He traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

    The spirit was sold from shops and market stalls, from basements and barrows in the streets, until every Londoner was averaging two pints of gin a week. Early eighteenth-century London was a violent and insecure town. Reformers blamed 'Madam Geneva' for everything from social decay to rising crime and passed eight major acts in an attempt to control it. When prohibition was attempted, it was greeted with popular riots and the explosion of a bomb in Westminster Hall. With arguments about gin drawing in writers such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, the campaign for reform reached its climax with the unforgettable image of Hogarth's 'Gin Lane'. This is the story of the rise and fall of 'Madam Geneva'. Gin-drinkers and sellers, politicians and distillers all add their voices to Patrick Dillon's vivid account of London's first drug craze, and the ultimately successful attempts to control it. 'Excellent.' - Andrew Marr 'Patrick Dillon has gathered together some marvellous tales here... This book is as crowded with sensational incident as an 18th-century newspaper... With its manic tempo, Dillon's prose embodies the relentless energy of the time... the city's infinite variety is also successfully invoked. He has, too, a gift for simplifying complex issues.' - Daily Telegraph 'A crisp, fast-paced account... Dillon paints a vivid picture of hard-drinking London, high on spirits and speculation... Dillon's book offers a fascinating tale, ringing with authentic voices.' - Sunday Times

    Error. Better Beer.When most brewers think of an experimental beer, odd creations come to mind. And sure, in this book you can learn how to brew with ingredients like bacon, chanterelle mushrooms, defatted cacao nibs, and peanut butter powder. However, experimental homebrewing is more than that. It's about making good beer--the best beer, in fact. It's about tweaking process, designing solid recipes, and blind evaluations. So put on your goggles, step inside the lab, and learn from two of the craziest scientists around: Drew Beechum and Denny Conn. Get your hands dirty and tackle a money-saving project or try your hand at an off-the-wall technique. Freeze yourself an Eisbeer, make a batch of canned starter wort, fake a cask ale, extract flavors with distillation, or sit down at the microscope and do some yeast cell counting. More than 30 recipes and a full chapter of open-ended experiments will complete your transformation. Before you realize it, you'll be donning a white lab coat and sharing your own delicious results!

    As she traveled highways, dirt roads, bayous, and coastlines gathering stories and recipes, it was immediately apparent that dire predictions about the end of American cuisine were vastly overstated. From Park Avenue to trailer parks, from tidy suburbs to isolated outposts, home cooks were channeling their family histories as well as their tastes and personal ambitions into delicious meals. One decade and over 300,000 miles later, One Big Table is a celebration of these cooks, a mouthwatering portrait of the nation at the table.Meticulously selected from more than 20,000 contributions, the cookbook's 600 recipes are a definitive portrait of what we eat and why. In this lavish volume--illustrated throughout with historic photographs, folk art, vintage advertisements, and family snapshots--O'Neill celebrates heirloom recipes like the Doughty family's old-fashioned black duck and dumplings that originated on a long-vanished island off Virginia's Eastern Shore, the Pueblo tamales that Norma Naranjo makes in her horno in New Mexico, as well as modern riffs such as a Boston teenager's recipe for asparagus soup scented with nigella seeds and truffle oil. Many recipes offer a bridge between first-generation immigrants and their progeny--the bucatini with dandelion greens and spring garlic that an Italian immigrant and his grandson forage for in the Vermont woods--while others are contemporary variations that embody each generation's restless obsession with distinguishing itself from its predecessors. O'Neill cooks with artists, writers, doctors, truck drivers, food bloggers, scallop divers, horse trainers, potluckers, and gourmet club members.In a world where takeout is just a phone call away, One Big Table reminds us of the importance of remaining connected to the food we put on our tables. As this brilliantly edited collection shows on every page, the glories of a home-cooked meal prove how every generation has enriched and expanded our idea of American food. Every recipe in this book is a testament to the way our memories--historical, cultural, and personal--are bound up in our favorite and best family dishes.As O'Neill writes, "Most Americans cook from the heart as well as from a distinctly American yearning, something I could feel but couldn't describe until thousands of miles of highway helped me identify it in myself: hometown appetite. This book is a journey through hundreds of 'hometowns' that fuel the American appetite, recipe by recipe, bite by bite."

    Move over, Merlot. Craft beer has finally found a place at the fine dining table. Renowned beer sommeliers Hallie Beaune and Christina Perozzi offer a down-to-earth guide to craft and artisanal brews that celebrates beer for what it truly is: sophisticated, complex, and flavorful. Beaune and Perozzi cover everything from beer basics to the science behind beer, food and beer pairings, home brewing, and tips for perfecting one s palate. This edgy, no-nonsense guide exposes hidden truths, debunks every misconception, and reveals the power that comes with knowing an ale from a lager."

    Was it truly entombed in a Paris cellar for two hundred years? Or did it come from a secret Nazi bunker? Or from the moldy basement of a devilishly brilliant con artist? As Benjamin Wallace unravels the mystery, we meet a gallery of intriguing players—from the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women to the obsessive wine collector who discovered the bottle. Suspenseful and thrillingly strange, this is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries.

    Whiskey has profoundly influenced America’s political, economic, and cultural destiny, just as those same factors have inspired the evolution and unique flavor of the whiskey itself. Taking readers behind the curtain of an enchanting—and sometimes exasperating—industry, the work of writer Reid Mitenbuler crackles with attitude and commentary about taste, choice, and history. Few products better embody the United States, or American business, than bourbon. A tale of innovation, success, downfall, and resurrection, Bourbon Empire is an exploration of the spirit in all its unique forms, creating an indelible portrait of both bourbon and the people who make it.

    With a chapter for each of ten cocktails--from the grog sailors drank on the high seas in the 1700s to the mojitos of modern club hoppers--Wayne Curtis reveals that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the exploding sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society. Curtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, where rum delivered both a cheap wallop and cash for the Revolution, to the plundering pirate ships off the coast of Central America, to the watering holes of pre-Castro Cuba, and to the kitsch-laden tiki bars of 1950s America. Here are sugar barons and their armies conquering the Caribbean, Paul Revere stopping for a nip during his famous ride, Prohibitionists marching against "demon rum," Hemingway fattening his liver with Havana daiquiris, and today's bartenders reviving old favorites like Planter's Punch. In an age of microbrewed beer and single-malt whiskeys, rum--once the swill of the common man--has found its way into the tasting rooms of the most discriminating drinkers. Awash with local color and wry humor, "And a Bottle of Rum" is an affectionate toast to this most American of liquors, a chameleon spirit that has been constantly reinvented over the centuries by tavern keepers, bootleggers, lounge lizards, and marketing gurus. Complete with cocktail recipes for would-be epicurean time-travelers, this is history at its most intoxicating.

    But the storm of exciting brands and flavors has even the savviest bartenders puzzled over their personalities and best uses. Bitterman's Field Guide to Bitters and Amari is the handbook that decodes today’s burgeoning selection of bitters, along with their kindred spirits amari and shrubs, complete with 190 photographs.   The introduction includes everything you need to know to understand what bitters and amari are and how to use them. recipes for making essential and inventive bitters at home. The next section offers 123 recipes for making essential bitters at home, mixing, and cooking bitters, from a Burnt Grapefruit Gimlet to a Martini Julep, from Bittered Bittersweet Chocolate Torte to BBQ Pork Ribs with Bittersweet BBQ Sauce. Bitterman's Field Guide to Bitters and Amari cracks open the full potential of bitters, inspiring and empowering people to try them. The final section includes a comprehensive field guide to the wide world of the more than 500 great bitters and 50 amari available today. Complete with tasting notes, profiles of important makers and brand photography, the guide gives everyone from pro bartenders to home cooks a solid foundation for buying and using bitters.

    You'll find no tongue-tempting treats within -- unless, of course, you consider Boiled Cow Elbow with Plaid Sauce to be your idea of a tasty meal. No, The Gallery of Regrettable Food is a public service. Learn to identify these dishes. Learn to regard shivering liver molds with suspicion. Learn why curries are a Communist plot to undermine decent, honest American spices. Learn to heed the advice of stern, fictional nutritionists. If you see any of these dishes, please alert the authorities.Now, the good news: laboratory tests prove that The Gallery of Regrettable Food AMUSES as well as informs. Four out of five doctors recommend this book for its GENEROUS PORTIONS OF HILARITY and ghastly pictures from RETRO COOKBOOKS. You too will look at these products of post-war cuisine and ask: "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?" It's an affectionate look at the days when starch ruled, pepper was a dangerous spice, and Stuffed Meat with Meat Sauce was considered health food.Bon appetit!The Gallery of Regrettable Food is a simple introduction to poorly photographed foodstuffs and horrid recipes from the Golden Age of Salt and Starch. It's a wonder anyone in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s gained any weight. It isn't that the food was inedible; it was merely dull. Everything was geared toward a timid palate fearful of spice. It wasn't nonnutritious -- no, between the limp boiled vegetables, fat-choked meat cylinders, and pink whipped Jell-O desserts, you were bound to find a few calories that would drag you into the next day. It's just that the pictures are so hideously unappealing.Author James Lileks has made it his life's work to unearth the worst recipes and food photography from that bygone era and assemble them with hilarious, acerbic commentary: "This is not meat. This is something they scraped out of the air filter from the engines of the Exxon Valdez." It all started when he went home to Fargo and found an ancient recipe book in his mom's cupboard: Specialties of the House, from the North Dakota State Wheat Commission. He never looked back. Now, they're not really recipe books. They're ads for food companies, with every recipe using the company's products, often in unexpected and horrifying ways. There's not a single appetizing dish in the entire collection.The pictures in the book are ghastly -- the Italian dishes look like a surgeon had a sneezing fit during an operation, and the queasy casseroles look like something on which the janitor dumps sawdust. But you have to enjoy the spirit behind the books -- cheerful postwar perfect housewifery, and folks with the guts to undertake such culinary experiments as stuffing cabbage with hamburger, creating the perfect tongue mousse when you have the fellas over for a pregame nosh, or, best of all, baking peppers with a creamy marshmallow sauce. Alas, too many of these dishes bring back scary childhood memories.

    History survey because of the uncommon value it offers instructors and students alike. The authors' own abridgement preserves the analytical power of the parent text, America's History, while offering all the flexibility of a brief book. The latest scholarship, hallmark global perspective, and handy format combine with the best full-color art and map program of any brief text to create a book that students read and enjoy.

    By admired historian, author of Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil ("he would do Graham Greene proud" --Kirkus Reviews).In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of the relations of these two powers back to the eighteenth-century's Persian Empire, the subject of great admiration of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams and for the Iranians, an America seen as an ideal to emulate for its own government.Drawing on years of archival research both in the US and Iran--including access to Iranian government archives rarely available to western scholars--the Iranian-born, Oxford-educated historian leads us through the four seasons of US-Iran relations: the 'spring' of mutual fascination; the 'summer' of early interactions; the 'autumn' of close strategic ties; and the long, dark 'winter' of mutual hatred.Ghazvinian, with grasp and a storyteller's ability, makes clear where, how, and when it all went wrong. And shows why two countries that once had such heartfelt admiration for each other became such committed enemies; showing us, as well, how it didn't have to turn out this way.

    It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.From 1629 to 1775, North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts (1629-1640). The second was the movement of a Royalist elite and indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1649-75). The third was the "Friends' migration,"--the Quakers--from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a great flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American backcountry (ca. 1717-75).These four groups differed in many ways--in religion, rank, generation and place of origin. They brought to America different folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the United States. They spoke distinctive English dialects and built their houses in diverse ways. They had different ideas of family, marriage and gender; different practices of child-naming and child-raising; different attitudes toward sex, age and death; different rituals of worship and magic; different forms of work and play; different customs of food and dress; different traditions of education and literacy; different modes of settlement and association. They also had profoundly different ideas of comity, order, power and freedom which derived from British folk-traditions. Albion's Seed describes those differences in detail, and discusses the continuing importance of their transference to America.Today most people in the United States (more than 80 percent) have no British ancestors at all. These many other groups, even while preserving their own ethnic cultures, have also assimilated regional folkways which were transplanted from Britain to America. In that sense, nearly all Americans today are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnic origins may be; but they are so in their different regional ways. The concluding section of Albion's Seed explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.Albion's Seed also argues that the four British folkways created an expansive cultural pluralism that has proved to the more libertarian than any single culture alone could be. Together they became the determinants of a voluntary society in the United States.

    Three years previously, in March 1968, a unit of American soldiers engaged in seemingly indiscriminate violence against unarmed civilians, killing over 500 people, including women and children. News filtered slowly through the system, but was initially suppressed, dismissed or downplayed by military authorities. By late 1969, however journalists had pursued the rumors, when New York Times reporter Seymour Hirsch published an expose on the massacre, the story became a national outrage. Howard Jones places the events of My Lai and its aftermath in a wider historical context. As a result of the reporting of Hirsch and others, the U.S. army conducted a special inquiry, which charged Lieutenant William Calley and nearly 30 other officers with war crimes. A court martial followed, but after four months Calley alone was found guilty of premeditated murder. He served four and a half months in prison before President Nixon pardoned him and ordered his release. Jones' compelling narrative details the events in Vietnam, as well as the mixed public response to Calley's sentence and to his defense that he had merely been following orders. Jones shows how pivotal the My Lai massacre was in galvanizing opposition to the Vietnam War, playing a part nearly as significant as that of the Tet Offensive and the Cambodian bombing. For many, it undermined any pretense of American moral superiority, calling into question not only the conduct of the war but the justification for U.S. involvement. Jones also reveals how the effects of My Lai were felt within the American military itself, forcing authorities to focus on failures within the chain of command and to review training methods as well as to confront the issue of civilian casualties--what, in later years, came to be known as "collateral damage." A trenchant and sober reassessment, My Lai delves into questions raised by the massacre that have never been properly answered: questions about America's leaders in the field and in Washington; the seeming breakdown of the U.S. army in Vietnam; the cover-up and ultimate public exposure; and the trial itself, which drew comparisons to Nuremberg. Based on extensive archival research, this is the best account to date of one of the defining moments of the Vietnam War."

    Tracing the interaction between food and strategy, on both the military and home fronts, this title demonstrates how the issue of access to food was a driving force within Nazi policy and contributed to the decision to murder hundreds of thousands of 'useless eaters' in Europe.