Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation


John Ehle - 1988
    government policy toward Indians in the early 1800s is that it persisted in removing to the West those who had most successfully adapted to European values. As whites encroached on Cherokee land, many Native leaders responded by educating their children, learning English, and developing plantations. Such a leader was Ridge, who had fought with Andrew Jackson against the British. As he and other Cherokee leaders grappled with the issue of moving, the land-hungry Georgia legislatiors, with the aid of Jackson, succeeded in ousting the Cherokee from their land, forcing them to make the arduous journey West on the infamous "Trail of Tears." (Library Journal)

Twenty Years at Hull House


Jane Addams - 1910
    Major work from the American social worker, sociologist, philosopher and reformer, known in America as the "mother of social work."

Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir


Madeleine K. Albright - 2020
    “I don’t want to be remembered,” she answered. “I am still here and have much more I intend to do. As difficult as it might seem, I want every stage of my life to be more exciting than the last.”In that time of transition, the former Secretary considered the possibilities: she could write, teach, travel, give speeches, start a business, fight for democracy, help to empower women, campaign for favored political candidates, spend more time with her grandchildren. Instead of choosing one or two, she decided to do it all. For nearly twenty years, Albright has been in constant motion, navigating half a dozen professions, clashing with presidents and prime ministers, learning every day.Hell and Other Destinations reveals this Albright at her bluntest, funniest, most intimate, and most serious. It is the tale of our times anchored in lessons for all time, narrated by an extraordinary woman with a matchless zest for life.

Blue Above the Chimneys


Christine Marion Fraser - 1980
    Growing up with her siblings in a tiny flat, learning to avoid her hardworking, hard-drinking one-eyed father, making a menace of herself in the streets along with the other urchins, Christine lived an impoverished life but never once cared. Until she was struck down by a terrible illness. Suddenly, her wild days of childhood were over. A long spell in hospital completely changed her life. Now she found herself dependent on others for so many of her needs. And on top of that her mother and father died.Yet Christine was always resourceful and never once looked down. She knew that always there, if you looked hard enough, was some blue up above the chimneys.

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood


William J. Mann - 2014
    Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.

Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir


Melanie McGrath - 2002
    As McGrath acknowledges, "It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn't. It belonged to Jenny". McGrath's achievement in the book is to make Jenny's very commonplace, circumscribed life not only believable and moving but also to turn it into a mirror in which the reader can see the changes that the century visited upon the East End. When Jenny was a young girl, the London docks were the biggest port in the world, teeming with life and industry. By the time she was an old woman, all the docks were closed and the old East End was a part of history. Not that Silvertown encourages nostalgia. The descriptions of Jenny's impoverished childhood, of the pulling of all her teeth on her 17th birthday, of the sweatshop where she worked, are enough to make readers throw away any rose-tinted glasses they might be tempted to use. Very occasionally the dialogue in the book lapses into the "Cor, blimey, strike a light, guv'nor" kind of Cockney heard in so many bad British films of the black-and-white era. Largely, both dialogue and narrative combine to provide a remarkably convincing and lively portrait of an ordinary life rescued from oblivion and of a world that's gone.--Nick Rennison

Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34


Bryan Burrough - 2004
    Edgar Hoover’s FBI to tell the full story—for the first time—of the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and the assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers. In an epic feat of storytelling and drawing on a remarkable amount of newly available material on all the major figures involved, Burrough reveals a web of interconnections within the vast American underworld and demonstrates how Hoover’s G-men overcame their early fumbles to secure the FBI’s rise to power.

Sherlock Holmes The Definitive Collection


Arthur Conan Doyle - 2011
    No more searching for each of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, you get them all in one book. In addition you get 54 amazing mystery stories by all time great writers, including the Father Brown series and The Man who Was Thursday. The following is included:THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLESMR. SHERLOCK HOLMESTHE CURSE OF THE BASKERVILLESTHE PROBLEMSIR HENRY BASKERVILLETHREE BROKEN THREADSBASKERVILLE HALLTHE STAPLETONS OF MERRIPIT HOUSEFIRST REPORT OF DR. WATSONSECOND REPORT OF DR. WATSONEXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF DR. WATSONTHE MAN ON THE TORDEATH ON THE MOORFIXING THE NETSTHE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLESA RETROSPECTIONTHE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMESTHE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGETHE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETERTHE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTONTHE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MENTHE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSETHE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZTHE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE-QUARTERTHE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDERTHE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOLTHE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAINTHE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONSTHE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY CYCLISTTHE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTSTHE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMESSILVER BLAZETHE YELLOW FACETHE STOCK-BROKER’S CLERKTHE “GLORIA SCOTT”THE MUSGRAVE RITUALTHE REIGATE PUZZLETHE CROOKED MANTHE RESIDENT PATIENTTHE GREEK INTERPRETERTHE NAVAL TREATYTHE FINAL PROBLEMA STUDY IN SCARLETTHE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMESA SCANDAL IN BOHEMIATHE RED-HEADED LEAGUEA CASE OF IDENTITYTHE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERYTHE FIVE ORANGE PIPSTHE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIPTHE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLETHE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BANDTHE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER’S THUMBTHE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELORTHE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONETTHE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHESTHE SIGN OF FOURTHE VALLEY OF FEARHIS LAST BOWTALES OF TERROR AND MYSTERYINNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWNTHE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY * The Great Valdez Sapphire by Anonymous * The Lost Duchess by Anonymous * The Minor Canon by Anonymous * The Pipe by Anonymous * The Puzzle by Anonymous * The Baron's Quarry by Egerton Castle * The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins * A Case of Identity by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle * A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle * The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle * His Wedded Wife by Rudyard Kipling * In the House of Suddhoo by Rudyard Kipling * My Own True Ghost Story by Rudyard Kipling * The Sending of Dana Da by Rudyard Kipling * The Pavilion on the Links by Robert Louis Stevenson * The Fowl in the Pot by Stanley John Weyman * Bourgonef by Anonymous * The Closed Cabinet by Anonymous * The Avenger by Thomas De Quincey * The Haunted House by Charles Dickens * No. I Branch Line: The Signal Man by Dickens * The Haunted and the Haunters by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton * The House and the Brain by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton * The Incantation by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton * Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Rober Maturin * A Mystery with a Moral by Laurence Sterne * On Being Found Out by William Makepeace Thackeray * The Notch on the Ax by William Makepeace Thackeray * The Nail by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón * The Adventure of the Three Robbers by Lucius Apuleius * Melmoth Reconciled by Honoré de Balzac * The Conscript by Honoré de Balzac * The Deposition by Luigi Capuana * The Invisible Eye by Erckmann-Chatrian * The Owl's Ear by Erckmann-Chatrian * The Waters of Death by Erckmann-Chatrian * An Uncomfortable Bed by Guy de Maupassant * Fear by Guy de Maupassant * Ghosts by Guy de Maupassant * The Confession by Guy de Maupassant * The Horla by Guy de Maupassant * The Man with the Pale Eyes by Guy de Maupassant * The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant * The Miracle of Zobéide by Pierre Mille * Letter to Sura by Pliny, the Younger * The Torture by Hope by Auguste comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam * Zadig The Babylonian by Voltaire

Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War


Charles B. Dew - 2001
    Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument--the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately--did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.Dew's discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunion--often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause--have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 1860-61.Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war--indeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.

The Metaphysical Club


Louis Menand - 2001
    Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist and the founder of semiotics. The club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. They also thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability.

Left for Dead in the Outback: How I Survived 71 Days Lost in a Desert Hell


Ricky Megee - 2008
    

I'd Sooner Starve!


Mark Sinclair - 2011
    ever wanted to quit your job...?‘I’d Sooner Starve’ is the amazing true story of one man's quest to escape his monotonous nine-to-five existence and open a charming delicatessen and restaurant in a delightful market town.With honesty, humour and breathtaking naïveté, it records his steep learning curve, radical lifestyle change and the immediate revelation that the customer is not always right!Amidst tales of bulimia, public menstruation, endless abuse and hilarious customer encounters, this eye-opening story unveils what happens after you walk into the boss and say: “I quit!”‘I’d Sooner Starve’ is a shockingly comical tale of culinary highs, customer lows and one woman's unhealthy fixation with thigh-warmed Stilton…‘An absolute hoot!’ ~ Anonymous celebrity chef‘This hits the nail on the head so much I can't believe it! So much so, I can't possibly put my name to it!’~ UK chef‘I am delighted that Mark has written this book. Maybe now people will believe me when I tell them the stories!’ ~ Matt, co-ownerI'd Sooner Starve - the book the celebrity chefs were too afraid to endorse!

Life On The Old Plantation In Ante-Bellum Days


Irving E. Lowery - 2009
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Preachin' the Blues: The Life & Times of Son House


Daniel Beaumont - 2011
    So begins Preachin' the Blues, the biography of American blues signer and guitarist Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. (1902 - 1988). House pioneered an innovative style, incorporating strong repetitive rhythms with elements of southern gospel and spiritual vocals. A seminal figure in the history of the Delta blues, he was an important, direct influence on such figures as Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. The landscape of Son House's life and the vicissitudes he endured make for an absorbing narrative, threaded through with a tension between House's religious beliefs and his spells of commitment to a lifestyle that implicitly rejected it. Drinking, womanizing, and singing the blues caused this tension that is palpable in his music, and becomes explicit in one of his finest performances, "Preachin' the Blues." Large parts of House's life are obscure, not least because his own accounts of them were inconsistent. Author Daniel Beaumont offers a chronology/topography of House's youth, taking into account evidence that conflicts sharply with the well-worn fable, and he illuminates the obscurity of House's two decades in Rochester, NY between his departure from Mississippi in the 1940s and his "rediscovery" by members of the Folk Revival Movement in 1964. Beaumont gives a detailed and perceptive account of House's primary musical legacy: his recordings for Paramount in 1930 and for the Library of Congress in 1941-42. In the course of his research Beaumont has unearthed not only connections among the many scattered facts and fictions but new information about a rumoured murder in Mississippi, and a charge of manslaughter on Long Island - incidents which bring tragic light upon House's lifelong struggles and self-imposed disappearance, and give trenchant meaning to the moving music of this early blues legend.

The Glitter and the Gold


Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan - 1952
    She was the real American heiress who lived long before Downton Abbey’s Lady Grantham arrived.Mme. Balsan is an unsnobbish and amused observer of the intricate hierarchy both upstairs and downstairs and a revealing witness to the glittering balls, huge weekend parties, and major state occasions she attended or hosted chronicling her encounters with every important figure of the day—from Queen Victoria, Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to Tsar Nicholas and the young Winston Churchill. This richly enjoyable memoir is a revealing portrait of a golden age now being celebrated every week behind the doors of Downton Abbey.