2501 results for "American History"

After Jackie: pride, prejudice, and baseball's forgotten heroes : an oral history

Fussman, Cal
To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the breaking of baseball's color barrier, an exploration of Jackie Robinson's impact and legacy by the people whose lives were transformed by his courage. When Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he forever changed the game of baseball--and America itself. Sportswriter Fussman traces Robinson's enormous legacy in sports, politics, and the civil rights movement through the men (and women) who came after him. With moving and intimate interviews of more than one hundred former major league players of African-American descent, as well as such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Ali, and Walter Cronkite, among others, this book recalls the day one man altered history for so many, and the history that followed.--From publisher description.
ESPN Books 2007-04-03 243 pages

A Preface to Politics

Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, and critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 book Public Opinion.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2016-03-07 120 pages

P.S.: further thoughts from a lifetime of listening

Terkel, Studs
Millions of Studs Terkel fans have come to know the prizewinning oral historian through his landmark books—“The Good War”, Hard Times, Working, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, and many others. Few people realize, however, that much of Studs’s best work was not collected into these thematic volumes and has, in fact, never been published. P.S. brings together these significant and deeply enjoyable writings for the first time. The pieces in P.S. reflect Studs’s wide-ranging interests and travels, as well as his abiding connection to his hometown, Chicago. Here we have a fascinating conversation with James Baldwin, possibly Studs’s finest interview with an author; pieces on the colorful history and culture of Chicago; vivid portraits of Studs’s heroes and cohorts (including an insightful and still timely interview with songwriter Yip Harburg, known for his “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”); and the transcript of Studs’s famous broadcast on the Depression, the very moving essence of what was to become Hard Times. A fitting postscript to a lifetime of listening, P.S. is a truly Terkelesque display of Studs’s extraordinary range of talent and the amazing people he found to talk to.
New Press 2008-11-11 230 pages

How to Think about the Great Ideas From the Great Books of Western Civilization

Mortimer J. Adler
Time magazine called Mortimer J. Adler a ''philosopher for everyman.'' In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as ''What is love?'', ''How do we decide the right thing to do?'', and, ''What does it mean to be good?'' Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in light of more than two millennia of Western civilization and discourse. Adler's essays offer a remarkable and contemplative distillation of the Great Ideas of Western Thought.
ReadHowYouWant.com 2010-10-19 428 pages

Good for the money: my fight to pay back America

Benmosche, Bob
"In 2009, at the peak of the financial crisis, AIG - the American insurance behemoth - was sinking fast. It was the peg upon which the nation hung its ire and resentment during the financial crisis: the pinnacle of Wall Street arrogance and greed. When Bob Benmosche climbed aboard as CEO, it was widely assumed that he would go down with his ship. In mere months, he turned things around, pulling AIG from the brink of financial collapse and restoring its profitability. Before three years were up, AIG had fully repaid its staggering debt to the U.S. government - with interest.Good for the Money is an unyielding leader's memoir of a career spent fixing companies through thoughtful, unconventional strategy. With his brash, no-holds-barred approach to the job, Benmosche restored AIG's employee morale and good name. His is a story of perseverance, told with refreshing irreverence in unpretentious terms.Called "an American hero" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, Benmosche was a self-made man who never forgot what life is like for the nation's 99-percent; again and again, he pushed back against obstinate colleagues to salvage American jobs and industry. Good for the Money affords you a front-row seat for Benmosche's heated battles with major players from Geithner to Obama to Cuomo, and offers incomparable lessons in leadership from the legendary CEO who changed the way Wall Street does business"--
St. Martin's Press 2016-04-12 271 pages

The Politics of Petulance America in an Age of Immaturity

Alan Wolfe
How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this? Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted. The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today. Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.
University of Chicago Press 2019-08-22 220 pages

The sisters Weiss

Ragen, Naomi
In 1950's Brooklyn, sisters Rose and Pearl Weiss grow up in a loving but strict ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, never dreaming of defying their parents or their community's unbending and intrusive demands. Then, a chance meeting with a young French immigrant turns Rose's world upside down, its once bearable strictures suddenly tightening like a noose around her neck. Defiantly, she begins to live a secret life that shocks her family when it is discovered. Out of guilt and an overwhelming desire to be reconciled with those she loves, she finally bows to her parents' demands that she agree to an arranged marriage. But the night before her wedding, she commits an act of defiance so unforgivable it will exile her forever from her innocent young sister, her family, and all she has ever known. Forty years later, pious Pearl's sheltered young daughter Rivka suddenly discovers the truth about the family outcast, her Aunt Rose, now a successful photographer. Inspired, but na℗♭.ve and reckless, she sets off on a dangerous adventure that will stir up the ghosts of the past and alter the future in unimaginable ways for all involved.
St. Martin's Griffin 2013 408 pages

Man Ray

Ray, Man
He was soon experimenting with different processes—solarization, negative images, multiple exposures—and in 1921 he created the "rayograph." This volume collects together the best of his experimental work, as well as portraits of some of the most important figures in modern art. About the series: The classic Photofile series brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at a reasonable price. Handsome and collectible, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography. Now back in print, the series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography.
Thames and Hudson 1989 144 pages

Elie Wiesel: confronting the silence

Berger, Joseph
"As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage. Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question."--
Yale University Press 2023-01-01 342 pages

Freedom rider diary: smuggled notes from Parchman Prison

Silver, Carol Ruth
Arrested as a Freedom Rider in June of 1961, Carol Ruth Silver, a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate originally from Massachusetts, spent the next forty days in Mississippi jail cells, including the Maximum Security Unit at the infamous Parchman Prison Farm. She chronicled the events and her experiences on hidden scraps of paper which amazingly she was able to smuggle out. These raw written scraps she fashioned into a manuscript, which has waited, unread for more than fifty years. Freedom Rider Diary is that account. Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode inte
University Press of Mississippi 2014-01-23 225 pages

Bitter fruit: the story of the American coup in Guatemala

Schlesinger, Stephen
The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University work to increase knowledge of the cultures, histories, environment, and contemporary affairs of Latin America; foster cooperation and understanding among the people of the Americas; and contribute to democracy, social progress, and sustainable development throughout the hemisphere. Book jacket.
Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies 1999 331 pages

Can American capitalism survive? why greed is not good, opportunity is not equal, and fairness won't make us poor

Pearlstein, Steven
Pulitzer Prize-winning economics journalist Steven Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. Thirty years ago, 'greed is good' and 'maximizing shareholder value' became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our business culture, economy, and politics. Although, around the world, free market capitalism has lifted more than a billion people from poverty, in the United States most of the benefits of economic growth have been captured by the richest 10%, along with providing justification for squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch. As a result, Americans are losing faith that a free market economy is the best system. In Can American Capitalism Survive', Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steven Pearlstein chronicles our descent and challenges the theories being taught in business schools and exercised in boardrooms around the country. We're missing a key tenet of Adam Smith's wealth of nations: without trust and social capital, democratic capitalism cannot survive. Further, equality of incomes and opportunity need not come at the expense of economic growth. Pearlstein lays out bold steps we can take as a country: a guaranteed minimum income paired with universal national service, tax incentives for companies to share profits with workers, ending class segregation in public education, and restoring competition to markets. He provides a path forward that will create the shared prosperity that will sustain capitalism over the long term ; Thirty years ago, 'greed is good' and 'maximizing shareholder value' became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our business culture, economy, and politics. Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. He challenges the theories being taught in business schools and in boardrooms, believing that we're missing a key tenet of Adam Smith's wealth of nations: without trust and social capital, democratic capitalism cannot survive. -- adapted from jacket
St. Martin's Press 2018 244 pages

The American Way of Poverty How the Other Half Still Lives

Sasha Abramsky
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America , in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor—the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty. It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.
PublicAffairs 2014-08-26 368 pages