Valley. Yet, as you will see inside, its history is rich beyond its industry. Ansonia highlights the town’s wonderful old homes and churches. This one town had 25 churches at one time. The book follows the town through good times as well as hard times, such as the Blizzard of 1888 and the Flood of 1955 and the redevelopment days that followed.

The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton


James C. Turner - 1999
    Turner shows how Norton developed the key ideas which still underlie the humanities - historicism and culture - and how his influence endures in America's colleges and universities because of institutions he developed and models he devised.

Lawmen of the Old West: The Good Guys


Del Cain - 1999
    The men portrayed in this book, while less well known today, were good and honorable men. They are men that, in today's confusing world, can be held up as role models. The book is well written, in a style crafted to attract the mainstream reader.

Shooting the Pacific War


Soule Thayer - 1999
    As a junior officer with no military training or indoctrination and less than ten weeks of active duty behind him, he had been assigned to be photographic officer for the First Marine Division. The Corps had never had a photographic division before, much less a field photographic unit. But Soule accepted the challenge, created the unit from scratch, established policies for photography, and led his men into combat. Soule and his unit produced films and

Millions for Defense: The Subscription Warships of 1798


Frederick C. Leiner - 1999
    The fascinating story of the subscription warships funded by private American citizens.

The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets


David E. Spiro - 1999
    Conventional wisdom holds that international capital markets adjusted automatically and remarkably well: enormous amounts of money flowed into oil-rich states, and efficient markets then placed that new money in cash-poor Third World economies. David Spiro has followed the money trail, and the story he tells contradicts the accepted beliefs. Most of the sudden flush of new oil wealth didn't go to poor oil-importing countries around the globe. Instead, the United States made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it U.S. securities in secret, a deal resulting in a substantial portion of Saudi assets being held by the U.S. government. With this arrangement, the U.S. government violated its agreements with allies in the developed world. Spiro argues that American policymakers took this action to prop up otherwise intolerable levels of U.S. public debt. In effect, recycled OPEC wealth subsidized the debt-happy policies of the U.S. government as well as the debt-happy consumption of its citizenry.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT


Philip Jr, Philip III and Peter Kunhardt - 1999
    The text and the large photos plus the portraits are wonderful!