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Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle And The Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor
Par James M. Scott. 2015
Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History "Like Lauren Hillebrand's Unbroken…Target Tokyo brings to life an indelible era." —Ben…
Cosgrove, The Daily Beast On April 18, 1942, sixteen U.S. Army bombers under the command of daredevil pilot Jimmy Doolittle lifted off from the deck of the USS Hornet on a one-way mission to pummel Japan’s factories, refineries, and dockyards in retaliation for their attack on Pearl Harbor. The raid buoyed America’s morale, and prompted an ill-fated Japanese attempt to seize Midway that turned the tide of the war. But it came at a horrific cost: an estimated 250,000 Chinese died in retaliation by the Japanese. Deeply researched and brilliantly written, Target Tokyo has been hailed as the definitive account of one of America’s most daring military operations.Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century
Par Andrew Wender Cohen. 2015
How skirting the law once defined America’s relation to the world. In the frigid winter of 1875, Charles L. Lawrence…
made international headlines when he was arrested for smuggling silk worth $60 million into the United States. An intimate of Boss Tweed, gloriously dubbed “The Prince of Smugglers,” and the head of a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, Lawrence scandalized a nation whose founders themselves had once dabbled in contraband. Since the Revolution itself, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs on most imports. Protecting the nation was the custom house, which waged a “war on smuggling,” inspecting every traveler for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds, and art. The Civil War’s blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband, but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age, when characters like assassin Louis Bieral, economist “The Parsee Merchant,” Congressman Ben Butler, and actress Rose Eytinge tempted consumers with illicit foreign luxuries. Only as the United States became a global power with World War I did smuggling lose its scurvy romance. Meticulously researched, Contraband explores the history of smuggling to illuminate the broader history of the United States, its power, its politics, and its culture.Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War)
Par Frank J. Wetta, Martin A. Novelli. 2024
Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli’s Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood…
motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters’ backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers’ imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln’s life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln’s legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president. Wetta and Novelli’s work is the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln’s life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film.Fabric of a Nation: A History with Skills and Sources, For the AP® U.S. History Course
Par Jason Stacy, Matthew Ellington. 2024
The only AP® U.S. History book that weaves together content, skills, sources, and AP® exam practice is back and better…
than ever. AP® U.S. History is about so much more than just events on a timeline. The Course Framework is designed to develop crucial reading, reasoning, and writing skills that help students think like historians to interpret the world of the past—and understand how it relates to the world of today. And Fabric of a Nation is still one of the only textbooks that covers every aspect of this course, seamlessly stitching together history skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice. In this new edition, we make it easier than ever to cover all of the skills and topics in the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description by aligning our content to the Unit Topics and Historical Reasoning Processes of each Period. An Accessible, Balanced NarrativeThere’s only so much time in a school year. To cover everything and leave enough time for skill development, you need more focused content, not just more content—and to be most effective, skills development should be accessible and placed just where it is needed. Within the narration are AP® Skills Workshops and AP® Working with Evidence features that support students as they learn the history and prepare to take the AP® Exam. Fabric of a Nation delivers a thorough, yet approachable historical narrative that perfectly aligns with all the essential content of the AP® course. An up-to-date historical survey based on current scholarship, this book is also easy to understand and fun to read, with plenty of interesting details and a crisp writing style that keeps things fresh. Perfectly Aligned to the AP® Scope and SequenceFabric of a Nation has an easy-to-use organization that fully aligns with the College Board’s Course and Exam Description for AP® U.S. History. Instead of long, meandering chapters, this book is divided into smaller, approachable modules that pull together content, skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice into brief 1- to 2-day lessons. Each module corresponds with a specific unit topic in the course framework, including the contextualization and reasoning process topics that bookend each time period. This approach takes the guesswork out of when to introduce which skills and how to blend sources with content—all at a manageable pace that mirrors the scope and sequence of the AP® course framework. Seamlessly Integrated AP® Skill Workshops for Thinking and Writing SkillsInspired by the authors’ classroom experience and sound pedagogical principles, the instruction in Fabric of a Nation scaffolds learning throughout the course of the book. Every module offers an opportunity to either learn or practice new skills to prepare for each section of the AP® Exam in an AP® Skills Workshop. As the book progresses, the nature of these workshops moves from focused instruction early on, to guided practice in the middle of the book, and then finally, to independent practice near the end of the year. Fabric of a Nation was designed to provide you and your students everything needed to succeed in the AP® US History course and on the exam. It’s all there. AP® Exam Practice: We Boast the Most MaterialEvery period culminates with AP® Practice questions providing students a mini-AP® exam with approximately 15 stimulus-based multiple-choice questions, 4 short-answer questions, 1 document-based essay question, and 3 long-essay questions. Additionally, a full-length practice exam is included at the end of the textbook. Because the modules in this book are divided into periods that perfectly align to the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description, it’s also easy to pair Fabric of a Nation with the resources on AP® Classroom. Each textbook module can be used with the corresponding AP® Daily Videos and Topic Questions while the AP® Exam Practice at the end of each perioInsatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans
Par Theresa McCulla. 2024
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City,…
Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans's culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse
Par Kim Wickens. 2023
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • &“A vivid portrait of America&’s greatest stallion, the larger-than-life men who raced and bred him, and the dramatic…
times in which they lived.&”—Geraldine Brooks, author of HorseThe powerful true story of the champion Thoroughbred racehorse who gained international fame in the tumultuous Civil War–era South, and became the most successful sire in American racing historyThe early days of American horse racing were grueling. Four-mile races, run two or three times in succession, were the norm, rewarding horses who brandished the ideal combination of stamina and speed. The stallion Lexington, named after the city in Kentucky where he was born, possessed these winning qualities, which pioneering Americans prized. Lexington shattered the world speed record for a four-mile race, showing a war-torn nation that the extraordinary was possible even in those perilous times. He would continue his winning career until deteriorating eyesight forced his retirement in 1855. But once his groundbreaking achievements as a racehorse ended, his role as a sire began. Horses from his bloodline won more money than the offspring of any other Thoroughbred—an annual success that led Lexington to be named America&’s leading sire an unprecedented sixteen times. Yet with the Civil War raging, Lexington&’s years at a Kentucky stud farm were far from idyllic. Confederate soldiers ran amok, looting freely and kidnapping horses from the top stables. They soon focused on the prized Lexington and his valuable progeny. Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports readers back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
Par David S. Reynolds. 2020
Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022.One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of…
the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award"A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street JournalFrom one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent ageDavid S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War.It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics.No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.By the time he turned thirty at the end of the nineteenth century, John D. Hart thrived as the busiest…
importer of bananas on the East Coast. A master of ships with a thunderous voice, Hart aggressively carried tropical fruit to an insatiable market with little concern for notions of supply and demand. But when an unexpected crisis hit the fruit business, Hart was unprepared. The financial Panic of 1893 doomed his strategy of bringing in limitless bananas. Jobless consumers could not afford such luxuries. Nearing bankruptcy, Hart was approached by Emilio Nuñez, a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party—a cadre of exiled conspirators in New York whose singular purpose was to liberate the Cuban island from four hundred years of Spanish rule. Nuñez enlisted Hart as a “filibuster” to transport guns and ammunition to the Cuban rebels. For nearly three years, Hart became the most visible of a disparate group of mariners between New York and Key West who tormented Spanish authorities, riled the US government, and became heroes to an oppressed people fighting to be free. In King of the Gunrunners: How a Philadelphia Fruit Importer Inspired a Revolution and Provoked the Spanish-American War, author James W. Miller reveals the untold story of a forgotten American whose adventures helped pave the way for the United States’ emergence as an international power. With the Yellow Press trumpeting his exploits, Hart’s influence helped inflame the nation’s mood and made war with Spain inevitable. The quick US victory in what became known as the Spanish-American War compelled Spain to abandon Cuba and cede sovereignty over Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, which also annexed the independent state of Hawaii during the conflict. This volume presents the story of Hart, the defiant king of the Cuban gunrunners, who prolonged a revolution, provoked a war, and left an indelible mark on history.From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home…
to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for remarkable careers, jazz clubs sparked the development of a self-determined African American community. In delving into the history of entrepreneurialism, placemaking, labor organizing, and critical listening in the Hill District, Harper forges connections to larger political contexts, processes of urban development, and civil rights struggles.Harper adopts a broad approach in thinking about jazz clubs, foregrounding the network of patrons, business owners, and musicians who were actively invested in community building. Jazz in the Hill provides a valuable case study detailing the intersections of music, political and cultural history, public policy, labor, and law. The book addresses distinctive eras and issues of twentieth century American urban history, including notions of “vice” during the Prohibition Era (1920–1934); “blight” during the mid-twentieth century boom in urban redevelopment (1946–1973); and workplace integration during the civil rights era (1954–1968). Throughout, Harper demonstrates how the clubs, as a nexus of music, politics, economy, labor, and social relations, supported the livelihood of residents and artists while developing cultures of listening and learning. Though the neighborhood has undergone an extensive socioeconomic transformation that has muted its nightlife, this musical legacy continues to guide current development visions for the Hill on the cusp of its remaking.Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
Par Drew Gilpin Faust. 1956
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.To grow…
up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives.A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted” and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own—one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.Includes black-and-white imagesThe Next President: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of America's Presidents
Par Kate Messner, Adam Rex. 2020
An inspiring and informative book for kids about the past and future of America's presidents.Who will be the NEXT president?…
Could it be you? When George Washington became the first president of the United States, there were nine future presidents already alive in America, doing things like practicing law or studying medicine.When JFK became the thirty-fifth president, there were 10 future presidents already alive in America, doing things like hosting TV shows and learning the saxophone.And right now—today!—there are at least 10 future presidents alive in America. They could be playing basketball, like Barack Obama, or helping in the garden, like Dwight D. Eisenhower. They could be solving math problems or reading books. They could be making art—or already making change.• A breezy, kid-friendly survey of American history and American presidents• Great for teachers, librarians, and other educators• Kate Messner's nonfiction picture books have been lauded by critics and received a variety of awards.For young readers and students who loved The New Big Book of Presidents, Lincoln and Kennedy: A Pair to Compare, and Kid Presidents: True Tales of Childhood from America's Presidents.A helpful addition to curriculums of 5th- to 8th-grade students studying U.S. History and civics and the federal government.• For readers ages 8–12• S. history for kids• Students, librarians, teachers• 5th–8th-grade kidsFrom award-winning author Kate Messner and New York Times bestselling artist Adam Rex comes a timely and compelling compendium about the U.S. presidents—before they were presidents.Kate Messner is an award-winning author whose many books for kids have been selected as Best Books by the New York Times, Junior Library Guild, IndieBound, and Bank Street College of Education. She lives on Lake Champlain with her family.Adam Rex is the author and illustrator of many beloved picture books and novels, including Nothing Rhymes with Orange and the New York Times bestseller Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. He has worked with the likes of Jon Scieszka, Mac Barnett, Jeff Kinney, and Neil Gaiman. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America (New Directions in Tourism Analysis)
Par Cathy Rex and Shevaun E. Watson. 2022
This book addresses the interconnected issues of public memory, race, and heritage tourism, exploring the ways in which historical tourism…
shapes collective understandings of America’s earliest engagements with race.It includes contributions from a diverse group of humanities scholars, including early Americanists, and scholars from communication, English, museum studies, historic preservation, art and architecture, Native American studies, and history. Through eight chapters, the collection offers varied perspectives and original analyses of memory-making and re-making through travel to early American sites, bringing needed attention to the considerable role that tourism plays in producing—and possibly unsettling—racialized memories about America’s past. The book is an interdisciplinary effort that analyses lesser-known sites of historical and racial significance throughout North America and the Caribbean (up to about 1830) to unpack the relationship between leisure travel, processes of collective remembering or forgetting, and the connections of tourist sites to colonialism, slavery, genocide, and oppression.Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America provides a deconstruction of the touristic experience with racism, slavery, and the Indigenous experience in America that will appeal to students and academics in the social sciences and humanities.Nathan Raab, America&’s preeminent rare documents dealer, delivers a &“diverting account of treasure hunting in the fast lane&” (The Wall…
Street Journal) that recounts his years as the Sherlock Holmes of historical artifacts, questing after precious finds and determining their authenticity.A box uncovered in a Maine attic with twenty letters written by Alexander Hamilton; a handheld address to Congress by President George Washington; a long-lost Gold Medal that belonged to an American President; a note that Winston Churchill wrote to his captor when he was a young POW in South Africa; paperwork signed and filled out by Amelia Earhart when she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic; an American flag carried to the moon and back by Neil Armstrong; an unpublished letter written by Albert Einstein, discussing his theory of relativity. Each day, people from all over the world contact Nathan Raab for help understanding what they have, what it might be worth, and how to sell it. The Raab Collection&’s president, Nathan is a modern-day treasure hunter and one of the world&’s most prominent dealers of historical artifacts. Most weeks, he travels the country, scours auctions, or fields phone calls and emails from people who think they may have found something of note in a grandparent&’s attic. In The Hunt for History, &“Raab takes us on a wild hunt and deliciously opens up numerous hidden crevices of history&” (Jay Winik, author of April 1865)—spotting a letter from British officials that secured the Rosetta Stone; discovering a piece of the first electric cable laid by Edison; restoring a fragmented letter from Andrew Jackson that led to the infamous Trail of Tears; and locating copies of missing audio that had been recorded on Air Force One as the plane brought JFK&’s body back to Washington. Whether it&’s the first report of Napoleon&’s death or an unpublished letter penned by Albert Einstein to a curious soldier, every document and artifact Raab uncovers comes with a spellbinding story—and often offers new insights into a life we thought we knew.Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy
Par Damien Lewis. 2022
The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress.…
Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all &“negroes and Jews.&” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer&’s life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers—a cover for her spying work—Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served—the US, France, and Britain. Drawing on a plethora of new historical material and rigorous research, including previously undisclosed letters and journals, Lewis upends the conventional story of Josephine Baker, explaining why she fully deserves her unique place in the French Panthéon.The End of White Christian America
Par Robert P. Jones. 2016
&“Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year&” (The New York Times Book Review). *Winner of the Grawemeyer…
Award in Religion* Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation. Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them. Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t. “Jones’s analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum” (Library Journal).Nationalism in nineteenth-century America operated through a collection of symbols, signifiers citizens could invest with meaning and understanding. In Confederate…
Visions, Ian Binnington examines the roots of Confederate nationalism by analyzing some of its most important symbols: Confederate constitutions, treasury notes, wartime literature, and the role of the military in symbolizing the Confederate nation.Nationalisms tend to construct glorified pasts, idyllic pictures of national strength, honor, and unity, based on visions of what should have been rather than what actually was. Binnington considers the ways in which the Confederacy was imagined by antebellum Southerners employing intertwined mythic concepts—the "Worthy Southron," the "Demon Yankee," the "Silent Slave"—and a sense of shared history that constituted a distinctive Confederate Americanism. The Worthy Southron, the constructed Confederate self, was imagined as a champion of liberty, counterposed to the Demon Yankee other, a fanatical abolitionist and enemy of Liberty. The Silent Slave was a companion to the vocal Confederate self, loyal and trusting, reliable and honest.The creation of American national identity was fraught with struggle, political conflict, and bloody Civil War. Confederate Visions examines literature, newspapers and periodicals, visual imagery, and formal state documents to explore the origins and development of wartime Confederate nationalism.Revised and updated to include the winner of the 2020 presidential election, this photo-filled and fact-packed book is a timely…
must-have reference. National Geographic presents the 45 individuals who have led the U.S. in this up-to-date, authoritative, and lavishly illustrated family, school, and library reference. Key features include: Information about the 2021 president-elect and the 2020 election results as of the publication date A brand-new thematic spread on the impeachment process and its history Revised terminology around the language of slavery and analysis of early presidents who benefitted from and relied on enslaved labor Comprehensive profiles of all the former presidents along with timelines and descriptions of crucial events during their terms Thematic spreads covering a variety of topics from the history of voting rights to how to write a letter to the president Full-page portraits, famous quotes, and fascinating facts to help kids get to know each leader A fascinating read and excellent reference for students and kids of all ages!The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically chronicles his hilarious adventures in attempting to follow…
the original meaning of the Constitution, as he searches for answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America&’s foundational document?&“I didn&’t know how I learned so much while laughing so hard.&”—Andy BorowitzA.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the on-going debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution.In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and—because women were not allowed to sign contracts— feebly attempting to take over his wife&’s day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations.The book blends unforgettable adventures—delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, applying for a Letter of Marque to become a legal pirate for the government, and battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group—with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides. Jacobs dives deep into originalism and living constitutionalism, the two rival ways of interpreting the document.Much like he did with the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs provides a crash course on our Constitution as he experiences the benefits and perils of living like it&’s the 1790s. He relishes, for instance, the slow thinking of the era, free from social media alerts. But also discovers the progress we&’ve made since 1789 when married women couldn&’t own property.Now more than ever, Americans need to understand the meaning and value of the Constitution. As politicians and Supreme Court Justices wage a high-stakes battle over how literally we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs provides an entertaining yet illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.Big Red's Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and a Story of Race in America
Par Mark Hertsgaard. 2024
The moving story of a New Orleans woman who fought for justice and her community even amidst one of the…
city's darkest moments.Mark Hertsgaard and Deborah Cotton were strangers to one another, united only by a love of jazz and New Orlean&’s distinctive Second Line tradition. And then, during a Mother&’s Day parade, they were thrown together when two gunmen fired into the crowd… Deborah Cotton—known to all as Big Red—was among the most grievously injured. She is the driving force of this deeply reported parable of two of America&’s most deeply rooted issues. A racial justice activist in her forties who was born to a Black father and a white mother, Cotton was one of twenty people—including the author—shot in the biggest mass shooting in the modern history of New Orleans. Once one of the largest slave ports, the city has long been a vortex of violence and racism. From her apparent deathbed, Big Red shocked observers by urging mercy for two young Black men accused of the attack. &“Racism can kill Black people even when a Black finger pulls the trigger,&” she tells Hertsgaard, who, she later said, is &“called&” to investigate what actually happened, and why. Charismatic, complicated, and struck down in her prime, Big Red and her heroic life will captivate readers. In the wake of the shooting, she never stopped fighting as she sought to get to the core of this uniquely American maelstrom. Big Red's Mercy is an illuminating narrative that provides a human and unflinching look at modern America.The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President
Par Edward F. O'Keefe. 2024
A spirited and poignant family love story, revealing how an icon of rugged American masculinity was profoundly shaped by the…
women in his life, especially his mother, sisters, and wives.Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his senior thesis for Harvard in 1880 that women ought to be paid equal to men and have the option of keeping their maiden names upon marriage. It&’s little surprise he&’d be a feminist, given the women he grew up with. His mother, Mittie, was witty and decisive, a Southern belle raising four young children in New York while her husband spent long stretches away with the Union Army. Theodore&’s college sweetheart and first wife, Alice—so vivacious she was known as Sunshine—steered her beau away from science (he&’d roam campus with taxidermy specimen in his pockets) and towards politics. Older sister Bamie would soon become her brother&’s key political strategist and advisor; journalists called her Washington, DC, home &“the little White House.&” Younger sister Conie served as her brother&’s press secretary before the role existed, slipping stories of his heroics in Cuba and his rambunctious home life to reporters to create the legend of the Rough Rider we remember today. And Edith—Theodore&’s childhood playmate and second wife—would elevate the role of presidential spouse to an American institution, curating both the White House and her husband&’s legacy. A dazzling and lyrical look at one America&’s most significant presidents as we&’ve never seen him before, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt celebrates five extraordinary yet unsung women who opened the door to the American Century and pushed Theodore Roosevelt through it.