Showing results for "Making Americans" in Americas

President Theodore Roosevelt forever transformed America, ushering the country into the arena of world supremacy. His brand of leadership was entirely American: confident, compassionate, energetic, diverse, visionary. But Roosevelt was not a born leader; his ascent to the apex of power was not a foregone conclusion.

The classic, “gripping” (New York Times) history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize “A stinging indictment of slavery...

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture.

It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just 32 days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favourite film, celebrating moral fortitude.

With Mormonism on the verge of an unprecedented cultural and political breakthrough, an eminent scholar of American evangelicalism explores the history and reflects on the future of this native-born American faith and its connection to the life of the nation. In 1830, a young seer and...

The final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general in the Civil War and the 18th president of the United States, is a colossal neoclassical tomb located in the most dynamic city in the country. It is larger than the final resting place of any other president or any other person in America. Since its creation, the popularity and condition of this monument have reflected not only Grant's legacy in the public mind but also the state of New York City and of the Union. In this deeply researched book, presidential historian Louis L. Picone recounts the full story.

In 1692, a small Puritan community in Massachusetts became the stage for one of the darkest episodes in American history. The Salem Witch Trials, fueled by superstition, religious zeal, and the fear of the unknown, led to over 150 accusations, countless shattered lives, and the executions of innocent men and women. But beyond the gallows and confessions lies a deeper story, one of resistance, power, and the origins of collective fear in America.

A withering and witty examination of how the American legal system, burdened by complexity and untrammeled growth, fails Americans and threatens the rule of law itself, by the acclaimed author of A Generation of Sociopaths. Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do...

J. G. Boswell was the biggest farmer in America. He built a secret empire while thumbing his nose at nature, politicians, labor unions, and every journalist who ever tried to lift the veil on the ultimate "factory in the fields". The King of California is the previously untold account of how a Georgia slave-owning family migrated to California in the early 1920s, drained one of America 's biggest lakes in an act of incredible hubris and carved out the richest cotton empire in the world.

In Maier's hands, the Declaration of Independence is brought close to us. She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in the other "declarations" of 1776: the local resolutions - most of which have gone unnoticed over the past two centuries - that explained, advocated, and justified Independence and undergirded Congress' work. Detective-like, she discloses the origins of key ideas and phrases in the Declaration and unravels the complex story of its drafting and of the group-editing job which angered Thomas Jefferson.

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

A Harper Perennial Political Classic, The Making of the President 1960 is the groundbreaking national bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1960 presidential campaign and the election of John F. Kennedy. The Making of the President: 1960 revolutionized the way modern presidential...

Rebels in the Making is a narrative-driven history of how and why secession occurred. In this work, senior Civil War historian William L. Barney narrates the explosion of the sectional conflict into secession and civil war. Carefully examining the events in all 15 slave states and distinguishing the political circumstances in each, he argues that this was not a mass democratic movement but one led from above.

American Apartheid shows how the Black ghetto was created by Whites during the first half of the 20th century in order to isolate growing urban Black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation".

Legend has it that as the American colonies hurtled toward independence, representatives of the Continental Congress, including George Washington, walked into Betsy Ross’s Philadelphia upholstery shop and commissioned the first flag of the Revolutionary nation. Although this story has long...

In American Gospel (literally meaning the "good news about America"), New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham sets the record straight on the history of religion in American public life. As Meacham shows, faith --meaning a belief in a higher power, and the sense that we are God's chosen...

At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney, Jr., was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became the youngest person executed in the United States during the 20th century.

A fascinating look at Hollywood’s most turbulent decade and the demise of the studio system—set against the boom of the post–World War II years, the Cold War, and the atomic age—and the movies that reflected the seismic shifts “The definitive book on 1950s Hollywood.” —Booklist...

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anti-capitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community.

The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm. Making the Presidency is an exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic.