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The Original Watergate Stories


The Washington Post - 2012
    The story reported that a team of burglars had been arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington. On assignment, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward uncovered a widespread political scandal and cover-up at the highest levels of government, culminating with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its work, which became the subject of two best-selling books and a renowned movie, "All the President's Men."This eBook is a look back at the dramatic chain of events that would convulse Washington for two years and lead to the first resignation of a U.S. president, forever changing American politics.

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing


Mark McGurl - 2009
    McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and even more important how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature.McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison.Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, "The Program Era" becomes a meditation on systematic creativity, an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university.An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, "The Program Era" will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Raising a Reader: A Mother's Tale of Desperation and Delight


Jennie Nash - 2003
    And because reading is the thing I love most, it's only natural for me to hope it will become something they love, too...The trouble is that reading is a particularly slippery passion to want to pass along because it's a skill most parents would agree their children have to master, to one degree or another. ""--from Raising a Reader" Can passion be passed along from parent to child? Can you, in other words, make someone love baseball, ballet or books? Of course you can't - but that doesn't stop parents from trying. Jennie Nash was one of those parents - a parent so obsessed about getting her kids to read that her desire sometimes strayed into desperation; her hope often became an obsession; and instead of helping, her resolve got in the way. In the end, she found that, like so many of the things we do as parents, passing along a passion for reading happens in the push and pull of digging in and letting go, day in and day out, both because of and in spite of our efforts. Nash shares stories and misadventures from the years when her young daughters were learning what it meant to have a relationship with words--and she was learning to let them. She reminds us how the magic moments happen in their own sweet time, by being together in the presence of good books and seeing each child as unique. Each chapter of "Raising a Reader" ends with personal, practical tips and games that spring straight from the narrative. A comprehensive index discusses many of the books Nash has enjoyed with her children, providing a year's worth of titles for parents and their children to explore.

The Alamo


John Myers Myers - 1948
    John Myers Myers authored sixteen books, including Doc Holliday and Tombstone's Early Years, also available as Bison Books.

Disappearing Ink: The Insider, the FBI, and the Looting of the Kenyon College Library (Kindle Single)


Travis McDade - 2015
    But what he also had was unsupervised access to one of the finest special collections libraries in the country. In October 1990 Kenyon College hired David Breithaupt as its library’s part-time evening supervisor. In April 2000 he was fired after a Georgia librarian discovered him selling a letter by Flannery O’Connor on eBay, but that was only the tip of the iceberg: for the past ten years, Breithaupt had been browsing the collection, taking from it whatever rare books, manuscripts, and documents caught his eye—Flannery O'Connor letters, W.H. Auden annotated typescripts, a Thomas Pynchon manuscript, and much, much more. It was a large-scale, long-term pillaging of Kenyon College’s most precious works. After he was caught, the American justice system looked like it was about to disappoint the college the way it had countless rare book crime victims before—but Kenyon refused to let this happen.

The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy


Amy Wallace - 1986
    

Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South


Melton A. McLaurin - 1987
    McLaurin honestly and plainly recalls his boyhood during the 1950s, an era when segregation existed unchallenged in the rural South. In his small hometown of Wade, North Carolina, whites and blacks lived and worked within each other's shadows, yet were separated by the history they shared. Separate Pasts is the moving story of the bonds McLaurin formed with friends of both races--a testament to the power of human relationships to overcome even the most ingrained systems of oppression.A new afterword provides historical context for the development of segregation in North Carolina. In his poignant portrayal of contemporary Wade, McLaurin shows that, despite integration and the election of a black mayor, the legacy of racism remains.

Backwoods Genius


Julia Scully - 2012
    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.

The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past


Keith Windschuttle - 1994
    He believes that they deny the existence of truth and substitute radically chic theorizing for real knowledge about the past. The result is revolutionary and unprecedented: contemporary historians are increasingly obscuring the facts on which truth about the past is built. In The Killing of History, Windschuttle offers a devastating expose of these developments. This fascinating narrative leads us into a series of case histories that demonstrate how radical theory has attempted to replace the learning of traditional history with its own political agenda.

Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation


Rawn James Jr. - 2010
    The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston was the pioneer: After becoming the first African-American on the Harvard Law Review, he transformed the law school at all-black Howard University into a West Point for civil rights advocacy. One of Houston's students at Howard was a brash young man named Thurgood Marshall. Soon after Marshall's graduation, Houston and Marshall opened the NAACP's legal office. The abstemious, proper Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely duo, but together they faced down angry Southern mobs, negotiated with presidents and senators, and convinced even racist judges and juries that the Constitution demanded equal justice under law for all American citizens. Houston, tragically, would die before his strategy came to fruition in the Brown suit, but Marshall would argue the case victoriously and go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court justice--always crediting his mentor for teaching him everything he knew. Together, the two advocates changed the course of American history.

Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities


James Turner - 2014
    In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word?In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, if not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins--and what they still share--has never been more urgent.

Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860


Carl F. Kaestle - 1983
    Public acceptance of state school systems, Kaestle argues, was encouraged by the people's commitment to republican government, by their trust in Protestant values, and by the development of capitalism. The author also examines the opposition to the Founding Fathers' educational ideas and shows what effects these had on our school system.

Mobsters, Madams Murder in Steubenville, Ohio: The Story of Little Chicago


Susan M. Guy - 2014
    The white slave trade was rampant, and along with all the vice crimes, murders became a weekly occurrence. Law enforcement seemed to turn a blind eye, and cries of political corruption were heard in the state capital. This scenario replayed itself over and over again during the past century as mobsters and madams ruled and murders plagued the city and county at an alarming rate.

Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders


Mark Perry - 2001
    After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had had children with one of his slaves, the Grimké sisters helped to educate their nephews and gave them the means to start a new life in postbellum America. The nephews, Archibald and Francis, went on to become well-known African American activists in the burgeoning civil rights movement and the founding of the NAACP. Spanning 150 eventful years, this is an inspiring tale of a remarkable family that transformed itself and America.

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition


John Sepich - 2008
    The New York Times Book Review ranked it third in a 2006 survey of the “best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” and in 2005 Time chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923. Yet Blood Meridian’s complexity, as well as its sheer bloodiness, makes it difficult for some readers. To guide all its readers and help them appreciate the novel’s wealth of historically verifiable characters, places, and events, John Sepich compiled what has become the classic reference work, Notes on BLOOD MERIDIAN. Tracing many of the nineteenth-century primary sources that McCarthy used, Notes uncovers the historical roots of Blood Meridian. Originally published in 1993, Notes remained in print for only a few years and has become highly sought-after in the rare book market, with used copies selling for hundreds of dollars. In bringing the book back into print to make it more widely available, Sepich has revised and expanded Notes with a new preface and two new essays that explore key themes and issues in the work. This amplified edition of Notes on BLOOD MERIDIAN is the essential guide for all who seek a fuller understanding and appreciation of McCarthy’s finest work.