Showing results for "The Fall" in United States

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

Considered by Ty Cobb as the "finest natural hitter in the history of the game," "Shoeless Joe" Jackson is ranked with the greatest players to ever step onto a baseball diamond. With a career .356 batting average - which is still ranked third all-time - the man from Pickens County, South Carolina, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest players in the sport's history. That is until the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which shook baseball to its core.

Americans have lost faith in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. Thomas Baker spent many years with the FBI and is deeply troubled by this loss of faith. Specific lapses have come to light and each is thoroughly discussed in this book: Why did they happen? What changed? The answer begins days after the 9/11 attacks when the FBI underwent a significant change in culture.

This book tells the story, for the first time, of the United States government's response to Guevara's ill-starred insurgency in Bolivia in 1967. Henry Butterfield Ryan argues that Guevara's life must be re-evaluated in light of secret documents only recently released by the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council.

Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844) was one of the most successful and controversial religious leaders of nineteenth-century America, publishing the Book of Mormon and starting what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He built temples, founded a city-state in Illinois, ran for president, and married more than thirty women. This self-made prophet thrilled his followers with his grand vision of peace and unity, but his increasingly grandiose plans tested and sometimes shattered their faith.

The Battle of Chickamauga was the third bloodiest of the American Civil War and the only major Confederate victory in the conflict's western theater. It pitted Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee against William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland and resulted in more than 34,500 casualties. In this first volume of an authoritative two-volume history of the Chickamauga Campaign, William Glenn Robertson provides a richly detailed narrative of military operations in southeastern and eastern Tennessee as two armies prepared to meet along the "River of Death."

From the New York Times best-selling journalist, the staggering, hidden story of an unlikely band of mothers who discovered the deadly secret of Love Canal, and exposed one of America’s most devastating environmental disasters. Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their...

One of the most notorious murders in US history, the 1892 killing of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, officially remains an unsolved case. Although Lizzie Borden was charged with the axe murders of her father and stepmother, the jury found her not guilty. No one else was ever charged. Edwin H. Porter was a young police reporter for the Fall River Daily Globe who covered the crime. Beginning with the discovery of the bodies, all the way through the investigation, trial, and final verdict, Porter gives a detailed account with first-hand access to the crime scene.

In this brilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author Ken Ellingwood animates the life and times of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. First to Fall illuminates this flawed yet heroic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for free press rights in a time when the First Amendment offered little protection for those who dared to critique America’s “peculiar institution”.

In the quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, over the course of two days in July 1848, a small group of women and men, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, held a convention that would launch the woman's rights movement and change the course of history. The implications of that remarkable convention would be felt around the world - and indeed are still being felt today.

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail.

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today, most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy - particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

Having a good, stable job used to be the bedrock of the American Dream. Not anymore. In this richly detailed and eye-opening book, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers. Through the stories of four major employers -- General Motors...

How earnest hippies, frightened parents, suffering patients, and other ordinary Americans went to war over marijuana In the last five years, eight states have legalized recreational marijuana. To many, continued progress seems certain. But pot was on a similar trajectory forty years ago, only to...

In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a path-breaking and brilliant new history of early America.

Henry Lee III - whose nickname, "Light-Horse," came from his legendary exploits with mounted troops and skill in the saddle - was a dashing cavalry commander and hero of America's War for Independence. By now most Americans have forgotten about Light-Horse Harry Lee, the father of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, but this new biography reveals he may be one of the most fascinating figures in our nation's history. A daring military commander, Lee was also an early American statesman whose passionate argument in favor of national unity helped ratify the Constitution.

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

It is an explosive true story of survival, betrayal, and the moment America lost its grip on the Middle East. On November 4, 1979, 52 Americans were taken hostage inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, an act that stunned the world and sparked a 444-day standoff that shattered U.S. diplomacy and changed global politics forever. In this pulse-pounding narrative, acclaimed historian Davis Truman pulls back the curtain on the backroom deals, psychological torment, and international missteps that defined one of the longest hostage crises in modern history.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, served as the 32nd president of the United States. He was a compelling orator who inspired millions with his "fireside" radio speeches during the Great Depression of the 1930s and his wartime addresses to the nation in the 1940s.