U.S. History
Showing 33–64 of 116 results
-
Shortfall
Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking$26.95The rollicking true story of a 1930s version of Bernie Madoff—and the building and loan crash he helped precipitate—in a wonderful work of narrative nonfiction by the Gustavus Myers book award winnerShortfall opens with a surprise discovery in an attic—boxes filled with letters and documents hidden for more than seventy years—and launches into a fast-paced story that uncovers the dark secrets in Echols’s family—an upside-down version of the building and loan story at the center of Frank Capra’s 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. In a narrative filled with colorful characters and profound insights into the American past, Shortfall is also the essential backstory to more recent financial crises, from the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and 1990s to the subprime collapse of 2008.
Shortfall chronicles the collapse of the building and loan industry during the Great Depression—a story told in microcosm through the firestorm that erupted in one hard-hit American city during the early 1930s. Over a six-month period in 1932, all four of the building and loan associations in Colorado Springs, Colorado, crashed in an awful domino-like fashion, leaving some of the town’s citizens destitute. The largest of these associations was owned by author Alice Echols’s grandfather, Walter Davis, who absconded with millions of dollars in a case that riveted the national media. This book tells the dramatic story of his rise and shocking fall.
-
Able Archer 83
The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War$31.99In November 1983, Soviet nuclear forces went on high alert. After months nervously watching increasingly assertive NATO military posturing, Soviet intelligence agencies in Western Europe received flash telegrams reporting alarming activity on U.S. bases. In response, the Soviets began planning for a countdown to a nuclear first strike by NATO on Eastern Europe. And then Able Archer 83, a vast NATO war game exercise that modeled a Soviet attack on NATO allies, ended.
What the West didn’t know at the time was that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real and were actively preparing for a surprise missile attack from NATO. This close scrape with Armageddon was largely unknown until last October when the U.S. government released a ninety-four-page presidential analysis of Able Archer that the National Security Archive had spent over a decade trying to declassify. Able Archer 83 is based upon more than a thousand pages of declassified documents that archive staffer Nate Jones has pried loose from several U.S. government agencies and British archives, as well as from formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, vividly recreating the atmosphere that nearly unleashed nuclear war.
-
A People’s History of the American Revolution
How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence$19.95 – $30.00“The best single-volume history of the Revolution I have read.” —Howard Zinn
Upon its initial publication, Ray Raphael’s magisterial A People’s History of the American Revolution was hailed by NPR’s Fresh Air as “relentlessly aggressive and unsentimental.” With impeccable skill, Raphael presented a wide array of fascinating scholarship within a single volume, employing a bottom-up approach that has served as a revelation.
A People’s History of the American Revolution draws upon diaries, personal letters, and other Revolutionary-era treasures, weaving a thrilling “you are there” narrative—“a tapestry that uses individual experiences to illustrate the larger stories”. Raphael shifts the focus away from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to the slaves they owned, the Indians they displaced, and the men and boys who did the fighting (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
This “remarkable perspective on a familiar part of American history” helps us appreciate more fully the incredible diversity of the American Revolution (Kirkus Reviews).
“Through letters, diaries, and other accounts, Raphael shows these individuals—white women and men of the farming and laboring classes, free and enslaved African Americans, Native Americans, loyalists, and religious pacifists—acting for or against the Revolution and enduring a war that compounded the difficulties of everyday life.” —Library Journal
“A tour de force . . . Ray Raphael has probably altered the way in which future historians will see events.” —The Sunday Times -
Down for the Count
Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America$18.95 – $18.99The updated edition of Steal This Vote—a rollicking history of US voter suppression and fraud from Jacksonian democracy to Citizens United and beyond.
In Down for the Count, award-winning journalist Andrew Gumbel explores the tawdry history of elections in the United States. From Jim Crow to Tammany Hall to the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, it is a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the Supreme Court. Gumbel then uses this history to explain why America is now experiencing the biggest backslide in voting rights in more than a century.
First published in 2005 as Steal This Vote, this thoroughly revised and updated edition reveals why America faces so much trouble running clean, transparent elections. And it demonstrates how the partisan battles now raging over voter IDs, campaign spending, and minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostility to the very notion of representative democracy.
Interviewing Democrats, Republicans, and a range of voting rights activists, Gumbel offers an engaging and accessible analysis of how our democratic integrity is so often corrupted by racism, money, and power. In an age of high-stakes electoral combat, billionaire-backed candidacies, and bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, this book is more important than ever.
“In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel . . . traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present . . . [the issues he] so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy.” —Publishers Weekly, on Steal This Vote -
The Spirit of 74
How the American Revolution Began$26.95 – $26.99How ordinary people went from resistance to revolution: “[A] concise, lively narrative . . . the authors expertly build tension.” —Publishers Weekly
Americans know about the Boston Tea Party and “the shot heard ’round the world,” but sixteen months divided these two iconic events, a period that has nearly been lost to history. The Spirit of ’74 fills in this gap in our nation’s founding narrative, showing how in these mislaid months, step by step, real people made a revolution.
After the Tea Party, Parliament not only shut down a port but also revoked the sacred Massachusetts charter. Completely disenfranchised, citizens rose up as a body and cast off British rule everywhere except in Boston, where British forces were stationed. A “Spirit of ’74” initiated the American Revolution, much as the better-known “Spirit of ’76” sparked independence. Redcoats marched on Lexington and Concord to take back a lost province, but they encountered Massachusetts militiamen who had trained for months to protect the revolution they had already made.
The Spirit of ’74 places our founding moment in a rich new historical context, both changing and deepening its meaning for all Americans.
-
Constitutional Myths
What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right$17.95 – $26.95Americans on both sides of the aisle love to reference the Constitution as the ultimate source of truth. But which truth? What did the framers really have in mind? In a book that author R.B. Bernstein calls “essential reading,” acclaimed historian Ray Raphael places the Constitution in its historical context, dispensing little-known facts and debunking popular preconceived notions.
For each myth, Raphael first notes the kernel of truth it represents, since most myths have some basis in fact. Then he presents a big “BUT”—the larger context that reveals what the myth distorts. What did the framers see as the true role of government? What did they think of taxes? At the Constitutional Convention, how did they mix principles with politics? Did James Madison really father the Constitution? Did the framers promote a Bill of Rights? Do the so-called Federalist Papers reveal the Constitution’s inner meaning?
An authoritative and entertaining book, which “should appeal equally to armchair historians and professionals in the field” (Booklist), Constitutional Myths reveals what our founding document really says and how we should apply it today. -
A War Like No Other
The Constitution in a Time of Terror$27.95 – $27.99“A scholarly and cautionary collection of essays focusing on what [Fiss] views as the post-9/11 debasements of key provisions of the Constitution” (Kirkus Reviews).
A leading legal scholar for more than thirty years, Owen Fiss’s focus was civil procedure and equal protection. But when the War on Terror began to shroud legal proceedings in secrecy, he realized the bulwarks of procedure that shield the individual from the awesome power of the state were dissolving, perhaps irreparably, and that it was time for him to speak up.
The ten chapters in this volume cover the major legal battlefronts of the War on Terror from Guantánamo to drones, with a focus on the constitutional implications of those new tools. The underlying theme is Fiss’s concern for the offense done to the US Constitution by the administrative and legislative branches of government in the name of public safety and the refusal of the judiciary to hold the government accountable. A War Like No Other is an essential intellectual foundation for all concerned about constitutional rights and the law in a new age.
“Fiss is one of our most clear-eyed and hard-edged constitutional analysts, and this critique of the damage done to our constitutional heritage in the name of waging a war on terror is the most devastating I have seen.” —Stanley N. Katz, director of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies
“An essential contribution from one of the country’s foremost legal scholars.” —Jonathan Hafetz, former senior attorney for the National Security project of the ACLU
“Thought-provoking.” —Publishers Weekly
-
Democracy in the Dark
The Seduction of Government Secrecy$26.99 – $27.95“A timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in” (The Washington Post).
From Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe to the National Security Agency’s massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government’s modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the US Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI’s effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide; the CIA’s enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA’s thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran–Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: How much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden.
Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz’s Unchecked and Unbalanced, cowritten with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy.
“[An] important new book . . . Carefully researched, engagingly written stories of government secrecy gone amiss.” —The American Prospect -
Sherman’s Ghosts
Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War$26.95 – $26.99This “thought-provoking” military history considers the influence of General Sherman’s Civil War tactics on American conflicts through the twentieth century (The New York Times).
“To know what war is, one should follow our tracks,” Gen. William T. Sherman once wrote to his wife, describing the devastation left by his armies in Georgia. Sherman’s Ghosts is an investigation of those tracks, as well as those left across the globe by the American military in the 150 years since Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea.”
Sherman’s Ghosts opens with an epic retelling of General Sherman’s fateful decision to terrorize the South’s civilian population in order to break the back of the Confederacy. Acclaimed journalist and historian Matthew Carr exposes how this strategy, which Sherman called “indirect warfare,” became the central preoccupation of war planners in the twentieth century and beyond. He offers a lucid assessment of the impact Sherman’s slash-and-burn policies have had on subsequent wars and military conflicts, including World War II and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and even Iraq and Afghanistan.
In riveting accounts of military campaigns and in the words of American soldiers and strategists, Carr finds ample evidence of Sherman’s long shadow. Sherman’s Ghosts is a rare reframing of how we understand our violent history and a call to action for those who hope to change it.
-
Remembering Jim Crow
African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South$19.95 – $20.99A timely paperback reissue of the stunning, prize-winning portrait of the Jim Crow South through unique first-person accounts
Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years through first-person interviews carefully collected by researchers at Duke University’s Behind the Veil project. Newly relevant today as Americans reckon with the legacies of slavery and strive for racial equality, Remembering Jim Crow provides vivid, compelling accounts by men and women from all walks of life, who tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression.
“A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance” (Library Journal), Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how Black Southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. Collectively, these narratives illuminate individual and community survival and tell a powerful story of the American past that is crucial for us to remember as we grapple with Jim Crow’s legacies in the present.
-
Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus
What Your History Books Got Wrong$44.99Some myths don’t die, and lies are still being told about Christopher Columbus: that he “discovered” the Americas (not only was the land familiar to native inhabitants, but it had also been visited before by Europeans), that the land was sparsely populated by native people (there were fourteen million inhabitants in 1492), that those people were primitive (Europeans learned a lot and gained technology and agricultural skill from Native Americans), and that they submitted to Columbus’s “God-like” authority (they submitted to the deadly smallpox and bubonic plague that Columbus’s crew imported from Europe).Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus disproves the myths about Columbus still enshrined in American textbooks with quotations from primary source material that sets the record straight. The poster and accompanying 48–;page paperback book sum up the mistellings—and reveal the real story—in a graphically appealing and accessible format that shows the degree to which textbooks have “lied” by knowingly substituting crowd-pleasing myths for grim and gruesome historical evidence.
-
Founding Myths
Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past$18.99 – $21.99The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that showed “why we must move past historical nonsense so that a truer, more democratic national record can emerge” (School Library Journal)
Originally published to universal acclaim, award-winning historian Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths has since established itself as a landmark of historical myth-busting. With Raphael’s trademark wit and flair, Founding Myths exposed the errors and inventions in America’s most cherished tales, from Paul Revere’s famous ride to Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. For the thousands who have been captivated by Raphael’s eye-opening accounts, history has never been the same.
In this revised tenth-anniversary edition, Raphael revisits the original myths and further explores their evolution over time, uncovering new stories and peeling back new layers of misinformation. This new edition also examines the highly politicized debates over America’s past, as well as how our approach to history in school reinforces rather than corrects historical mistakes.
A book that “explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation” (National Public Radio), this revised edition of Founding Myths will be a welcome resource for anyone seeking to separate historical fact from fiction.
-
Killing Machine
The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare$26.95With Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, many believed the United States had entered a new era: Obama came into office with high expectations that he would end the war in Iraq and initiate a new foreign policy that would reestablish American values and the United States’ leadership role in the world.In this shattering new assessment, historian Lloyd C. Gardner argues that, despite cosmetic changes, Obama has simply built on the expanding power base of presidential power that reaches back across decades and through multiple administrations.
The new president ended the “enhanced interrogation” policy of the Bush administration but did not abandon the concept of preemption. Obama withdrew from Iraq but has institutionalized drone warfare—including the White House’s central role in selecting targets. What has come into view, Gardner argues, is the new face of American presidential power: high–tech, secretive, global, and lethal.
Killing Machine skillfully narrates the drawdown in Iraq, the counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan, the rise of the use of drones, and targeted assassinations from al-Awlaki to Bin Laden—drawing from the words of key players in these actions as well as their major public critics. With unparalleled historical perspective, Gardner’s book is the new touchstone for understanding not only the Obama administration but the American presidency itself.
-
A People’s Art History of the United States
250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements$21.99 – $35.00Inspired by the pathbreaking work of Howard Zinn, A People’s Art History of the United States is propelled by a democratic vision of art, showing that art doesn’t just belong within the confines of museums and archives. In fact, art is created every day in the street and all around us, and everyone deserves to be a part of it.Called “important” by renowned art critic Lucy Lippard, A People’s Art History of the United States introduces us to key works of American radical art alongside dramatic retellings of the histories that inspired them. Richly illustrated with more than two hundred black-and-white images, this book by acclaimed artist and author Nicolas Lampert is the go-to resource for everyone who wants to know what activist art can and does do for our society.
Spanning the abolitionist movement, early labor movements, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and up to the present antiglobalization movement and beyond, A People’s Art History of the United States is a wonderful read as well as a brilliant toolkit for today’s artists and activists to adapt past tactics to the present, utilizing art and media as a form of civil disobedience.
-
Wrong Turn
Americas Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency$24.95 – $24.99A searing indictment of US strategy in Afghanistan from a distinguished military leader and West Point military historian—“A remarkable book” (National Review).
In 2008, Col. Gian Gentile exposed a growing rift among military intellectuals with an article titled “Misreading the Surge Threatens U.S. Army’s Conventional Capabilities,” that appeared in World Politics Review. While the years of US strategy in Afghanistan had been dominated by the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN), Gentile and a small group of dissident officers and defense analysts began to question the necessity and efficacy of COIN—essentially armed nation-building—in achieving the United States’ limited core policy objective in Afghanistan: the destruction of Al Qaeda.
Drawing both on the author’s experiences as a combat battalion commander in the Iraq War and his research into the application of counterinsurgency in a variety of historical contexts, Wrong Turn is a brilliant summation of Gentile’s views of the failures of COIN, as well as a trenchant reevaluation of US operations in Afghanistan.
“Gentile is convinced that Obama’s ‘surge’ in Afghanistan can’t work. . . . And, if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats . . . who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare . . . may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.” —The New Republic -
After bin Laden
Al Qaeda, the Next Generation$27.95 – $27.99An “intelligent and fascinatingly readable” examination of Al Qaeda after the death of its longtime leader, by the renowned Arab world journalist (Pat Lancaster, editor in chief of Middle East Magazine).
Osama bin Laden is dead, yet Al Qaeda remains the CIA’s number one threat. Since the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and the US military’s subsequent strikes, the organization has evolved into a much more complex and far-flung entity. This richly documented account of Al Qaeda moves well beyond the headlines to offer readers a deeper understanding of the organization’s aims, strategies, and fortunes in a new era of conflict with the United States and the Western powers.
Drawing on firsthand accounts and interviews with uniquely well-placed sources within Al Qaeda, noted journalist and expert Abdel Bari Atwan investigates the movement’s new internal dynamics, how it survives financially, and how its political appeal has changed dramatically following the Arab Spring. Atwan profiles the next generation of leaders and explores both the new methods they embrace—especially on the digital battlefield—as well as the global range of their operations and local variations in Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere.
“Abdel Bari Atwan has long been one of the sharpest commentators about Al Qaeda and the Middle East.” —Peter Bergen, author of Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Osama bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abottabad
“A sobering, intensive report.” —Kirkus Reviews
-
A People’s History of the U.S. Military
Ordinary Soldiers Reflect on Their Experience of War, from the American Revolution to Afghanistan$19.95 – $29.95Military service can shatter or give meaning to lives–it is rarely a neutral encounter—and it has resulted in a rich outpouring of personal testimony from the men and women who have literally placed their lives on the line. “A ‘real’ love letter to our military [that] will prove enlightening, even galvanizing” (Dissent), A People’s History of the U.S. Military tells the captivating narratives of common soldiers, sampled from over three centuries of letters, diaries, and memoirs as well as audio recordings, films, and blogs. The often dramatic, sometimes very raw, and always richly textured first–person accounts collected in this book cover a wide range of perspectives, from ardent patriots to disillusioned cynics, barely literate farm boys to urbane college graduates, scions of founding families to recent immigrants, and women disguising themselves as men in order to serve their country to African Americans fighting for their freedom through military service.Praised as “compact and complete” (Booklist), “an excellent educational tool” (Publishers Weekly), and “a useful, unsettling, bottom–up history of America’s wars that emphasizes the soldiers’ mistreatment, suffering, and injustice” (Kirkus Reviews), A People’s History of the U.S. Military has already become a major new touchstone for our understanding of American military service.
-
The Indispensable Zinn
The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian"$19.95 – $19.99A “well-chosen anthology of the radical historian’s prodigious output,” from A People’s History of the United States and lesser known sources (Kirkus Reviews).
When Howard Zinn died in early 2010, millions of Americans mourned the loss of one of the nation’s foremost intellectual and political guides; a historian, activist, and truth-teller who, in the words of the New York Times’s Bob Herbert, “peel[ed] back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long.”
A collection designed to highlight Zinn’s essential writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his inspiring writings on the civil rights movement, and the full text of his celebrated play, Marx in Soho. Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection.
With a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an afterword from Zinn’s former Spellman College student and longtime friend, Alice Walker, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past,” and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone coming to Zinn’s essential body of work for the first time (Noam Chomsky). -
Studs Terkel’s Chicago
$19.99 – $30.00In a blend of history, memoir, and photography, the Pulitzer Prize winner paints a vivid portrait of this extraordinary American city.
Chicago was home to the country’s first skyscraper (a ten-story building built in 1884), and marks the start of the famed Route 66. It is also the birthplace of the remote control (Zenith) and the car radio (Motorola), and the first major American city to elect a woman (Jane Byrne) and then an African American man (Harold Washington) as mayor.
Its literary and journalistic history is just as dazzling, and includes Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and Sara Paretsky. From Al Capone to the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Chicago, in the words of Studs Terkel, “has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast woman—a reputation.”
Chicago was also home to Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian, who moved to Chicago in 1922 as an eight-year-old and who would make it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. This book is a splendid evocation of Studs Terkel’s hometown in all its glory—and all its imperfection. -
Stayin’ Alive
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class$23.95 – $28.00Winner of the 2011 Merle Curti award, an epic account that recasts the 1970s as the key turning point in modern U.S. history, from the renowned historian
A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin’ Alive is prizewinning historian Jefferson Cowie’s remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book—part political intrigue, part labor history, with large doses of American music, film and television lore—Cowie, with “an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America’s fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.
-
A People’s History of World War II
The Worlds Most Destructive Conflict, As Told By the People Who Lived Through It$18.95The most destructive war in human history, World War II continues to generate an astonishingly rich trove of historical material, writings, and first-person recollections, which are essential to any appreciation of this most pivotal of historical events.
A People’s History of World War II brings the full range of human experience during World War II to life through some of the most vivid accounts and images available anywhere. This concise and accessible volume includes first-person interviews by Studs Terkel; rare archival photographs from the Office of War Information collection; propaganda comics from Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss); narratives of wartime experiences from writers including historian Howard Zinn, civil rights activist Robert L. Carter, and celebrated French author Marguerite Duras; and selections from the writings of some of the world’s leading historians of the war, including John Dower, Philippe Burrin, David Wyman, and Eric Hobsbawm. -
After the Fall
New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years that Followed$26.95 – $26.99New Yorkers remember 9/11 in this landmark volume of oral history commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks—A “staggering book of living memory” (Booklist, starred review).
Within days of September 11, 2001, Columbia’s Oral History Research Office deployed interviewers across the city to collect the accounts and observations of hundreds of people from a diverse mix of New York neighborhoods and backgrounds. With follow-up interviews spanning years, the project produced a deep and revealing look at how the attacks changed individual lives and communities in New York City.
After the Fall presents a selection of these fascinating testimonies, with heartbreaking and enlightening stories from a broad range of New Yorkers. The interviews include first-responders, taxi drivers, school teachers, artists, religious leaders, immigrants, and others who were interviewed numerous times since the 2001 attacks. The result is a remarkable time-lapse account of the city as it changed in the wake of 9/11, one that will resonate powerfully with New Yorkers and millions of others who continue to feel the impact of the most damaging foreign attack to ever occur inside the United States. -
A People’s History of Poverty in America
$21.95Tens of millions of Americans currently live in poverty, more and more of them in extreme poverty. But the words we use to describe them tend to obscure rather than illuminate the human lives and real-life stories behind the statistics.
A “sympathetic social history that allows poor people, past and present, to tell their own remarkably similar stories” (Booklist), A People’s History of Poverty in America movingly brings to life poor people’s everyday battles for dignity and respect in the face of the judgment, control, and disdain that are all too often the price they must pay for charity and government aid.
Through prodigious research, Stephen Pimpare has unearthed poignant and often surprising testimonies and accounts that range from the early days of the United States to the complex social and economic terrain of the present. A work of sweeping analysis, A People’s History of Poverty in America reminds us that poverty is not in itself a moral failure, though our failure to understand it may well be. -
An Army of Phantoms
American Movies and the Making of the Cold War$19.99 – $29.95Acclaimed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context,” An Army of Phantoms is a “delightful” and “amazing” (Dissent) work of film history and cultural criticism by J. Hoberman, one of the foremost film critics writing today, addressing the dynamic synergy of American politics and American popular culture.
By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but what played out behind it” (The American Scholar), Hoberman orchestrates a colorful, sometimes surreal pageant wherein Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe. From cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York). -
Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War
The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Americas Leading Comic Artists$21.95 – $29.95Dedicated readers and fans of Theodor Seuss Geisel, or Dr. Seuss, know of Seuss’s fascinating, long-forgotten career as a political cartoonist for the New York daily newspaper PM during World War II. Dr. Seuss, however, was only one of a number of distinguished cartoonists whose work appeared in PM. In Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War, we discover an astonishing treasure trove of over three hundred incisive political cartoons by Seuss as well as a cohort of other legendary cartoonists of the time, including Saul Steinberg, Al Hirschfeld, Arthur Szyk, Carl Rose, and Mischa Richter. These fascinating cartoons offer a totally different picture of the war, both at home and abroad. Sure to fascinate and surprise readers across the generations, Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War lets readers “time travel to a remarkable time when editorial cartoons really mattered” (America in WWII).
-
A Bomb in Every Issue
How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America$17.95 – $25.95A Bomb in Every Issue recounts the rise and fall of Ramparts magazine, which, for nearly a decade in the 1960s, was the nation’s premier leftist publication, combining radical content, sophisticated design, and public relations savvy to shape political journalism for a generation. Featuring interviews with David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Adam Hochschild, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Robert Scheer, Warren Hinckle, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Seymour Hersh, William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, Brit Hume, Bobby Seale, Howard Zinn, and others, A Bomb in Every Issue situates the magazine amidst student movements in Berkeley, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the acid-inflected Summer of Love in San Francisco while assessing the magazine’s impact on national media and politics. -
Founders
The People Who Brought You a Nation$21.95 – $29.95Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison—together they are best known as an intimate cadre of daring, brilliant men credited with our nation’s founding. But does this group tell the whole story? In his widely praised new history of the roots of American patriotism, celebrated author Ray Raphael expands the historical canvas to reveal an entire generation of patriots who pushed for independence, fought a war, and set the United States on its course—giving us “an evangelizing introduction to the American Revolution” (Booklist).
Called “entertaining yet informative” by Library Journal, Founders brings to life seven historical figures whose stories anchor a sweeping yet intimate history of the Founding Era, from the beginnings of unrest in 1761 through the passage of the Bill of Rights thirty years later. Here we follow the intertwined lives of George Washington and a private soldier in his army. America’s richest merchant, who rescued the nation from bankruptcy, goes head to head with a peripatetic revolutionary who incited rebellion in seven states. Rounding out the company is a richly nuanced cast that includes a common village blacksmith, a conservative enslaver with an abolitionist son, and Mercy Otis Warren, the most politically engaged woman of the time.
A master narrative with unprecedented historical scope, Founders will forever change our image of this most crucial moment in America’s past.
-
1877
America's Year of Living Violently1877 was the year many Americans wanted to forget. In the messy aftermath of the Civil War, economic depression, white supremacy, labor unrest, and a factionalized political system produced a period of unprecedented violence and upheaval in American life. This “solid, deeply informed history” (Publishers Weekly) brilliantly recaptures this tumultuous time, revealing that the fires of that pivotal year also fueled a hothouse of cultural and intellectual innovation. Best of all, historian Michael A. Bellesiles tells the story of 1877 not just through dramatic events, but also through the lives of famous and little-known Americans alike: Mark Twain, Crazy Horse, Susan B. Anthony; the detective Allan Pinkerton and President Rutherford B.Hayes; the black poet Albery Allson Whitman and the pioneer in women’s health issues Mary Putman Jacobi; Ida B. Wells; and Billy the kid. 1877‘s account of America at the dawn of its modern era will forever alter our understanding of the forces that shape our politics, our culture, and our national identity.
-
Bitterly Divided
The South's Inner Civil War$19.95 – $27.95The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review
Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause.
“This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review -
The Empire Strikes Out
$27.95 -
Lift Every Voice
The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement$26.00 – $29.95An epic narrative of the struggle against injustice, hailed as “the definitive history of the NAACP” by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A “civil rights Hall of Fame” (Kirkus) that was published to remarkable praise in conjunction with the NAACP’s Centennial Celebration, Lift Every Voice is a momentous history of the struggle for civil rights told through the stories of men and women who fought inescapable racial barriers in the North as well as the South—keeping the promise of democracy alive from the earliest days of the twentieth century to the triumphs of the 1950s and 1960s.
Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. In the critical postwar era, following a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow.
A sweeping and dramatic story woven deep into the fabric of American history—”history that helped shape America’s consciousness, if not its soul” (Booklist)—Lift Every Voice offers a timeless lesson on how people, without access to the traditional levers of power, can create change under seemingly impossible odds.
-
Studs Terkel’s Working
A Graphic Adaptation$22.95Comics impresario Harvey Pekar brings to vivid life Terkel’s bestselling masterpiece, with comics by America’s leading illustrators
Ever since Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel’s Working first documented American workers’ hopes and dreams, that “deep penetration of American thought and feeling” (Los Angeles Times) has sold over a million copies, captivating readers with accounts of how their fellow citizens make a living.
A masterpiece of words, Working is now adapted into comic-book form by Harvey Pekar, the blue-collar antihero of his American Book Award–winning comics series American Splendor. Brilliantly scripting and arranging Terkel’s interviews, Pekar collaborates with established comics veterans and some of the comic underground’s brightest new talent, selected by editor Paul Buhle. Readers will find a visual palette of influences from Mexican, African American, superhero, and feminist art, each piece an electric melding of artist and subject. This is a book that will both delight Terkel fans and introduce his work to a whole new audience—a fitting tribute to an American legend.
Showing 33–64 of 116 results
