Search results

With almost forty years' experience as a labor leader by 1909, Samuel Gompers had learned the value of practical achievements. Shorter hours, higher wages, safer and more sanitary workplaces, and a voice in establishing working conditions were the hallmarks of trade unionism in the Progressive Era, and these hard-won, incremental gains had significantly improved working-class lives. While these were not all he hoped to achieve, they represented, Gompers believed, essential victories in a bitter...

The son of black sharecroppers, John Oliver Hodges attended segregated schools in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the 1950s and '60s, worked in plantation cotton fields, and eventually left the region to earn multiple degrees and become a tenured university professor. Both poignant and thought provoking, Delta Fragments is Hodges's autobiographical journey back to the land of his birth. Brimming with vivid memories of family life, childhood friendships, the quest for knowledge, and the often brutal i...

From America's preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes the definitive telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945. This authoritative narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive and comprehensive D-Day and Citizen Soldiers, about which the great Civil War historian James McPherson wrote, "If there is a better book about the ex...

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America's consumer culture was centralized in midtown Manhattan to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles of skyscrapers were the headquarters of networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book publishers and mass circulation magazines such as Time and Life, numerous influential newspapers, and major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Every day tens of thousan...

Intellectuals "have been both rallying points and railed against in American politics, vessels of hope and targets of scorn," writes Michael J. Brown as he invigorates a recurrent debate in American life: are intellectual public figures essential voices of knowledge and wisdom, or out-of-touch elites? Hope and Scorn investigates the role of high-profile experts and thinkers in American life and their ever-fluctuating relationship with the political and public spheres. From Eisenhower's era to O...

In the summer of 1937, Jonathan Daniels, the young, white, liberal-minded editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, took a ten-state driving tour to ""discover"" his native land. He thought the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and he set out to find it--ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along wit...

While the name Duncan Hines is presently associated with cake mix, from the Depression to the mid-1950s, the name was most commonly associated with a series of guidebooks pointing travelers to the best restaurants, hotels/motels, and vacation destinations. These books were overwhelmingly popular, outpacing even the venerable Michelin Guide. Prior to Hines, finding good food or safe lodging was a hit-or-miss proposition: restaurants were often unsanitary and the food of poor quality. Hines was tr...

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain recent transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick's sweeping study of the past century of American historical writing.Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in th...

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s the mid-'70s to 19...

Robert M. La Follette (1855-1925), the Republican senator from Wisconsin, is best known as a key architect of American Progressivism and as a fiery advocate for liberal politics in the domestic sphere. But ""Fighting Bob"" did not immediately come to a progressive stance on foreign affairs. In The Education of an Anti-Imperialist, Richard Drake follows La Follette's growth as a critic of America's wars and the policies that led to them. He began his political career with conventional Republican...

A detailed and engaging historical examination that provides an intimate understanding of the daily life of the new immigrants in the United States.In the last decades, a growing number of immigrants from around the world have arrived in the United States. Daily Life of the New Americans: Immigration since 1965 provides a thematic overview of their everyday lives and underscores the diversity and complexity of the newcomer experience. Organized into six thematic chapters, the book examines how i...

All recordings document life, arising from a specific time and place, and if that place is artificial, the results will be as well. Culled from a lifetime of learning through failure and designed to provoke thought and inspiration for artists in every medium, How Music Dies (or Lives) is a virtual how-to manual for those on a quest for authenticity in an age of airbrushed and Auto-Tuned so-called "artists." Author and Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan chronicles his own journeys to find new an...

The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings. Its profound effect upon modern America has so greatly changed relations between the races that C. Vann Woodward has called it the ""second revolution.""In a limi...