The United States enjoys an established and essentially unchallenged role in the field of surgery. In this sweeping history of American surgical practice, renowned surgeon Seymour I. Schwartz, MD, describes how surgery in this country advanced from the comparatively crude practices of pioneering physicians in the pre-Columbian and colonial eras to its current level of preeminence in scientific surgery today.Of interest to the layperson and professional alike, Dr. Schwartz's engrossing narrative brings to life the personalities and sometimes dramatic conflicts that led to breakthrough contributions. In the nineteenth century, for example, the many colorful characters and surgical innovations included: a surgeon in a small Kentucky community who successfully removed a huge tumor from a woman's abdomen without anesthesia; the three individuals who each laid claim to the development of ether anesthesia; and the first successful gallbladder operation. Turning to the twentieth century, Dr. Schwartz highlights the evolution of vascular surgery, cardiothoracic surgery, and organ transplantation. Many great innovators made crucial contributions, including the Nobel Prize winners Alexis Carrel, who developed a method to sew vessels together, and Joseph Murray, who worked on kidney transplantation in Boston.Complete with an array of intriguing illustrations, this definitive work will captivate general readers with its engaging narrative and will inform medical professionals through its solid historical research and medical expertise.

This first modern history of American public life after the Civil War is a work of magisterial sweep and sophisticated insight. It will be the standard work on the era for many years to come. Integrating political, legal, and administrative history on a scale not previously attempted, Morton Keller examines crosscurrents in American institutions during a key transitional period in American history—a period that began with the end of a bloody civil war and ended with the beginning of massive industrialization. At the same time, he vividly captures the energy and optimism of a young country about to burst into the twentieth century. Keller begins by reviewing the twin legacies of the Civil War: a strengthened belief in an active national government and a vigorous drive toward civil equality. He moves on to the postwar years when centralizing and reformist tendencies were evident everywhere, not only in the Reconstructed South but also in a renewed North. After the 1880s, however, the pendulum began to swing back, and Americans faced the social and economic upheavals of the last decades of the nineteenth century with deeply divided views—an uncertainty that persists in our own day.

The first rigorous psychoanalytic investigation into the heart and mind of Nixon explores the forces and events that shaped his complex personality, presenting an enlightening portrait of a troubled man whose insecurities doomed him to suffer the most sensational downfall in American political history.

Focusing on American railroad history but touching on other countries, award-winning author Milton Meltzer shows how something as ubiquitous as the railroad is, in fact, a force that changed the world.

In this readable autobiography by the authors of The Story of Civilization, Will & Ariel Durant celebrate & examine a lifetime of ideas, friendships, triumphs & love. The story of their life together, rich in anecdotes & with the countless famous people they knew, is a passionate record of their shared experience as lovers, as spouses, as world travelers & as the authors of one of the most famous successful works of scholarship in American literary history. Ariel & Will met & fell in love in 1912. He taught at New York's anarchist Ferrer Center, a young man already in love with the world of ideas, who had quit seminary to his family's chagrin in search of freedom. She was 14, so young that she roller-skated on her way to City Hall for her marriage, the daughter of penniless immigrants struggling to survive in the New World, inheritor of all the rebellious traditions & the determination to survive of the Russian ghetto from which her family came. Together they shared not only a burning love for each other but a hunger for ideas. Their book follows their intellectual journey, beginning with their interest in anarchism (which brought them close to Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman) & going on thru a long, shared lifetime that brought them honors, fame & acquaintance with almost every major literary & intellectual personality in Europe & the USA. Their book is frank & moving, at once a star-studded history of the decades thru which they lived & worked & an intimate tribute to an enduring love.

Book by Silverman, Kenneth

With the publication of Liberty Tree , acclaimed historian Alfred F. Young presents a selection of his seminal writing as well as two provocative, never-before-published essays. Together, they take the reader on a journey through the American Revolution, exploring the role played by ordinary women and men (called, at the time, people out of doors) in shaping events during and after the Revolution, their impact on the Founding generation of the new American nation, and finally how this populist side of the Revolution has fared in public memory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, which include not only written documents but also material items like powder horns, and public rituals like parades and tarring and featherings, Young places ordinary Americans at the center of the Revolution. For example, in one essay he views the Constitution of 1787 as the result of an intentional accommodation by elites with non-elites, while another piece explores the process of ongoing negotiations would-be rulers conducted with the middling sort; women, enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans. Moreover, questions of history and modern memory are engaged by a compelling examination of icons of the Revolution, such as the pamphleteer Thomas Paine and Boston's Freedom Trail. For over forty years, history lovers, students, and scholars alike have been able to hear the voices and see the actions of ordinary people during the Revolutionary Era, thanks to Young's path-breaking work, which seamlessly blends sophisticated analysis with compelling and accessible prose. From his award-winning work on mechanics, or artisans, in the seaboard cities of the Northeast to the all but forgotten liberty tree, a major popular icon of the Revolution explored in depth for the first time, Young continues to astound readers as he forges new directions in the history of the American Revolution.

A short history of the Jews in America from 1654 and their first permanent community of twenty-three persons in New Amsterdam to the present, stressing the difficulties they have continually faced as an ethnic minority.

For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

"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"--

An illustrated history of the European and American cabaret, and its performers and styles, from its Parisian origins in the 1880s to its continuing successes in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and points east

A pictorial and documentary history of the Afro-American in the American frontier.

HARRY TURTLEDOVE HAS BECOME ONE OF THE MOST popular authors in SF today, with such bestsellers as The Guns of the South, How Few Remain, the Worldwar series, and The Great War: American Front. Widely hailed as the master of "alternate history" tales, he weaves his deep understanding of human history together with strong storytelling, a fantastic imagination, and a confident voice. Now Turtledove returns to the story of a World War in a world where magic works, with this moving sequel to Into the Darkness. Forthweg has been lost to the Algarvian and the Unkerlanter soldiers. Not satisfied to share the plundered Forthweg, Algarve invades Unkerlant and begins its slow push toward the Unkerlanter capital during the country's harsh winter. Away from the front, Algarvian soldiers corral Kaunians to send them west, toward Unkerlant, to work camps. The Kaunians left behind are worried about what the work camps might mean, but are assuaged by Algarvian lies. In Kuusamo, scholars race to find the relation between the laws of similarity and contagion, while the patient warriors of Zuwayza weigh the merits of siding with either the Algarvians or the Unkerlanters. Rumors abound about the Algarvian work camps, rumors most cannot believe are true. But the mages know, for they can feel the loss of life in their very souls. Turtledove's cast of characters takes on its own life as the reader sees the war from all sides and understands how the deaths and destruction benefit no one, not even the victors. In this world, the battle escalates and people tremble under the ... darkness descending.

Spain's Civil War, a tune-up for WW II, began in 1936. In three years, 600,000 patriots lay dead. Americans played a role in the conflict and Gerassi has chronicled their experiences. . . . Gerassi interviewed Americans who survived the Spanish Civil War, creating an oral history from those interviews. But the author has done more than that; he has written a social history of the 1930s, providing a window into an era in which radicalism took many forms. His `people's history' of men in arms and why they chose to take them up is most enlightening. Choice

A revised, updated and rewritten history of women cartoonists, with more color illustrations than ever before, and with some startling new discoveries (such as a Native American woman cartoonist from the 1940s who was also a Corporal in the women's army, and the revelation that a cartoonist included in all of Robbins's previous histories was a man!). In the pages of Pretty in Ink you'll find new photos and correspondence from cartoonists Ethel Hays and Edwina Dumm, and the true story of Golden Age comic book star Lily Renee, as intriguing as the comics she drew. Although the comics profession was dominated by men, there were far more women working in the profession throughout the 20th century than other histories indicate, and they have flourished in the 21st. Robbins not only documents the increasing relevance of women throughout the 20th century, with mainstream creators such as Ramona Fradon and Dale Messick and alternative cartoonists such as Lynda Barry, Carol Tyler, and Phoebe Gloeckner, but the latest generation of women cartoonists--Megan Kelso, Cathy Malkasian, Linda Medley, and Lilli Carre, among many others

"From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, from Sri Lanka to Iraq and from Yemen to the United States, human beings have been used as shields for protection, coercion, or deterrence. Over the past decade, human shields have also appeared with increasing frequency in noncombat contexts such as antinuclear struggles, civil and environmental protests, and even computer games. The phenomenon, however, is by no means a new one. In Human Shields, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini describe how human shields have been used in key historical and contemporary moments and across geographical sites. The practice of human shielding corresponds with the history of shifting understandings of what is valued as "human": in the American Civil War and the Franco-German War, only the elite were used as shields, while in later conflicts, hundreds of thousands of women and children and people of color were placed in the crossfire as deterrents. Human Shields demonstrates how this increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable"--

The "Tibetan Question," the nature of Tibet's political status vis-à-vis China, has been the subject of often bitterly competing views while the facts of the issue have not been fully accessible to interested observers. While one faction has argued that Tibet was, in the main, historically independent until it was conquered by the Chinese Communists in 1951 and incorporated into the new Chinese state, the other faction views Tibet as a traditional part of China that split away at the instigation of the British after the fall of the Manchu Dynasty and was later dutifully reunited with "New China" in 1951. In contrast, this comprehensive study of modern Tibetan history presents a detailed, non-partisan account of the demise of the Lamaist state. Drawing on a wealth of British, American, and Indian diplomatic records; first-hand-historical accounts written by Tibetan participants; and extensive interviews with former Tibetan officials, monastic leaders, soldiers, and traders, Goldstein meticulously examines what happened and why. He balances the traditional focus on international relations with an innovative emphasis on the intricate web of internal affairs and events that produced the fall of Tibet. Scholars and students of Asian history will find this work an invaluable resource and interested readers will appreciate the clear explanation of highly polemicized, and often confusing, historical events.

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.

"The historian John Lukacs offers a concise history of the twentieth century--its two world wars and cold war, its nations and leaders. The great themes woven through this spirited narrative are inseparable from the author's own intellectual preoccupations: the fading of liberalism, the rise of populism and nationalism, the achievements and dangers of technology, and the continuing democratization of the globe. The historical twentieth century began with the First World War in 1914 and ended seventy-five years later with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. The short century saw the end of European dominance and the rise of American power and influence throughout the world. The twentieth century was an American century--perhaps the American century. Lukacs explores in detail the phenomenon of national socialism (national socialist parties, he reminds us, have outlived the century), Hitler's sole responsibility for the Second World War, and the crucial roles played by his determined opponents Churchill and Roosevelt. Between 1939 and 1942 Germany came closer to winning than many people suppose. Lukacs casts a hard eye at the consequences of the Second World War--the often misunderstood Soviet-American cold war--and at the shifting social and political developments in the Far and Middle East and elsewhere. In an eloquent closing meditation on the passing of the twentieth century, he reflects on the advance of democracy throughout the world and the limitations of human knowledge" -- Publisher website

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.