2501 results for "American History"

Papers on the War

Daniel Ellsberg
In his second public contribution to ending the American intervention in Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg brings together and revises his papers that best explain US policy and strategies during the war. Drawing upon his virtually unique range of experience as a participant, field observer, analyst, and critic, Papers on the War shares a selection of Daniel Ellsberg’s writings as he critiques the presence of US policies in Vietnam. With the major contribution of a greatly expanded and redefined version of his crucial study “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine,” Ellsberg reveals consistent patterns of decision-making with respect to Indo-china that ran from Truman’s Administration into Nixon’s. From the first participant permitted to make use of the entire study that led to the Pentagon Papers, this book shares analysis on the invasion of Laos, the internal policies of South Vietnam, the failure of rural pacification, the American way of war, and the renewed escalation in the spring of 1972.
Simon & Schuster 2009-12-18 312 pages

The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions, 100 Answers

Boudin, Chesa
There is one country in the Americas that the Bush Administration regards as a significant threat to U.S. interests, and it is not Cuba. Oil-rich Venezuela's democratically-elected government has survived repeated, U.S.-supported attempts to undermine its power, including a short lived military coup. Its leader, President Hugo Chávez, is neither communist nor capitalist, and instead claims to be creating an alternative 21st Century socialism that courts international capital. What is the real story behind this leader of Latin America's lurch to the left? Is it a new petro-populism in the tradition of Peron and Fujimori, or is it truly a progressive, home-grown democratic revolution that will address the massive economic and social inequalities plaguing the region for more than three centuries? The curiosity of a North American living in Venezuela and the expertise of two Venezuelans—one an adviser in the Presidential Palace, and the other a journalist with a weekly column in one of Venezuela's leading newspapers—bring insiders' answers to outsiders' questions, such as: Is Chávez a dictator? What was the role of the Bush Administration in the 2002 military coup? What is Chávez's political platform? Does Chávez work with terrorist governments to undermine U.S. interests?
Thunder's Mouth Press 2006-01-25 153 pages

The bill from my father

Cooper, Bernard
Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now - balding, octogenarian - he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Fathe r is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times
Picador 2014-01-16 258 pages

When Chicago Ruled Baseball The Cubs-White Sox World Series of 1906

Bernard A. Weisberger
In 1906 the baseball world saw something that had never been done. Two teams from the same city squared off against each other in a World Series that pitted the heavily favored Cubs of the National League against the hardscrabble American League champion White Sox. Now, more than a century later, noted historian Bernard A. Weisberger tells the tale of a unique time in baseball, a unique time in America, and a time when Chicago was at the center of it all. When Chicago Ruled Baseball brings to life a dazzling epoch in a land of the self-made man—where A. G. Spalding helped establish baseball as both a national pastime and a thriving business, where Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown overcame a horribly disfiguring injury and pitched his way into the Hall of Fame . . . and Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance proved that you could use teamwork to stand out as stars. Weisberger brings to life an unforgettable story of how a city that had rebuilt itself from the ashes of the Great Fire thirty-five years earlier became the focal point of an entire baseball-loving country, and one grand sporting contest staked its claim as one of the most remarkable and electrifying World Series ever to be played.
HarperCollins 2007-04-24 240 pages

In search of first contact: the Vikings of Vinland, the peoples of the dawnland, and the Anglo-American anxiety of discovery

Kolodny, Annette
In Search of First Contact is a monumental achievement by the influential literary critic Annette Kolodny. In this book, she offers a radically new interpretation of two medieval Icelandic tales, known as the Vinland sagas. She contends that they are the first known European narratives about contact with North America. After carefully explaining the evidence for that conclusion, Kolodny examines what happened after 1837, when English translations of the two sagas became widely available and enormously popular in the United States. She assesses their impact on literature, immigration policy, and concepts of masculinity. Kolodny considers what the sagas reveal about the Native peoples encountered by the Norse in Vinland around the year A.D. 1000, and she recovers Native American stories of first contacts with Europeans, including one that has never before been shared outside of Native communities. These stories contradict the dominant narrative of "first contact" between Europeans and the New World. Kolodny rethinks the lingering power of a mythic American Viking heritage and the long-standing debate over whether Leif Eiriksson or Christopher Columbus should be credited as the first discoverer. With this paradigm-shattering work, Kolodny shows what literary criticism can bring to historical and social scientific endeavors.
Duke University Press 2012-05-29 426 pages

Harlem: photographs 1932-1940

Siskind, Aaron
The images in this book are from three different Harlem projects begun by Aaron Siskind during the 1930s. The earliest of these inforrmal, open-ended series dates from after Sisking joined the Photo League in 1932, others were made during his participation with the League's Feature Group, and some are from the "Most Crowded Blck" project of 1939, 1940
Cornerhouse Publications in association with the National Museum of American Art 1991 79 pages

Democracy, culture, and the voice of poetry

Pinsky, Robert
The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
Princeton University Press 2005-03-06 96 pages

Essays In American Jewish History To Commemorate The Tenth Anniversary Of The Founding Of The American Jewish Archives

Jacob Rader Marcus
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Creative Media Partners, LLC 2018-03-02 574 pages

Emerson's transcendental etudes

Cavell, Stanley
This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.
Stanford University Press 2003 277 pages

We the people. 2. Transformations

Ackerman, Bruce A.
Constitutional change, seemingly so orderly, formal, and refined, has in fact been a revolutionary process from the first, as Bruce Ackerman makes clear in We the People: Transformations . The Founding Fathers, hardly the genteel conservatives of myth, set America on a remarkable course of revolutionary disruption and constitutional creativity that endures to this day. After the bloody sacrifices of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party revolutionized the traditional system of constitutional amendment as they put principles of liberty and equality into higher law. Another wrenching transformation occurred during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers vindicated a new vision of activist government against an assault by the Supreme Court. These are the crucial episodes in American constitutional history that Ackerman takes up in this second volume of a trilogy hailed as "one of the most important contributions to American constitutional thought in the last half-century" (Cass Sunstein, New Republic ). In each case he shows how the American people--whether led by the Founding Federalists or the Lincoln Republicans or the Roosevelt Democrats--have confronted the Constitution in its moments of great crisis with dramatic acts of upheaval, always in the name of popular sovereignty. A thoroughly new way of understanding constitutional development, We the People: Transformations reveals how America's "dualist democracy" provides for these populist upheavals that amend the Constitution, often without formalities. The book also sets contemporary events, such as the Reagan Revolution and Roe v. Wade , in deeper constitutional perspective. In this context Ackerman exposes basic constitutional problems inherited from the New Deal Revolution and exacerbated by the Reagan Revolution, then considers the fundamental reforms that might resolve them. A bold challenge to formalist and fundamentalist views, this volume demonstrates that ongoing struggle over America's national identity, rather than consensus, marks its constitutional history.
Belknap press of Harvard university press 1998 515 pages

Allianz and the German insurance business, 1933-1945

Feldman, Gerald D.
Gerald Feldman's history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources, making this a more accurate account of Allianz and the men who directed its business than was ever before possible. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis, touching on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labor camps, and the problems of denazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study--when cooperation with Nazi policies was compulsory and when it was complicit, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated--are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on open access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Great Disorder (Oxford, 1993) received the DAAD Book Prize of the German Historical Association and the Book Prize for Central European History from the American Historical Association. He was an invited expert at the London Gold Conference in December 1997 and at the U.S. Conference on Holocaust Assets in Washington, D.C. in December 1998 and served as an advisor to the Presidential Commision on Holocaust Assets in the United States. --
Cambridge University Press 2001-10-22 568 pages

Small strangers: the experiences of immigrant children in America, 1880-1925

Klapper, Melissa R.
Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization—all related processes—molded modern America. Growing up in crowded tenements, insular mill towns, rural ethnic enclaves, or middle-class homes, as they came of age they found themselves increasingly caught between Old World expectations and New World demands. The encounters of these children with ethnic heritage, American values, and mass culture helped shape the twentieth century in a United States still known symbolically around the world as a nation of immigrants.
Ivan R. Dee 2007-04-26 219 pages

Wartime kiss: visions of the moment in the 1940s

Nemerov, Alexander
"Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a powerful reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an idiosyncratic collection of mostly obscure or unknown images and movie episodes--from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on a picnic blanket in the Santa Barbara hills to scenes from such films as Twelve O'Clock High and Hold Back the Dawn. Erotically charged and bearing traces of trauma even when they seem far removed from the war, these photos and scenes seem to hold out the promise of a palpable and emotional connection to those years. Through a series of fascinating stories, Nemerov reveals the surprising background of these bits of film and discovers unexpected connections between the war and Hollywood, from an obsession with aviation to Anne Frank's love of the movies. Beautifully written and illustrated, Wartime Kiss vividly evokes a world in which Margaret Bourke-White could follow a heroic assignment photographing a B-17 bombing mission over Tunis with a job in Hollywood documenting the filming of a war movie. Ultimately this is a book about history as a sensuous experience, a work as mysterious, indescribable, and affecting as a novel by W. G. Sebald"--
Princeton University Press 2013 175 pages

Acting in the night: Macbeth and the places of the Civil War

Nemerov, Alexander
"Alexander Nemerov is one of the greatest readers of American visual culture. This book has the revelatory power that only wide-ranging curiosity and true independence of mind can achieve." Richard H. Brodhead President of Duke University and author of Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America ; "A benchmark in the writing of art history and in studies of the Civil War, Acting in the Night occupies a category unto itself. It uniquely immerses the reader in a holistic experience of the Civil War and shows Nemerov as a cosummate stylist in the field of American art history."Kathleen Pyne author of Modernism and the Feminine Voice ; "This is a work of criticism that borders on poetry, a brilliant and extremely original book that invites us to rethink to the artistic world we study."Julia Reinhard Lupton author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life ; What can the performance of a single play on one night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, D.C., on October 17, 1863--with Abraham Lincoln in attendance--to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov's inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar,"in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it. For Nemerov, that evening's performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change. --Book Jacket
University of California Press 2010-09-01 299 pages

In the wake of terror: medicine and morality in a time of crisis

Moreno, Jonathan D.
Timely and provocative essays on bioethical questions brought to the forefront by the bioterrorist threat. The war on terrorism and the threat of chemical and biological weapons have brought a new urgency to already complex moral and bioethical questions. In the Wake of Terror presents thought-provoking essays on many of the troubling issues facing American society, written by experts from the fields of medicine, health care policy, law, political science, history, philosophy, and theology. One of the first potential casualties of catastrophic circumstances is civil liberties. In the past, medical experiments conducted for national security purposes have violated ethical standards, and this book questions whether current policy provides sufficient safeguards against further abuses. It also focuses on public health issues, offering contrasting views on the extent to which civil authorities should be allowed to restrict freedom of movement in the name of national security and debating whether aggressive public health interventions improve public confidence and cooperation or detract from them. A major area of concern is preparedness for future terrorist attacks. Chapters are devoted to ethical issues involved in the development, distribution, and rationing of vaccines and antidotes; resource allocation and medical triage; the moral duties of emergency health workers and other first responders; and the obligations of private entities such as managed care organizations and pharmaceutical companies. Contributors also address the implications of terrorism for our health insurance system and the role of genetic advances in bioterrorism. Underlying all of these issues, the authors argue, is the need to maintain a spirit of social solidarity, which can in turn only be achieved if preparations are publicly acknowledged and generally regarded as both prudent and fair.
MIT Press 2003 229 pages

Prison blossoms: anarchist voices from the American past

Berkman, Alexander
In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called "Prison Blossoms." This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2011-05-05 253 pages

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Murray Newton Rothbard
Official Mises Institute EditionThis fiery monograph shows a side of Murray Rothbard not seen in his theoretical treatise: his ability to employ "power elite" analysis to understand the relationship between money, power, and war.Rather than allow the left to dominate this approach to history; Rothbard shows how wealthy elites are only able to manipulate world affairs via their connection to state power. Those mainstream historians might deride Rothbard's history as a "conspiracy" approach, Rothbard himself is only out to show that world affairs are not random historical forces but the consequence of choices and paths chosen by real human beings.Here he gives the grim details of how a network of banks, bond dealers, and Wall Street insiders have both favored war and profited from it.The contents of this volume include a long and thoughtful introduction by Anthony Gregory and an afterword by Justin Raimondo.
Ludwig von Mises Institute 2011-05 76 pages

Modern American Poetry

Louis Untermeyer
This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!
HardPress 2019-08-06 470 pages