U.S. History
Showing 65–96 of 150 results
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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.
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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. -
A Saving Remnant
$19.95 – $27.95From the award-winning biographer and historian, a brilliant dual biography of two of the most fascinating twentieth-century political activistsHailed as “remarkable” and “a must read” by Choice, A Saving Remnant is prizewinning historian and biographer Martin Duberman’s deeply revealing dual portrait that explores the fascinating political and social lives of two integral and captivating figures of the twentieth-century American left. Barbara Deming, a feminist, writer, and abidingly nonviolent activist, was an out lesbian from the age of sixteen. The first openly gay man to run for president on the Socialist Party ticket, David McReynolds was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War and was among the first activists to publicly burn a draft card.
Duberman brings the stories of a pivotal era vividly and movingly to life with an extraordinary cast of intellectuals, artists, and activists, including Adrienne Rich, Bayard Rustin, Allen Ginsberg, and a young Alvin Ailey. Telling a complex narrative, “Duberman has made it simply and brilliantly clear” (Edmund White, author of City Boy) as he deftly weaves together the connected stories of these two compelling figures in this beautiful, memorable book.
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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).
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Swallow
Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them$18.95 – $27.95In this fascinating and lyrical book, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from the sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy. The Mütter Museum’s Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection, a cabinet filled with thousands of items that have been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design, sets the stage for award-winning author Mary Cappello’s moving investigative portrait of Dr. Chevalier Jackson (1865-1958), his cosmology of objects, and the lives he saved. Its own uncanny, deeply rewarding assemblage, Swallow brings together the complex physiology of the human swallow and the menace of a button box; a willed ingestion of non-nutritive things that is little understood and a social history of hunger; the humanitarian mission that bred the Federal Caustic Poison Act of 1927 and a crusade to make the world “foreign body conscious.” -
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. -
The Freedoms We Lost
Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America$25.95A brilliant and original examination of American freedom as it existed before the Revolution, from the Smithsonian’s curator of social history.
The American Revolution is widely understood—by schoolchildren and citizens alike—as having ushered in “freedom” as we know it, a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view, historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American subjects of the British king—that is, American freedom before the Revolution. The Freedoms We Lost recovers a world of common people regularly serving on juries, joining crowds that enforced (or opposed) the king’s edicts, and supplying community enforcement of laws in an era when there were no professional police.
The Freedoms We Lost challenges the unquestioned assumption that the American patriots simply introduced freedom where the king had once reigned. Rather, Smith shows that they relied on colonial-era traditions of political participation to drive the Revolution forward—and eventually, betrayed these same traditions as leading patriots gravitated toward “monied men” and elites who would limit the role of common men in the new democracy. By the end of the 1780s, she shows, Americans discovered that forms of participation once proper to subjects of Britain were inappropriate—even impermissible—to citizens of the United States.
In a narrative that counters nearly every textbook account of America’s founding era, The Freedoms We Lost challenges us to think about what it means to be free. -
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.
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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.
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The Citizen Machine
Governing by Television in 1950s America$28.95The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television’s formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV’s potential to mold the right kind of citizen.
Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape. -
Not Written in Stone
Learning and Unlearning American History Through 200 Years of Textbooks$22.50A teaching edition of the “thought-provoking study” History in the Making, which explores how our view of the history changes over time (Library Journal).
Kyle Ward’s celebrated History in the Making struck a chord among readers of popular history. “Interesting and useful,” according to Booklist, the book “convincingly illustrates how texts change as social and political attitudes evolve.” With excerpts from history textbooks that span two hundred years, History in the Making looks at the different ways textbooks from different eras interpret and present the same historical events.
Not Written in Stone offers an abridged and annotated version of History in the Making specifically designed for classroom use. In each section, Ward provides an overview, questions for discussions and analysis, and then a fascinating chronological sampling of textbook excerpts which reveal the striking differences between textbooks over time.
An exciting new teaching tool, Not Written in Stone is destined to become a staple of classroom teaching about the American past.
“Students, teachers, and general readers will learn more about the past from these passages than from any single work, however current, that purports to monopolize the truth.” —Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths
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Protest Nation
Words That Inspired A Century of American Radicalism$17.95Historic writings by socialists, LGBT activists, environmentalists, and more: “An extraordinary collection of the voices of American dissidents.” —Howard Zinn
Protest Nation is a guide to the speeches, letters, broadsides, essays, and manifestos that form the backbone of the American radical tradition in the twentieth century. With examples from socialists, feminists, union organizers, civil-rights workers, gay and lesbian activists, and environmentalists that have served as beacons for millions, the volume also includes brief introductory essays by the editors that provide a rich biographical and historical context for each selection. Included are:
*a fiery speech by socialist Eugene V. Debs
*an astonishing treatise on animal liberation by Peter Singer
*an excerpt from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
*Harvey Milk’s “The Hope Speech”
*the original Black Panther Party Platform
*Peter Singer’s astonishing treatise on animal liberation
*plus writings from Upton Sinclair, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, César Chávez, and more -
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 Long Road to Baghdad
A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present$18.95 – $27.95The diplomatic historian examines the ideas, policies and actions that led from Vietnam to the Iraq War and America’s disastrous role in the Middle East.
“What will stand out one day is not George W. Bush’s uniqueness but the continuum from the Carter doctrine to ‘shock and awe’ in 2003.” —from The Long Road to Baghdad
In this revealing narrative of America’s path to its “new longest war,” one of the nation’s premier diplomatic historians excavates the deep historical roots of the US misadventure in Iraq. Lloyd Gardner’s sweeping and authoritative narrative places the Iraq War in the context of US foreign policy since Vietnam, casting the conflict as a chapter in a much broader story—in sharp contrast to the dominant narrative, which focus almost exclusively on the actions of the Bush Administration in the months leading up to the invasion.
Gardner illuminates a vital historical thread connecting Walt Whitman Rostow’s defense of US intervention in Southeast Asia, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s attempts to project American power into the “arc of crisis” (with Iran at its center), and the efforts of two Bush administrations, in separate Iraq wars, to establish a “landing zone” in that critically important region. Far more disturbing than a simple conspiracy to secure oil, Gardner’s account explains the Iraq War as the necessary outcome of a half-century of doomed US policies.
“A vital primer to the slow-motion conflagration of American foreign policy.” —Kirkus Reviews -
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.
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Home Fronts
$32.99Home Fronts offers a vivid cross-section of American intellectual, political, and cultural life in wartime over the past century. This work collects brief excerpts, each given historical context through concise introductions.
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A People’s History of Sports in the United States
$18.95 – $26.95From author and sportswriter Zirin comes a rollicking, rebellious, myth-busting history of sports in America that puts politics in the ring with pop culture.
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Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam
Or, How Not to Learn from the Past$16.95 – $24.95Essays by Christian G. Appy, Andrew J. Bacevich, John Prados, and others offer “history at its best, meaning, at its most useful.” —Howard Zinn
From the launch of the “Shock and Awe” invasion in March 2003 through President George W. Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” two months later, the war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate definitively that the United States had learned the lessons of Vietnam. This new book makes clear that something closer to the opposite is true—that US foreign policy makers have learned little from the past, even as they have been obsessed with the “Vietnam Syndrome.”
Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam brings together the country’s leading historians of the Vietnam experience. Examining the profound changes that have occurred in the country and the military since the Vietnam War, this book assembles a distinguished group to consider how America found itself once again in the midst of a quagmire—and the continuing debate about the purpose and exercise of American power.
Also includes contributions from: Alex Danchev * David Elliott * Elizabeth L. Hillman * Gabriel Kolko * Walter LaFeber * Wilfried Mausbach * Alfred W. McCoy * Gareth Porter
“Essential.” —Bill Moyers
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The Senator and the Sharecropper
$38.00This elegant work intertwines the life histories of a staunch segregationist and his sharecropper nemesis as they come to confront each other on the national political stage at the height of the civil rights struggle. Illustrated.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong$17.99 – $31.00INTRODUCTION
SOMETHING HAS GONE VERY WRONG
It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are
not so. —JOSH BILLINGSAmerican history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible
than anything anyone has ever said about it. —JAMES BALDWINConcealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people.
—GEN. PETROG. GRIGERNKO, SAMIZDAT LETTER TO A HISTORY JOURNAL, c. 1975 ,USSR
Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.
—JAMES W. LOEWEN
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history “the most irrelevant” of twenty- one subjects commonly taught in high school. Bor-r-ring is the adjective they apply to it. When students can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take classes in history, they repress what they learn, so every year or two another study decries what our seventeen-year-olds don’t know.
Even male children of affluent white families think that history as taught in high school is “too neat and rosy.” African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn history especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. If you’ll pardon my grammar, nonwhite students do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult for minorities than trigonometry or Faulkner.
Students don’t even know they are alienated, only that they “don’t like social studies” or “aren’t any good at history.” In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth. Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have a lot of time, light domestic responsibilities, sufficient resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, these teachers withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they end up going through the motions, staying ahead of their students in the textbooks, covering only material that will appear on the next test.
College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had
significant exposure to the subject before college. Not teachers in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school to make room for more accurate information. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non- Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don’t assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. Professors of English literature don’t presume that Romeo and Juliet was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we know we do.
Outside of school, Americans show great interest in history. Historical
novels, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr, et al.) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho!, Utah!, Nebraska!, Oregon!, Missouri!, and on! and on!) often become bestsellers. The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The series The Civil War attracted new audiences to public television. Movies based on historical incidents or themes are a continuing source of fascination, from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances with Wolves, JFK, and Saving Private Ryan. Not history itself but traditional American history courses turn students off.Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and are directly relevant to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.
What has gone wrong?
We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that textbooks dominate
American history courses more than they do any other subject. When I first came across that finding in the educational research literature, I was dumbfounded. I would have guessed almost anything else—plane geometry, for instance. After all, it would be hard for students to interview elderly residents of their community about plane geometry, or to learn about it from library books or old newspaper files or the thousands of photographs and documents at the Library of Congress website. All these resources—and more—are relevant to American history. Yet it is in history classrooms, not geometry, where students spend more time reading from their textbooks, answering the fifty-five boring questions at the end of each chapter, going over those answers aloud, and so on.Between the glossy covers, American history textbooks are full of information— overly full. These books are huge. The specimens in my original collection of a dozen of the most popular textbooks averaged four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. To my astonishment, during the last twelve years they grew even larger. In 2006 I surveyed six new books. (Owing to publisher consolidation, there no longer are twelve.) Three are new editions of “legacy textbooks,” descended from books originally published half a century ago; three are “new new” books. These six new books average 1,150 pages and almost six pounds! I never imagined they would get bigger. I had thought—hoped?—that the profusion of resources on the Web would make it obvious that these behemoths are obsolete. The Web did not exist when the earlier batch of textbooks came into being. In those days, for history textbooks to be huge made some sense: students in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, say, or Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, had few resources in American history other than their textbooks. No longer: today every school that has a phone line is connected to the Web. There students can browse hundreds of thousands of primary sources including newspaper articles, the census, historic photographs, and original documents, as well as secondary interpretations from scholars, citizens, other students, and rascals and liars. No longer is there any need to supply students with nine months’ reading between the covers of one book, written or collected by a single set of authors.
The new books are so huge that they may endanger their readers. Each of the 1,104 pages in The American Journey is wider and taller than any page in the twelve already enormous high school textbooks in my original sample. Surely at 5.6 pounds, Journey is the heaviest book ever assigned to middle- school children in the history of American education. (At more than $84, it may also be the most expensive.) A new nonprofit organization, Backpack Safety America, has formed, spurred by chiropractors and other health care professionals. Its mission is “to reduce the weight of textbooks and backpacks.” In the meantime, pending that accomplishment, chiropractors are visiting schools teaching proper posture and lifting techniques.
Publishers, too, realize that the books look formidably large, so they try to disguise their total page count by creative pagination. Journey, for example, has 1,104 pages but manages to come in under a thousand by using separate numbering for thirty-two pages at the front of the book and seventy-two pages at the end. Students aren’t fooled. They know these are by far the heaviest volumes to lug home, the largest to hold in the lap, and the hardest to get excited about.
Editors also realize how daunting these books appear to the poor children who must read them, so they provide elaborate introductions and enticements, beginning with the table of contents. For The Americans, for example, a 1,358- page textbook from McDougal Littell weighing in at almost seven pounds, the table of contents runs twenty-two pages. It is profusely illustrated and has little colored banners with titles like “Geography Spotlight,” “Daily Life,” and “Historical Spotlight.” Right after it comes a three-page layout, “Themes in History” and “Themes in Geography.” Then come hints on how to read the complex, disjointed thirty- to forty-page chapters. “Each chapter begins with a two-page chapter opener,” it says. “Study the chapter opener to help you get ready to read.”
“Oh, no,” groan students. “Nothing good will come of this.” They know that no one has to tell them how to get ready to read a Harry Potter book or any other book that is readable. Something different is going on here.
Unfortunately, having a still bigger book only spurs conscientious teachers to spend even more time making sure students read it and deal with its hundreds of minute questions and tasks. This makes history courses even more boring. Publishers then try to make their books more interesting by inserting various special aids to give them eye appeal. But these gimmicks have just the opposite effect. Many are completely useless, except to the marketing department. Consider the little colored banners in the table of contents of The Americans. No student would ever need to have a list of the “Geography Spotlights” in this book. One spotlight happens to be “The Panama Canal,” but the student seeking information on the canal would find it by looking in the index in the back, not by surmising that it might be a Geography Spotlight, then finding that list within the twenty- two pages of contents in the front, and then scanning it to see if Panama Canal appears. The only possible use for these bannered lists is for the sales rep to point to when trying to get a school district to adopt the book.
The books are huge so that no publisher will lose an adoption because a book has left out a detail of concern to a particular geographical area or group. Textbook authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every U.S. president, even William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. The Americans, to take one example, highlights 840 “Main Ideas Within Its Main Text.” In addition, the text contains 310 “Skill Builders,” 890 “Terms and Names,” 466 “Critical Thinking” questions, and still other projects within its chapters. And that’s not counting the hundreds of terms and questions in the two- page reviews that follow each chapter. At year’s end, no student can remember 840 main ideas, not to mention 890 terms and countless other factoids. So students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test on that chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder so many high school graduates cannot remember in which century the Civil War was fought!
Students are right: the books are boring. The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out fine in the end. “Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges,” in the words of one textbook. Most authors of history textbooks don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as “mumbling lecturer.” No wonder students lose interest.
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Slaves Without Masters
The Free Negro in the Antebellum South$24.00Widely recognized as “one of the nation’s foremost scholars on the slave era” (Boston Globe), Bancroft Prize–winning historian Ira Berlin has changed the way we think about African American life in slavery and freedom. These two classic volumes, now available in handsome new editions, are indispensable resources for educators and general readers alike.
First published to great acclaim in 1974, Slaves Without Masters established Berlin in his field and went on to win the National History Society’s Best First Book Prize. It tells the moving story of the quarter of a million free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War, portraying “with careful scholarship, acute analysis, and admirable historical imagination” (The New Republic) their struggle for community, economic independence, and education within an oppressive society.
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History in the Making
An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years$17.95 – $26.95The popular, “thought-provoking study” that explores how contemporary prejudices change the way each generation looks at the nation’s past (Library Journal).
Historian Kyle Ward, the acclaimed co-author of History Lessons, offers another fascinating look at the biases inherent in the way we think about, write about, and teach our own history. Juxtaposing passages from US history textbooks of different eras, History in the Making provides new perspectives on familiar historical events, and sheds light on the ways they have been represented over generations.
Covering subjects that span two hundred years, from Columbus’s arrival to the Boston Massacre, from women’s suffrage to Japanese internment, History in the Making exposes the changing values, priorities, and points of view that have framed—and reframed—our past.
“Interesting and useful . . . convincingly illustrates how texts change as social and political attitudes evolve.” —Booklist
“Students, teachers, and general readers will learn more about the past from these passages than from any single work, however current, that purports to monopolize the truth.” —Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths -
Remembering Slavery
African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation$20.99 – $49.95The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed
“As vital and necessary a historical document as anyone has ever produced in this country.” —The Boston Globe
With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again.
No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America.
Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice).
With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.
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Harlem on My Mind
Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968$24.95Long before Harlem became one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the red-hot real estate market of Manhattan, it was a metaphor for African American culture at its richest. Allon Schoener’s celebrated Harlem on My Mind is the classic record of Harlem life during some of the most exciting and turbulent years of its history, a beautiful—and poignant—reminder of a powerful moment in African America history.
Including the work of some of Harlem’s most treasured photographers, among them James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks, there are photographs of Harlem’s literary lights—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Richard Wright; its politicians—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and its musicians—Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. The book also includes the photographs of the everyday folk who gave life to this legendary community.
These extraordinary images are juxtaposed with articles from publications such as the New York Times and the Amsterdam News, which have helped to record the life of one of New York’s most memorialized neighborhoods.
Originally published in 1969 as the catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s controversial exhibition of the same name, Harlem on My Mind is as compelling today as it was when first published.
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Pretensions to Empire
Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration$16.95 – $24.95Pretensions to Empire brings together Lewis Lapham’s recent political commentaries from his National Magazine Award–winning Harper’s “Notebook” column, beginning with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and culminating in Lapham’s eloquent (and widely cited) case for the impeachment of George W. Bush.
Written in the highly literate and “self-assured style” (Publishers Weekly) that has earned Lapham a large and devoted readership, the pieces in this collection provide not only a critical perspective on Bush’s presidency—helping us understand what happened and how it happened—but also vital new information and research, including a brilliant dissection of the Republican propaganda mill’s octopus-like network and its role in the neoconservative ascent to power. As Lapham writes in the book’s preface, “these essays describe a march of folly, establish a record of moral incompetence and criminal intent, speak to the character of a government stupefied by its worship of money and blinded by its belief in miracles.”
Elegant and erudite, Pretensions to Empire is a “rousing” indictment of a stumbling political regime from the “loquacious lion of the literary left” (Mother Jones).
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Dangerous Woman
The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman$17.95The anarchist and radical hero Emma Goldman, brought to vivid life in a graphic biography by an acclaimed artist.
“You are a terrible child and will grow into a worse woman! You have no respect for your elders or for authority! You will surely end on the gallows as a public menace!”—Emma Goldman’s childhood religion teacher
A wonderful retelling of the famous anarchist and radical icon Emma Goldman’s extraordinary life, this graphic biography embodies the richness and drama of Goldman’s story in a wholly original way.
A Dangerous Woman depicts the full sweep of a life lived to the hilt in the struggle for equality and justice. Emma Goldman was at the forefront of the radical causes of the twentieth century, from leading hunger demonstrations during the Great Depression—”Ask for work! If they do not give you work, ask for bread! If they do not give you work or bread, take the bread!”—to organizing a cloakmakers’ strike, from lecturing on how to use birth control to fighting conscription for World War I, while her soulmate, Alexander Berkman, spent fourteen years in jail for his failed attentat against industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
Sharon Rudahl’s lovely, energetic illustrations bring Goldman’s many facets and passions to new life; her work belongs with the critically acclaimed graphic nonfiction of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Featuring a foreword by Alice Wexler, A Dangerous Woman is a marvelously compelling presentation of a woman devoted to revolutionizing her age.
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The Last Three Miles
$24.95 – $24.99An investigative history of Depression Era power brokers and labor wars in the construction of the Pulaski Skyway across the New Jersey Meadowlands.
In the 1930s, as America’s love affair with the automobile began, cars and trucks leaving the nation’s largest city were dumped out of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads winding through New Jersey swampland. The Pulaski Skyway, America’s first “superhighway,” would change all that by connecting the hub of New York City to the rest of the country. But the corrupt and violent path to its completion would change much more for Jersey City’s residents and labor unions.
Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player—was a prime mover behind the ambitious transit project. Hague’s nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle. Construction of the last three miles of the Pulaski Skyway, then simply known as Route 25, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as “Death Avenue”—appropriately featured in the opening sequence of HBO’s hit series The Sopranos.
A book in the tradition of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and Henry Petroski’s Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life a riveting and bloodstained chapter in the heroic age of public works.
“A revealing look into how local politics can affect the design and construction of our national infrastructure, sometimes with disastrous results. Hart uses his considerable narrative talent to tell an engaging human story about what might seem otherwise to be but an enormous black steel structure.” —Henry Petroski, author of Engineers of Dreams and Success Through Failure -
Free at Last
A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War$34.99A handsome new edition of an essential work by the groundbreaking historian of African American life in the nineteenth century
Free at Last brings together some of the most remarkable correspondence ever written by Americans. These letters, personal testimonies, official transcripts, and other records convey the struggle of black men and women to overthrow the slave system, to aid the Union cause, and to give meaning to their newly won freedom in a war-torn nation. Drawn from the landmark reference volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, this “work of deep significance for all Americans” (The Washington Post Book World ) offers a unique way of understanding emancipation.
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