8468 results for "History"

My mother's wars

Faderman, Lillian
An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman’s mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother’s past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path. The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman’s mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a “good-time gal.” They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life. Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York’s garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover’s angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family. Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
Beacon Press 2015-07-14 264 pages

The palladium of justice: origins of trial by jury

Levy, Leonard W.
Trial by jury is the mainstay of the accusatorial system of criminal justice. Here one of our most distinguished constitutional scholars, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Leonard Levy, brings his formidable skills to bear in tracing the development of what many great legal minds have called the Palladium of Justice. Recounting this history with his characteristic clarity, vigor, and elegance of expression, Mr. Levy has given us a brilliant and useful summary of one of our most cherished freedoms. Incisively, thoroughly, and thoughtfully—as always-Leonard Levy offers historical meaning and understanding to one of our most basic rights. —Stanley I. Kutler
I.R. Dee 1999-06-08 114 pages

A New Textbook of Americanism The Politics of Ayn Rand

Jonathan Hoenig,Leonard Peikoff
Featuring new, never-before-released discussions with Ayn Rand...all about her politics! Most people have no idea what the United States represents. Ayn Rand did grasp America's political essence down to its roots. World-famous as the author of Atlas Shrugged, Rand emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1926 at the age of twenty-one. Upon her arrival, she discovered that the collectivist politics of Russia, and Europe in general, were taking hold in America. An early effort to fight this trend was Rand's Textbook of Americanism, which she began writing in 1946 but was left unfinished. Until now. Seventy-two years later, A New Textbook of Americanism: The Politics of Ayn Rand addresses the questions she did not answer then, building on her insights to illuminate Americanism and its present-day application. Featuring Rand's full 1946 work plus essays from the New Intellectuals, including Leonard Peikoff, and never-before-published discussions with Ayn Rand. Rand once called the United States "the only moral country in the history of the world." A New Textbook of Americanism explores the reasons for her judgment.
Independently Published 2018-09-27 222 pages

A Living Wage American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society

Lawrence B. Glickman
The fight for a "living wage" has a long and revealing history as documented here by Lawrence B. Glickman. The labor movement's response to wages shows how American workers negotiated the transition from artisan to consumer, opening up new political possibilities for organized workers and creating contradictions that continue to haunt the labor movement today. Nineteenth-century workers hoped to become self-employed artisans, rather than permanent "wage slaves." After the Civil War, however, unions redefined working-class identity in consumerist terms, and demanded a wage that would reward workers commensurate with their needs as consumers. This consumerist turn in labor ideology also led workers to struggle for shorter hours and union labels. First articulated in the 1870s, the demand for a living wage was voiced increasingly by labor leaders and reformers at the turn of the century. Glickman explores the racial, ethnic, and gender implications, as white male workers defined themselves in contrast to African Americans, women, Asians, and recent European immigrants. He shows how a historical perspective on the concept of a living wage can inform our understanding of current controversies.
Cornell University Press 1999-03-11 240 pages

Seven Voyages How China's Treasure Fleet Conquered the Sea

Laurence Bergreen,Sara Fray
From New York Times bestselling author Laurence Bergreen and author Sara Fray comes this immaculately researched history for young readers detailing the life of Zheng He, his complex and enduring friendship with his emperor, and the epic Seven Voyages he led that would establish China as a global power. 1405. The central coast of China. At nearly seven feet tall, Admiral Zheng He looked out at the sea before him. For the next three decades, the oceans would be his home, as he would command over 1,500 ships and thousands of sailors in seven journeys that would predate the heart of the European Age of Exploration. Over his seven epic journeys, Zheng He explored the Northern Pacific and Indian Oceans, traveling as far as the east coast of Africa, expanding Chinese power globally, warring with pirates, and capturing enemies along the way in the name of his emperor, Zhu Di. But this giant figure was not always at the helm of a ship.
Roaring Brook Press 2021-01-19 176 pages

Messianism, secrecy and mysticism: a new interpretation of early American Jewish life

Leibman, Laura Arnold
"Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism tells the history of Early American Jews, focusing on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. It offers new insights about the origins of Jewish American messianism, helping readers better understand messianism in contemporary American society. It charts the shared culture of these Jews who lived in the port towns in the Caribbean and on both sides of the Atlantic, and author Laura Arnold Leibman argues that thinking about Judaism as an embodied religion is key to understanding their culture. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism makes early Jewish American history entertaining, accessible, and interesting to general readers, as well as to academic audiences." -- Publisher's website.
Vallentine Mitchell 2013 388 pages

For a new West: essays, 1919-1958

Polanyi, Karl
At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was reported that a ghost was haunting the deliberations of the assembled global elite - that of the renowned social scientist and economic historian, Karl Polanyi. In his classic work, The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the impact of the rise of market society on western civilization and captured better than anyone else the destructive effects of the economic, political and social crisis of the 1930s. Today, in the throes of another Great Recession, Polanyi's work has gained a new significance. To understand the profound challenges faced by our democracies today, we need to revisit history and revisit his work. In this new collection of unpublished texts - lectures, draft essays and reports written between 1919 and 1958 - Polanyi examines the collapse of the liberal economic order and the demise of democracies in the inter-war years. He takes up again the fundamental question that preoccupied him throughout his work - the place of the economy in society - and aims to show how we might return to an economy anchored in society and its cultural, religious and political institutions. For anyone concerned about the danger to democracy and social life posed by the unleashing of capital from regulatory control and the dominance of the neoliberal ideologies of market fundamentalism, this important new volume by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century is a must-read.--
Polity Press 2014 258 pages

Trapped The 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster

Karen Tintori
A gripping account of the worst coal mine fire in US history—the 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster that claimed the lives of 259 men. "Drawing on diaries, letters, written accounts of survivors and testimony from the coroner's inquest...Tintori's engaging prose keeps readers on the edge" ( Publishers Weekly ). Inspired by a refrain of her girlhood—"Your grandfather survived the Cherry Mine disaster"—Karen Tintori began a search for her family's role in the harrowing tragedy of 1909. She uncovered the stories of victims, survivors, widows, orphans, townspeople, firefighters, reporters, and mine owners, and wove them together to pen Trapped, a riveting account of the tragic day that would inspire America's first worker's compensation laws and hasten much-needed child labor reform. On a Saturday morning in November of 1909, four hundred and eighty men went down into the mines as they had countless times before. But a fire erupted in the mineshaft that day and soon burned out of control. By nightfall, more than half the men would either be dead or trapped as officials sealed the mine in an attempt to contain the blaze. Miraculously, twenty men would emerge one week later, but not before the Cherry Mine disaster went down in history as the worst ever coal mine fire in the US—and not before all the treachery and heroism of mankind were revealed.
Simon and Schuster 2003-09-17 288 pages

Women and health in America: historical readings

Leavitt, Judith W.
Product Description In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health. Review "Superb."— Isis "Highly recommended for everyone interested in women's health."— Journal of the American Medical Women's Association "Should be on everyone's reference shelf."— Women's Studies in Indiana "Leavitt is to be commended for selecting pieces which highlight the major debates."— Women's Review of Books "It's a pleasure, as well as useful, to have such a range of excellent work in one book."— Journal of the History of Medicine "[Leavitt's] approach ensures that women's history will meet high standards and, in fact, raises the standards of historical scholarship."— Bulletin of the History of Dentistry "This anthology may be just the prescription to cure a current deficiency disease, to supply in one place the information that has been sadly lacking in historical treatments of women as patients and practitioners."— Mobius About the Author Judith Walzer Leavitt is Ruth Bleier Professor of History of Medicine, History of Science, and Women’s Studies and the associate dean of faculty at the medical school, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her many books include The Healthiest City and Sickness and Health in America, both also available from the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as Typhoid Mary and Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750–1950.
University of Wisconsin Press 1998 692 pages

The question of gender: Joan W. Scott's critical feminism

Judith Butler,Elizabeth Weed
A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott's influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," this volume explores the current uses of the term—and the ongoing influence of Scott's agenda-setting work in history and other disciplines. How has the study of gender, independently or in conjunction with other axes of difference—such as race, class, and sexuality—inflected existing fields of study and created new ones? To what extent has this concept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as women's and queer studies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with what effects? In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transformations, can gender remain a useful category in the 21st century? Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has translated into their own disciplinary perspectives.
Indiana University Press 2011-07-20 330 pages

Crisis, revolution, and Russian Jews

Frankel, Jonathan
This collection of essays examines the politicization and the politics of the Jewish people in the Russian empire during the late tsarist period. The focal point is the Russian revolution of 1905, when the political mobilization of the Jewish youth took on massive proportions, producing a cohort of radicalized activists - committed to socialism, nationalism, or both - who would exert an extraordinary influence on Jewish history in the twentieth-century in Eastern Europe, the United States, and Palestine. Frankel describes the dynamics of 1905 and the leading role of the intelligentsia as revolutionaries, ideologues, and observers. But, elsewhere, he also looks backwards to the emergent stage of modern Jewish politics in both Russia and the West and forward to the part played by the veterans of 1905 in Palestine and the United States.
Cambridge University Press 2010 324 pages

Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die Bioethics and the Transformation of Health Care in America

Amy Gutmann,Jonathan D Moreno
NOW FEATURING A NEW AFTERWORD, "PANDEMIC ETHICS" From two eminent scholars comes a provocative examination of bioethics and our culture’s obsession with having it all without paying the price. Shockingly, the United States has among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality rates of any high-income nation, yet, as Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno show, we spend twice as much per capita on medical care without insuring everyone. A “remarkable, highly readable journey” (Judy Woodruff ) sure to become a classic on bioethics, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die explores the troubling contradictions between expanding medical research and neglecting human rights, from testing anthrax vaccines on children to using brain science for marketing campaigns. Providing “a clear and compassionate presentation” ( Library Journal ) of such complex topics as radical changes in doctor-patient relations, legal controversies over in vitro babies, experiments on humans, unaffordable new drugs, and limited access to hospice care, this urgent and incisive history is “required reading for anyone with a heartbeat” (Andrea Mitchell).
National Geographic Books 2020-11-23 272 pages

The ancient eight: college football's Ivy League and the game they play today

Feinstein, John
Award-winning, bestselling author John Feinstein chronicles a year inside Ivy League Football, unveiling the heart and soul of college football's oldest teams as they compete at an elite level in a conference that prizes tradition -- amid a rapidly changing and increasingly monetized collegiate sports world. The history of the Ivy League dates back to 1869 when Princeton played the first college football game against Rutgers. That storied history, however, is not what this book is about. Rather, The Ancient Eight explores Ivy League football today. Why? Because the conference is underrated. NFL rosters typically feature about a dozen former Ivy players. To play in the league, one must maintain the highest academic standards and be a great football player. The rivalries are as intense as in the SEC or the Big Ten, even if the linemen aren't quite as large. There are arcane rules forbidding participation in the NCAA postseason, not allowing eligible graduate students to play, and scheduling ten straight weeks without a bye. But there is also a genuine purity -- not one that's made up for marketing purposes -- in the Ivy League. Through intimate interviews with players, coaches, and key figures, Feinstein uncovers the unique culture that defines football on the Ivy League gridiron, offering unparalleled access to the remarkable coaching staffs and student-athletes who balance their academic ambitions with their passion for the game. The story of the 2023 season began tragically when longtime Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens suffered fatal injuries in a bicycle accident, and one of his players, Joshua Balara, died of cancer the same day. But Dartmouth would persist to shockingly win a share of the Ivy championship, along with both Harvard and Yale -- the result of a nail-biting 138th meeting of those two schools in The Game. On the field, inside the locker room, and around campus, The Ancient Eight reveals the phenomenal stories of the young men who play in today's Ivy League and those who coach them.
Hachette Books 2024 246 pages

The Natural The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton

Joe Klein
Joe Klein, best-selling author of Primary Colors and one of our most brilliant political analysts, now tackles the subject he knows best: Bill Clinton. Astute, even-handed, and keenly intelligent, The Natural is the only book to read if you want to understand exactly what happened–to the military, to the economy, to the American people, to the country–during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and how the decisions made during his tenure affect all of us today. Much has been written about Clinton, but The Natural is the first work to cut through the gossip, scandals, media hype, and emotional turbulence that Clinton always engendered, to step back and rationally analyze the eight years of his tenure, a period during which America rose to unprecedented levels of prosperity. Joe Klein puts that record into perspective, showing us what worked and what didn’t, exactly what was accomplished and why, and who was responsible for the successes and the failures. We see how the Clinton White House functioned on the inside, how it dealt with the maneuvers of Congress and the Gingrich revolution, and who held power and made the decisions during the endless crises that beset the administration. Klein’s access to the White House over the years as a journalist gave him a prime spot from which to view every crucial event–both political and personal–and he sets them forth in an insightful, readable, and completely engrossing manner. The Natural is stern in its criticism and convincing with its praise. It will cause endless debate amongst friends and foes of the Clinton administration. It is a book that anyone interested in contemporary politics, in American history, or in the functioning of our democracy, should read.
Crown 2003-02-11 240 pages

The No-nonsense Guide to Science

Jerome R. Ravetz
Science is still the great intellectual adventure, but now it is also seen as an instrument of profit, power, and privilege. Wrongly used, it might yet make the 21st century our last.To make sense of all this, we need to let go of old ideas and assumptions. In the No-Nonsense Guide to Science, Jerome Ravetz introduces the "post-normal" way of thinking about science. We are to transcend the old simplistic ideas of perfect certainty and objectivity in science-they have failed to protect people and the environment when science has gone wrong and they have enabled flat, dogmatic teaching in our schools. We must now accept that value-loading, uncertainty, and ignorance are very real parts of science, and that citizens must participate in the policies that shape its evolution. The book also includes a refreshing new look at the history of science, and concludes with a series of questions that anyone can use to start their own exploration of the present and future of science.
Between the Lines 2005 143 pages

Movieland: Hollywood and the great American dream culture

Charyn, Jerome
In Movieland, Jerome Charyn mingles his own life as a moviegoer with the history, romance, and sadness of Hollywood. He meets Paul Newman, Viveca Lindfors, and Mae Clark, the actress who was the original bride of Frankenstein; explores Cinecitta, Mussolini's own Hollywood on the Tiber; recalls his own life as Otto Preminger's house writer (and jester) during Preminger's decline; reinvents the lost years and lost stars of the silent era --Irving Thalberg, Gloria Swanson, and Clara Bow -- and seeks out the hieroglyphics of modern Hollywood; writes of the Nazi officer who saved the Cinematheque Francaise and its library of American films; and pays homage to Hollywood's heroes, victims, goddesses, and neglected lords: Louise Brooks, Raymond Chandler, Carole Landis, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, and more.
New York University Press 1996-08 304 pages

What was liberalism? the past, present and promise of a noble idea

Traub, James
"In the vertiginous era of Trump and Marine le Pen, liberalism's status is challenged. There is a widespread fear that liberal values, long taken for granted, are now in danger -- not only from authoritarian countries abroad, but also from a loss of faith inside the liberal world. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the majority support it once enjoyed? And what is so precious about liberalism in the first place? In What Was Liberalism?, award-winning journalist and author James Traub tackles these questions by examining the history of liberalism, from the American and French revolutions through the writings of John Stuart Mill and early-twentieth-century American progressives to liberalism's midcentury triumph in the West, its shaky present, and its uncertain future. Liberalism, Traub shows, began with a commitment to individual liberty, but it didn't end there. Over time, liberals sought to balance freedom of speech and action with goods like justice and equality, opposing both economic exploitation and totalitarianism. Partly as a result, the relationship between liberalism and democracy also evolved. Many nineteenth-century liberals were deeply worried about the democracy's illiberal effects, but by the middle of the twentieth century, liberalism had become the consensus faith of a wide swath of Americans and Europeans, both left and right. Yet even as the liberal West emerged victorious from the Cold War, liberalism's broad majoritarian foundations were crumbling, falling prey to accelerating economic inequality and the vexing challenges of race and immigration. Traub explores how illiberalism burned out of sight like an underground fire, and how it exploded into view in Europe and the United States in recent decades"--
Basic Books 2019-09-24 311 pages

None Is Too Many Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948

Irving Abella,Harold Troper
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award (Holocaust Category) Winner of the Canadian Historical Association John A. Macdonald Prize Featured in The Literary Review of Canada 100: Canada's Most Important Books [This] is a story best summed up in the words of an anonymous senior Canadian official who, in the midst of a rambling, off-the-record discussion with journalists in 1945, was asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war ... 'None,' he said, 'is too many.' From the Preface One of the most significant studies of Canadian history ever written, None Is Too Many conclusively lays to rest the comfortable notion that Canada has always been an accepting and welcoming society. Detailing the country's refusal to offer aid, let alone sanctuary, to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1948, it is an immensely bleak and discomfiting story - and one that was largely unknown before the book's publication. Irving Abella and Harold Troper's retelling of this episode is a harrowing read not easily forgotten: its power is such that, 'a manuscript copy helped convince Ron Atkey, Minister of Employment and Immigration in Joe Clark's government, to grant 50,000 "boat people" asylum in Canada in 1979, during the Southeast Asian refugee crisis' (Robin Roger, The Literary Review of Canada). None Is Too Many will undoubtedly continue to serve as a potent reminder of the fragility of tolerance, even in a country where it is held as one of our highest values.
University of Toronto Press 2017-05-24 384 pages