Showing results for "Reading Biography" in Americas

"Citizen Kane does Adventureland." —The Washington Post The outlandish, hilarious, terrifying, and almost impossible-to-believe story of the legendary, dangerous amusement park where millions were entertained and almost as many bruises were sustained, told through the eyes of the founder's...

Derided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. In Reading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel’s celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee...

“Quick in the saddle and fast out of town.” Watch one of America’s most remarkable heroes come alive through fast-paced prose and gripping storytelling. He’s Famous for his Ride. He’s Essential for So Much More. The story of Paul Revere is the story of the American Revolution. Always...

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the nation's first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams.

Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted Gettysburg Address was originally meant to be secondary to other presentations that day, following on as it did from a two hour speech by the orator Edward Everett. Although Lincoln's speech was only just over two minutes long, it came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In it's short span, Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis.

Francis Grierson's, The Valley of Shadows, is truly a lost American classic. Written at the dawn of the twentieth century, the author has remarkably captured his adventures and observations as a child growing up on the prairies of Illinois in the years leading up the Civil War, in a region that was neither North nor South; neither for slavery nor against it; and how their small family farm became an unscheduled stop on the Underground Railroad.