Exposing the hysteria and manipulation behind the worst failure of public policy since World War I, this clear-eyed journalist has been a critical source of reason and truth. The product of relentless investigation and research, Pandemia explains how an illness that many people will even never know they had became the occasion for economically ruinous lockdowns and the suppression of personal freedom on a previously unimaginable scale. Dispassionate, factual, and untainted by any agenda other than telling the truth, this is the account that pandemic-weary Americans desperately need.

    At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.

    But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection." "Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto." But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.

    That spring, child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and the events that brought about America's second emancipation.

    Doom. Raving and kicking against mediocrity, his anger and pain simmer close to the surface. He speaks and writes the language of the punk music that defined him. He is extreme alpinist Mark Twight, and he doesn't back down from the truth. He's a one-man literary punk band. If you have any doubt, here comes his knockout punch: the only collection of writing Twight swears he'll ever publish. Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber is raw, unfiltered Twight. These author's cut are the real deal, not the homogenized fluff offered up by magazine editors who are often unwilling to offend. Twight's words make it clear that climbing is only distantly about the summit. Several of these pieces are new to U.S. readers. Twight edited all of the selections and appended each with a current author's note; confessing his inspiration, events that followed, and lessons learned (or not learned, some might say). It adds up to a frightfully lucid look into Twight's personal life as both man and hardcore alpine climber. The dissection scares me sometimes... Whether railing against the spinelessness of American siege-style mountaineering, admitting addiction to pushing the bounds of the possible, or reveling in his ability to cut away anything in life that holds him back, Twight never blinks. Along the way, there is the drama of new and epic routes, unbreakable bonds between climbing partners, and Twight's evolution as a climber and a man. He tells every story in a unique, in-your-face style.Kiss or Kill is not an easy read. It may scare some readers-but that's the point. "I want this book to help you recognize your own anger, which will help you understand mine," says Twight. "Somewhere out there somebody understands these words and knows they matter. They were written in blood, learned by heart."

    It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.

    Chaon mines the psychological landscape of his characters to dazzling effect. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.

    The explosive controversy and resulting lawsuit also raised a far more fundamental question: Who owns history? Many Indians see archeologists as desecrators of tribal rites and traditions; archeologists see their livelihoods and science threatened by the 1990 Federal reparation law, which gives tribes control over remains in their traditional territories.In this new work, Thomas charts the riveting story of this lawsuit, the archeologists' deteriorating relations with American Indians, and the rise of scientific archeology. His telling of the tale gains extra credence from his own reputation as a leader in building cooperation between the two sides.

    Disclosing his story through flashbacks and relying on research from his own case files, Razor pieces together the shattered fragments of his boyhood into a memoir that reads as compellingly as a novel.Abandoned as an infant at the State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota, Razor was raised by abusive workers who thought of him as nothing more than "a dirty Injun." Cut off from his family and his heritage, he turns inward, forced to learn about the world on his own. After failed attempts to run away from the orphanage, he is indentured by the state to an abusive, reclusive farm family. Beaten, poorly fed, clothed in rags, and worked like slave labor, he struggles to attend high school and begins to dream of another life. Razor's stark and often chilling story, devoid of self-pity, recalls with haunting clarity the years he, like the locust, patiently waited to awaken and emerge.

    As the title implies, this is certainly not a novel -- not in the general sense of the term. And yet a reader who follows the flow will gradually notice certain novelistic conventions insinuating themselves. Writer -- as the narrator refers to himself -- is tired of inventing characters and subjecting them to the rigors of plot development. Instead, historical personages from Dickens to Beethoven recur throughout the book: They re born, create, speak fondly or acidly of their own work and the work of others, and then die. (Death, in fact, is a major concern of Writer.) Works of art interlock and interrelate; diary entries, attributions, and critical comments jostle for position. But what at first appear to be random bits of historical trivia ultimately come together with a narrative logic: a beginning, middle, and end. So while Markson has jettisoned the standard conflict-and-resolution pattern of a novel, he nevertheless fashions a literary journey that gets somewhere. Indeed, the book s conclusion will come as an intensely moving surprise to those who reach it. Does Writer even exist in a book without characters? the narrator wonders. Passing through a period of aging and self-doubt, Writer looks deeply inside himself over the course of the book and worries about his very purpose. The real question hovering in the margins of this beguiling work is, Why do I write? Many an artist suffers under the burdens of posterity, the sinking feeling that words and works will fade with the passage of time. Eventually, though, this particular Writer answers in a qualified affirmative, for he realizes himself to be the main character in his own life. That which is not a novel, he implies, is life itself; creating art is what the artist does to live. In the end, out of a shared sense of mortality and its frailties and beauties, we can only agree. (Jonathan Cook)

    On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.Lewis and Clark opened the West in 1803, six decades later Powell and his scruffy band aimed to resolve the West’s last mystery. A brilliant narrative, a thrilling journey, a cast of memorable heroes—all these mark Down the Great Unknown, the true story of the last epic adventure on American soil.

    In a sweeping new synthesis, Mead uncovers four distinct historical patterns in foreign policy, each exemplified by a towering figure from our past.Wilsonians are moral missionaries, making the world safe for democracy by creating international watchdogs like the U.N. Hamiltonians likewise support international engagement, but their goal is to open foreign markets and expand the economy. Populist Jacksonians support a strong military, one that should be used rarely, but then with overwhelming force to bring the enemy to its knees. Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with liberty at home, are suspicious of both big military and large-scale international projects.A striking new vision of America's place in the world, Special Providence transcends stale debates about realists vs. idealists and hawks vs. doves to provide a revolutionary, nuanced, historically-grounded view of American foreign policy.

    LGBT Studies. One of SPD's bestselling authors, Kevin Killian's stories have had wide circulation among the avant-garde for many years. The poems in ARGENTO SERIES are loosely organized around the films of the great Italian/Brazilian filmmaker Dario Argento, whose take on the horror/thriller genre have made him arguably the most censored filmmaker in modern film history. But AIDS, and more specifically death, are as commonly the real subject of these poems, and Killian's ability to blend a light, transgressive, O'Hara-like wit with his sense of loss allows these poems to achieve something that is not mere sentimentality. For those who wonder how AIDS can be written about without indulging in cliches, Killian's book will come as a revelation and a gift.

    The desert is her blood. In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Red makes a stirring case for the preservation of America's Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams writes lyrically about the desert's power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise—an animal that can "teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience" as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land—an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one."Lush elegies to the wilderness.... Earthy, spiritual, evocative." —The Boston Globe"Erotic, scientific, literary.... Her intimacy with this landscape is complex and passionate." —Los Angeles Times Book Review"Her finest writing... Use[s] pure language in the face of laws that need to be changed and lawmakers and citizens who need to understand that there is another way to see." —Portland Oregonian

    John F. Kennedy during the dramatic thousand days of the Kennedy presidency? Here for the first time is the full story of the extravagant interplay of sex and politics that constitutes one of modern history's most spectacular dramas.Drawing from recently declassified top-secret material, as well as revelatory eyewitness accounts, Secret Service records, and Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal letters, bestselling biographer Barbara Leaming answers the question: what was it like to be Mrs. John F. Kennedy during the dramatic thousand days of the Kennedy presidency? Brilliantly researched, Leaming’s poignant and powerful chronicle illuminates the tumultuous day-to-day life of a woman who entered the White House at age thirty-one, seven years into a complex and troubled marriage, and left at thirty-four after her husband's assassination. Revealing the full story of the interplay of sex and politics in Washington, Mrs. Kennedy will indelibly challenge our vision of this fascinating woman, and bring a new perspective to her crucial role in the Kennedy presidency.

    Meredith’s challenge ultimately triggered what Time magazine called “the gravest conflict between federal and state authority since the Civil War,” a crisis that on September 30, 1962, exploded into a chaotic battle between thousands of white civilians and a small corps of federal marshals. To crush the insurrection, President John F. Kennedy ordered a lightning invasion of Mississippi by over 20,000 U.S. combat infantry, paratroopers, military police, and National Guard troops.Based on years of intensive research, including over 500 interviews, JFK’s White House tapes, and 9,000 pages of FBI files, An American Insurrection is a minute-by-minute account of the crisis. William Doyle offers intimate portraits of the key players, from James Meredith to the segregationist Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, to President John F. Kennedy and the federal marshals and soldiers who risked their lives to uphold the Constitution. The defeat of the segregationist uprising in Oxford was a turning point in the civil rights struggle, and An American Insurrection brings this largely forgotten event to life in all its drama, stunning detail, and historical importance.

    A ''sacred cow'' is an untouchable subject that we are not supposed to discuss. To do so impinges upon another's ''Christian liberty.'' Certainly, there are few sacred cows quite as sacred as the right of modern Christians to dress however they please. But in this groundbreaking work, Jeff Pollard challenges us to embrace God's standard and to understand the historical roots of the rise of nudity and immodesty in modern culture. His perspective is thoughtful and balanced. Most importantly, he accomplishes what few authors on this subject have achieved: a treatise that avoids both license and legalism. A courageous booklet.

    Oh, how she wishes things could be different. One day Lucy's older brother, Albert, comes home with something that can make a difference - a sack of quilts. The quilts are part of a secret code, and each different pattern gives important information to slaves planning to escape on the Underground Railroad. When Albert is caught one night helping the runaways, he too must flee, leaving Lucy behind. As he disappears into the darkness, Lucy fears she will never see her brother again.Set during the years before the Civil War, The Secret to Freedom is a testament to the enduring bond of family and a celebration of the human spirit. It is a story of triumph over adversity during a difficult chapter in our country's past. An Author's Note further explains the Underground Railroad quilt code.

    Included are such favorites as "My father moved through dooms of love" and "anyone lived in a pretty how town," along with the usual Cummings dazzle of satirical epigrams, love poems, and syntactical anagrams.This edition is published in a uniform format with Is 5, Tulips & Chimneys, ViVa, XAIPE, and No Thanks.

    Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor—men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.

    He said in an interview: "What is remarkable about Christmas? The fact that what we're dealing with here is the calculation of life--or, at the very least, existence--in the consciousness of an individual, a specific individual." He continued, "I liked that concentration of everything in one place--which is what you have in that cave scene." There resulted a remarkable sequence of poems about time, eternity, and love, spanning a lifetime of metaphysical reflection and formal invention.In Nativity Poems six superb poets in English have come together to translate the ten as yet untranslated poems from this sequence, and the poems are presented in English in their entirety in a beautiful, pocket-sized edition illustrated with Mikhail Lemkhin's photographs of winter-time St. Petersburg.

    Rather, it is the result of a well-tended soul. In this inspirational and Wise book, Moran shares the wisdom and experience from her own search for inner and outer beauty. Her thoughtful observations and advice show how anyone can transform their thinking about what makes us beautiful, while providing simple guidance for creating a radiance that only comes from within.Each compact essay contains a tool you can Put to use today to heighten your awareness of your own inner beauty. With her trademark candor, Moran illustrates how true beauty comes from a sense of wholeness. She combines tips for taking care of your spirit with simple techniques for tending the needs of your body and essays on self-affirmation and the care and feeding of the soul. Women of all ages will relate to Moran's reflections on her journey to a deeper understanding of inner radiance -- beauty that is soul deep.This sane, sensible approach to a strong self-image and loving self-care is firmly grounded in spiritual common sense, the marriage of body and soul. You start by lighting up your life -- and before you know it, you're lighting up the room.

    As a student in Atlanta, Vernon Jordan had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's afternoon naps, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss. "Vernon can read!" the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly fifty years later, Vernon Jordan, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders, remembers the sweeping struggles, changes, and dangers of black life during the civil rights revolution.After attending a predominantly white college in the Midwest and graduating from Howard University Law School, Jordan dedicated himself to the civil rights movement. He led the drive to register black voters in the South and was president of the National Urban League, one of the great civil rights organizations of the era, where he was instrumental in integrating American businesses and providing economic and social support to the expanding black middle class. He survived a white racist's assassination attempt and later became a pillar of America's legal, corporate, and political worlds.But Jordan's life was shaped in his early years, and this book is also a moving testament to the family whose support and courage provided the framework for his achievements. Vernon Can Read! chronicles a life of courage, pride, sacrifice, style, and accomplishment.

    Now this classic history is being reissued, with a new foreword byacclaimed biographer Arnold Rampersad.As Rampersad notes, Harlem Renaissance remains an indispensable guide to the facts and features, the puzzles and mysteries, of one of the most provocative episodes in African-American and American history. Indeed, Huggins offers a brilliant account of the creative explosion in Harlem during thesepivotal years. Blending the fields of history, literature, music, psychology, and folklore, he illuminates the thought and writing of such key figures as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. DuBois and provides sharp-eyed analyses of the poetry of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and LangstonHughes. But the main objective for Huggins, throughout the book, is always to achieve a better understanding of America as a whole. As Huggins himself noted, he didn't want Harlem in the 1920s to be the focus of the book so much as a lens through which readers might see how this one moment in timesheds light on the American character and culture, not just in Harlem but across the nation. He strives throughout to link the work of poets and novelists not only to artists working in other genres and media but also to economic, historical, and cultural forces in the culture at large.This superb reissue of Harlem Renaissance brings to a new generation of readers one of the great works in African-American history and indeed a landmark work in the field of American Studies.

    Her extraordinary dignity is supported by a best friend, a grown-up son, occasional sensual pleasures, and her determination to tell her own story.

    She draws on recently discovered material to shed new light on Wright's relationships with Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and others, and on his self-imposed exile in France (widely blamed for his so-called decline as a writer). In this lively, finely crafted narrative, Wright -- passionate, complex, courageous, and flawed -- comes vibrantly to life.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    In a collection of essays, Una Storia Segreta brings together the voices of the Italian American community and experts in the field, including personal stories by survivors and their children, letters from internment camps, news clips, photographs, and cartoons.

    Owners and designers share anecdotes about their experiences with local artisans, vendors, and bureaucracy, while offering real-world advice on the tactics of restoring a house in a foreign country. Whether the plan is to embark on a complete redesign, begin a restoration, or just move in and let the house evolve on its own, home owners and dreamers alike will value the information and thrill to the dream of Restoring a Home in Italy. This is a book at once lush and beautiful, and invaluably practical.

    Starting with the leak to the press of Roosevelt's famous Rainbow Plan, then spiraling back to FDR's inept prewar diplomacy with Japan, and his various attempts to lure Japan into an attack on the U.S. Fleet in the Pacific, Fleming takes the reader inside the incredibly fractious struggles and debates that went on in Washington, the nation, and the world as the New Dealers, led by FDR, strove to impose their will on the conduct of the War. Unlike the familiar yet idealized FDR of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, the reader encounters a Roosevelt in remorseless decline, battered by ideological forces and primitive hatreds which he could not handle-and frequently failed to understand-some of them leading to unimaginable catastrophe. Among FDR's most dismaying policies, Fleming argues, were an insistence on "unconditional surrender" for Germany (a policy that perhaps prolonged the war by as many as two years, leaving millions more dead) and his often uncritical embrace of and acquiescence to Stalin and the Soviets as an ally. For many Americans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a beloved, heroic, almost mythic figure, if not for the "big government" that was spawned under his New Deal, then certainly for his leadership through the War. The New Dealers' War paints a very different portrait of this leadership. It is sure to spark debate.

    His elegant and innovative photographs are the subject of this volume. It includes some 200 images.

    It saw the surrender of Vicksburg and the retreat of General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia after a crushing defeat at Gettysburg. In interweaving the narratives of these two storied battles, Duane Schultz has presented a compelling blow-by-blow account of what is arguably the most pivotal point of the entire conflict.All the players are brought to life here, whether it is Lincoln agonizing in the telegraph office while he waits for news from Generals Grant and Meade, General Pete Longstreet trying to cajole Lee into revising his plan of attack, or the women of the towns of Vicksburg and Gettysburg coming under fire and tending to the legions of wounded.We see a nation in the midst of its greatest convulsion, and we see that, while the "Glorious Fourth" dashed the greatest hopes of the Confederacy, the war was far from over.

    In an elegant and accessible style that combines thoroughly documented sociological insight with her own compelling personal narrative, Pem Buck illustrates the ways in which constructions of race and the promise of white privilege have been used at specific historical moments to divide those in the United Statesspecifically, in two Kentucky countieswho might have otherwise acted on common class interests. From the initial creation of the concept of "whiteness" and early strategies focused on convincing Europeans, regardless of their class position, to identify with the eliteto believe that what was good for the elite was good for themto the moment between 1750 and 1800 when most people who were identified by their European descent finally came to believe that skin color was as integral to their identity as gender, the promise of white privilege underpinned the Kentucky system. Pem Buck examines the long term effects of these developments and discusses their impact on the lives of working people in Kentucky. She also analyzes the role of local tobacco-growing and corporate elites in the underdevelopment of the state, highlighting the ways in which relationships between poor white and poor black working people were continuously manipulated to facilitate that process. Documentary material includes speeches, songs, photographs, charts, cartoons, and ads presented in a large, visually appealing format.

    Yet such places did exist, and their histories tell amazing stories of survival and the struggle for acceptance and self-respect. When Ricardo J. Brown died in 1999, he left a compelling memoir of his youth and experiences as a young gay man in St. Paul. After being discharged from the navy for revealing his sexual orientation to a commanding officer in 1945, Brown returned to his hometown with a new self-awareness and a desire to find a group of people like himself. He discovered such a place in Kirmser's.A small neighborhood bar owned by a German immigrant couple in St. Paul's downtown, Kirmser's served working-class customers during daylight hours, but became an unofficial home to the gay men and lesbians who gathered there nightly in the years following World War II. The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's introduces us to often humorous but frequently tragic stories of those who would become the author's friends: Flaming Youth, a homely, sardonic man who carried the nickname from his younger years ironically into middle age; Bud York, the "All-American Boy," who seduced all with his wholesome good looks and confidence; Dickie Grant, a likable, gentle boy who is arrested for writing bad checks and is murdered while in prison; and Dale, the author's best friend, who suddenly loses his job of six years after an anonymous note informed his employer that he is gay.A revealing look at the origins of gay culture in a mid-sized city and among working-class people, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's is destined to become a rare and unique classic.

    The book--which is suitable for courses on the history of American sexuality, gender studies, or gay and lesbian studies, presents a carefully selected group of readings organized to allow students to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions.

    It did more than report on the contemporary scene—it was part of the action—and its preoccupations preoccupy us still: birth control, women's rights, civil liberties, and questions of social and economic justice. Mother Earth appeared without interruption until August 1917, when it was killed by wartime postal censorship. Though Emma Goldman has since become a legendary figure, scarcely any material from her magazine ahs remained in print. This Mother Earth reader sets right this great wrong, and restores to public memory and important body of work—provocative writings by Margaret Sanger, Alexander Kropotkin, and dozens of other radical thinkers of the early twentieth century. About the Author:Peter Glassgold's fiction, poetry, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Forward, The Nation, The New Leader, and Publishers Weekly. His most recent book, the novel Angel Max, was nominated for the 1998 America Award for Fiction. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York.

    With over 1,400 entries written by some 900 historians and other scholars, it illuminates not only America's political, diplomatic, and military history, but also social, cultural, and intellectual trends; science, technology, and medicine; the arts; and religion. Here are the familiar political heroes, from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But here, too, are scientists, writers, radicals, sports figures, and religious leaders, with incisive portraits of such varied individuals as Thomas Edison and Eli Whitney, Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, Black Elk and Crazy Horse, Margaret Fuller, Emma Goldman, and Marian Anderson, even Al Capone and Jesse James. The Companion illuminates events that have shaped the nation (the Great Awakening, Bunker Hill, Wounded Knee, the Vietnam War); major Supreme Court decisions (Marbury v. Madison, Roe v. Wade); landmark legislation (the Fugitive Slave Law, the Pure Food and Drug Act); social movements (Suffrage, Civil Rights); influential books (The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin); ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, Social Darwinism); even natural disasters and iconic sites (the Chicago Fire, the Johnstown Flood, Niagara Falls, the Lincoln Memorial). Here too is the nation's social and cultural history, from Films, Football, and the 4-H Club, to Immigration, Courtship and Dating, Marriage and Divorce, and Death and Dying. Extensive multi-part entries cover such key topics as the Civil War, Indian History and Culture, Slavery, and the Federal Government. A new volume for a new century, The Oxford Companion to United States History covers everything from Jamestown and the Puritans to the Human Genome Project and the Internet—from Columbus to Clinton. Written in clear, graceful prose for researchers, browsers, and general readers alike, this is the volume that addresses the totality of the American experience, its triumphs and heroes as well as its tragedies and darker moments.

    Kennedy remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures in American history. From his humble beginnings as the son of Irish immigrants to his meteoric rise to statesman, diplomat, and finally to First Father, he has been both beloved and vilified. In Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, Amanda Smith has unearthed an extraordinary treasure of her grandfather's correspondence and several previously unseen photographs in a collection that reveals his metamorphoses. It is not only a living history of Kennedy's life, but also a revelation of his vision of his own family as the embodiment of the American dream.In the only firsthand record of his life, Hostage to Fortune begins in I914, with the honeymoon of Joe and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy in Atlantic City and ends in I96I with Joe's disabling stroke. In between, we see the public and private Kennedy -- father, husband, film producer, and New Deal government official. The correspondence between his wife and nine children is a completely loving one that too often ends in loss and grief. His relationships with the great figures of the age -- Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Pope Pius XII, and Charles Lindbergh -- show him courting friendships but also fighting for his beliefs, a trait that would ultimately end his public career. At once a fitting tribute to her grandfather, a great historical work, and a chronicle of America's greatest family, Hostage to Fortune will engage American history lovers as well as a public who continues to be fascinated by the Kennedy family.

    Al Smith, a nationally known counselor to Native people suffering from alcohol and drug abuse, wanted only to earn a living. Dave Frohnmayer, the Harvard-trained Attorney General of Oregon, was planning his campaign for governor and tending to his three desperately ill daughters. But a series of miscalculations transformed a routine unemployment dispute into a constitutional confrontation.Before it was over, Frohnmayer and Smith would twice ask the United States Supreme Court to decide whether the First Amendment protects the right of Native Americans and others to seek God with the use of peyote, a form of worship some scholars believe to be more than ten thousand years old. And the Court would finally answer no; it would say, for the first time in the history of the Constitution, that the Bill of Rights provided no protection for obscure and minority religions if the legislature chose not to recognize their needs.The Court's decision produced a fierce backlash from religious leaders and ordinary citizens, culminating in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), one of the most sweeping civil-rights statutes of the past thirty years. Now that the Court has invalidated the Act, some say it will lead to a constitutional amendment and a radical change in the American law of church and state.In the tradition of A Civil Action and Gideon's Trumpet, Garrett Epps tracks the case from the humblest hearing room to the Supreme Court Chamber, skillfully building the suspense and tension that are so much a part of litigating a great case. Expertly weaving together a fascinating legal narrative with dramatic personal stories, To an Unknown God is a riveting look at how justice works-- and doesn't work-- in America today.

    It was essentially a struggle about access to worldwide resources, most clearly seen in the desperate German attempts to deal with the American industrial threat, which ultimately levered the United States into the war, and thus a consequence of British sea control. This radical new book concentrates on the way in which each side tried to use or deny the sea to the other, and in so doing it describes rapid wartime changes not only in ship and weapon technology but also in the way naval warfare was envisaged and fought. Combat produced many surprises: some, like the impact of the mine and torpedo, are familiar, but this book also brings to light many previously unexplored subjects, like creative new tactical practices and improved command and control. The contrast between expectation and reality had enormous consequences not only for the course of the war but also for the way navies developed afterwards. This book melds strategic, technical, and tactical aspects to reveal the First World War from a fresh perspective, but also demonstrates how its perceived lessons dominated the way navies prepared for the Second.

    McMahon, University of Florida"Kux's study is, to my knowledge, the first full-dress, comprehensive, and authoritative study of U.S.-Pakistan relations. Focused primarily on formal diplomacy between these two countries, it systematically chronicles the major events, deftly handles the primary issues, and sympathetically considers the key political and diplomatic figures on both sides."–Robert Wirsing, University of South CarolinaU.S.-Pakistan relations have been extraordinarily volatile, largely a function of the twists and turns of the Cold War. An intimate partnership prevailed in the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan years, and friction during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter presidencies. Since the Cold War ended, the partnership has shriveled. The blunt talking to delivered by President Clinton to Pakistan's military dictator during Clinton's March 25, 2000, stopover in Pakistan highlighted U.S.-Pakistani differences. But the Clinton visit also underscored important U.S. interests in Pakistan.The first comprehensive account of this roller coaster relationship, this book is a companion volume to Kux's Estranged Democracies, recently called "the definitive history of Pakistani-American relations" in the New York Times.

    From his childhood in rural Connecticut to some of the earth’s last remaining wildernesses, Hoagland has traveled the world wielding his unusual gift for observation. In Compass Points he delivers an honest and lively accounting of his voyages through two marriages; the New York parties he attended as a precocious young writer; Vermont hippiedom and academia; his many vivid sojourns into Europe, Alaska, British Columbia, the Sudan; and, perhaps most unforgettably, his stint in the “Animal Department” of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus fifty years ago. Leavened with Hoagland’s trademark humor and insight, Compass Points is an entertaining and moving account of the days and nights of one of our most eminent literary voices.

    Naval Aviation, published in a fully updated and revised edition. On May 8, 1911, the Navy ordered its first airplanes and United States Naval Aviation was born. The Navy's aviation arm was founded on the same courage and spirit that still define its ranks: self-taught flier Eugene Ely, wearing a football helmet and a bicycle inner tube as a life preserver, became the first man to both take off and land on the deck of a ship. Over the next nine decades, Naval Aviation roared forward on the backs of the most advanced aircraft and well-trained aviators and flight crews in the world. Now, 100 years after its founding, the spirit and essence of United States Naval Aviation is celebrated for the first time in a definitive, magnificently illustrated, large-format book published in association with the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. Written by an outstanding team, including historians, authors, and experts associated with the National Naval Aviation Museum and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, as well as several distinguished active and retired Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard officers, U.S. Naval Aviation has more than 350 pages of riveting and informative text and stories of the Naval Aviation experience. Essays on Naval Aviation history and today's aviators focus not only on the planes, helicopters, and aircraft carriers, but especially on the people that make it all work. The thoughtful incorporation of full-color and vintage photography, portraits, recruiting posters, and historically inspired paintings complements the text while adding the excitement that only spectacular illustrations can bring to a book. U.S. Naval Aviation enables the history of America's naval aviators to be cherished permanently in a handsome package that every pilot and aviation personnel will be proud to own and--with its unique medallion-inlaid cover--to display.

    An extended interview with the three political prisoners - a frank discussion of past political movements, victories and errors, and the current political climate for revolutionary struggle within the USA.

    This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of "respectable" members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality.

    Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

    Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that came to be seen as synonymous with the white New Left, began community organizing in 1963, hoping to build an interracial movement of the poor through which to demand social and political change. SDS sought nothing less than to abolish poverty and extend democratic participation in America. Over the next five years, organizers established a strong presence in numerous low-income, racially diverse urban neighborhoods in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston, as well as other cities. Rejecting the strategies of the old left and labor movement and inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, activists sought to combine a number of single issues into a broader, more powerful coalition. Organizers never limited themselves to today's simple dichotomies of race vs. class or of identity politics vs. economic inequality. They actively synthesized emerging identity politics with class and coalition politics and with a drive for a more participatory welfare state, treating these diverse political approaches as inextricably intertwined. While common wisdom holds that the New Left rejected all state involvement as cooptative at best, Jennifer Frost traces the ways in which New Left and community activists did in fact put forward a prescriptive, even visionary, alternative to the welfare state. After Students for a Democratic Society and its community organizing unit, the Economic Research and Action Project, disbanded, New Left and community participants went on to apply their strategies and goals to the welfare rights, women's liberation, and the antiwar movements. In her study of activism before the age of identity politics, Frost has given us the first full-fledged history of what was arguably the most innovative community organizing campaign in post-war American history.

    In an eloquent challenge to the privileging of queer theory in the academy, Garber calls for recognition of the historical -- and intellectually significant -- role of lesbian poets as theorists of lesbian identity and activism.