In a strikingly original interpretation that brings the Jazz Age to life in a wholly new way, Ann Douglas arugues that when, after World War I, the United States began to assume the economic and political leadership of the West, New York became the heart of a daring and accomplished historical transformation.

     Free History BONUS Inside! When the first settlers reached the United States of America and started to chip out a living in the wilderness that seemed so fierce and unfamiliar to their European eyes, they could never have dreamed that someday the land upon which they stood would become one of the most powerful countries in the entire world. When Native Americans first witnessed those white sails bringing ships with white sailors into their world for the first time, they could never have dreamed that within a few centuries their population would be all but destroyed, that they would have to endure massacre after massacre, be stripped of their freedom and confined to comparatively tiny reservations, and walk the Trail of Tears within the next few hundred years. When the preachers of the Great Awakening stood on the backs of wagons or bits of old tree stumps and told the American people a new story of individual freedom and the power of ordinary people, they could never have dreamed that their preaching would trigger a landslide of abolitionism that would end in a civil war that almost tore the entire country apart. When the Civil War was finally won by the Union, and all African Americans' chains were broken at last, the military leaders could never have dreamed that within the next half century, the United States would emerge as one of the world's greatest military powers during the Spanish-American War. And when those soldiers won the struggle against Spain in Cuba, they could never have dreamed that later in the century, Cuba itself would turn against them and become the single greatest threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. When the Wright Brothers first took to the air and Thomas Edison made the lightbulb, they could never have dreamed that American innovation would produce not only the Ford car, basketball, the telephone, and Facebook, but it would also be instrumental in creating the atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people and finally brought an end to the Second World War. As for Martin Luther King, Jr., he did dream. He had a dream of equality and brotherhood, and his dream at least partially came true in 2008 when America saw the inauguration of its first black president. Never could the slaves of the great plantations of the South have dreamed that that day would ever come, but it did. Nobody could have dreamed it, but it all came to pass, and it became the history of the United States of America. And this is how it all happened... In The History of the United States: A Captivating Guide to American History, Including Events Such as the American Revolution, French and Indian War, Boston Tea Party, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf War, you will discover topics such as The People Who Were There First A Time of Exploration Colonizing America The French and Indian War The Boston Tea Party The American Revolution The First President Restless Times Horrors for the Natives Awakening Civil War Seeking for Peace A Rising Power Progress Disaster Strikes The Biggest Bomb in the World Icy Tension Freedom on the Home Front Terror and Its War And much, much more! So if you want to learn more about the history of the United States, then sc

    From politics to the media, from education to the arts, liberals seem to be completely in control. It's no wonder, then, that so many prominent conservative traditionalists are hopelessly pessimistic about the future of Western Civilization. But what if this is just one side of the equation? What if it turns out that brewing beneath the surface, a renewed Christian age is rising? In this thought-provoking book, Dr. Steve Turley argues that there is in fact two revolutions concurrently taking place: a demographic revolution and a political revolution, both of which suggest a significant conservative Christian resurgence. HERE’S A PREVIEW OF WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ………. Why scholars believe that the fertility discrepancy between conservative Christians and secularists means a far more conservative future How Europe is already reversing its demographic decline with a nationalist baby boom How conservative Christianity is on the rise in the US Why scholars believe there is a resurgence of Christianity in Europe How these demographic and religious trends are already reshaping much of European society And much, much more! Drawing from scholarly studies and current events, Dr. Turley's study will inspire you to reject the naysayers predicting the twilight of the West, and instead embrace a hopeful vision of cultural renewal and the coming Christian majority. Get your copy today!

    Others flew in on planes. One arrived after escaping in a suitcase. And some won’t say how they got here.These are “the new kids”: new to America and all the routines and rituals of an American high school, from lonely first days to prom. They attend International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, which is like most high schools in some ways—its halls are filled with students gossiping, joking, flirting, and pushing the limits of the school’s dress code—but all of the students are recent immigrants learning English. Together, they come from more than forty-five countries and speak more than twenty-eight languages.A singular work of narrative journalism, The New Kids chronicles a year in the life of a remarkable group of these teenage newcomers—a multicultural mosaic that embodies what is truly amazing about America.Hauser’s unforgettable portraits include Jessica, kicked out of her father’s home just days after arriving from China; Ngawang, who spent twenty-four hours folded up in a small suitcase to escape from Tibet; Mohamed, a diamond miner’s son from Sierra Leone whose arrival in New York City is shrouded in mystery; Yasmeen, a recently orphaned Yemeni girl who is torn between pursuing college and marrying so that she can take care of her younger siblings; and Chit Su, a Burmese refugee who is the only person to speak her language in the entire school. The students in this modern-day Babel deal with enormous obstacles: traumas and wars in their countries of origin that haunt them, and pressures from their cultures to marry or drop out and go to work. They aren’t just jostling for their places in the high school pecking order—they are carving out new lives for themselves in America.The New Kids is immersion reporting at its most compelling as Brooke Hauser takes us deep inside the dramas of five International High School students who are at once ordinary and extraordinary in their separate paths to the American Dream. Readers will be rooting for these kids long after reading the stories of where they came from, how they got here, and where they are going next.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Until their troubled son showed up with a need for cash--and a thirst for murder. . . Two Bodies David Legg was an obsessive control freak and an army deserter. After fathering an illegitimate child, he wooed and wed a trusting young woman--only to destroy his marriage with lies and infidelities. But his deceptions were far from over. . . A Savage Son In June of 1996, Jeannie and Brian were found shot to death, their bodies sitting next to each other on their living room loveseat. Jeannie's expensive ring and the couple's credit cards were missing. Meanwhile, David, the prime suspect, was living it up in Hawaii with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, draining his dead parents' savings through ATMs. After a long and costly chase this remorseless killer faced a jury of his peers in 2000, and was locked behind bars for life. "True crime afficionados will savor this riveting read." --Publishers Weekly on Honeymoon with a Killer

    This is by all means the best one-volume synthesis of the New Deal that has yet appeared in print. I for one doubt that there will ever be a better one. The combination of intensive scholarship, level-headed interpretation, and lively writing make this an invaluable book." -- Frank Freidel"Here is the best one-volume synthesis of the New Deal years yet published. Learned, thorough, lucid, fresh, it provides an incomparable introduction to the period for college students and intelligent general readers." -- John Morton Blum

    The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and streets.Edward L. Ayers gives us a different Civil War, built on an intimate scale. He charts the descent into war in the Great Valley spanning Pennsylvania and Virginia. Connected by strong ties of every kind, including the tendrils of slavery, the people of this borderland sought alternatives to secession and war. When none remained, they took up war with startling intensity. As this book relays with a vivid immediacy, it came to their doorsteps in hunger, disease, and measureless death. Ayers's Civil War emerges from the lives of everyday people as well as those who helped shape history—John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Jackson, and Lee. His story ends with the valley ravaged, Lincoln's support fragmenting, and Confederate forces massing for a battle at Gettysburg.

    On board were thirty barely clad black men, armed with cutlasses, and two white men - Spanish slave owners with an incredible story to tell. A month earlier, the Amistad had set sail from Havana with a valuable cargo of slaves and $40,000 worth of gold doubloons. She was headed for the Cuban coastal town of Puerto Principe - but in a matter of days, the captain and the cook were dead, and the ship was in the control of the slaves. Thus began "the Amistad affair," which, writes Mary Cable, "was to bedevil the diplomatic relations of the United States, Spain, and England for a generation; intensify bitterness over the question of slavery; and lead an ex-president (John Quincy Adams) to go before the Supreme Court and castigate the administration in an eloquent plea for the slaves' freedom. In her fascinating and carefully researched account, Cable takes us right to the heart of these complex matters, dramatically replaying an incredible series of events that converged to form a uniquely exciting and challenging chapter in American history.

    That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than one hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in coastal Georgia. In this remarkable new book, the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations’ inhabitants, white and black.Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner. This “upstairsdownstairs” history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression, and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against that oppression. Through letters, plantation and church records, court documents, slave narratives, archaeological findings, and the memory of the African-American community, Clarke brings to light the long-suppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantations—a history inseparably bound to that of their white owners.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    

    For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to "find themselves" and stake a claim. Others lost their way in a landscape of opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they weren't prepared to navigate.With warmth, humor, and perspective, the book also explores why changes in the law did not change everything for today's young women.

    Lee and Jefferson Davis, and much more.

    Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture-the trash it produces-and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning.Before the twentieth century, streets and bodies stank, but trash was nearly nonexistent. With goods and money scarce, almost everything was reused. Strasser paints a vivid picture of an America where scavenger pigs roamed the streets, swill children collected kitchen garbage, and itinerant peddlers traded manufactured goods for rags and bones. Over the last hundred years, however, Americans have become hooked on convenience, disposability, fashion, and constant technological change-the rise of mass consumption has led to waste on a previously unimaginable scale.Lively and colorful, Waste and Want recaptures a hidden part of our social history, vividly illustrating that what counts as trash depends on who's counting, and that what we throw away defines us as much as what we keep.