Search Results: History: United States, 20th Century from I Cannot Live Without Books

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook
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In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.
In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time,… Read More

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s by Elizabeth Hinton
What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors. and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.
Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an… Read More

Battleground New York City: Countering Spies, Saboteurs, and Terrorists Since 1861 by Thomas A. Reppetto
New York City has long been a breeding ground for spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and other threats to the nation and its greatest city. Battleground New York City examines the history of domestic security operations and the people and agencies involved in safeguarding "the city that never sleeps."
Starting with the bloody draft riots during the Civil War, Thomas Reppetto guides the reader through New York City's history, emphasizing the battles against twentieth-century German and Russian spies and more recent ones against Islamic radicals. This book illustrates how, over the course of two world wars, numerous political and social upheavals, and shocking terrorist attacks, the United States developed a complex web of organizations responsible for identifying and neutralizing security risks. New York has been the training and proving ground for law enforcement agencies in developing the… Read More

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallace
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"Westward Ho! For Oregon and California"
In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months their jingoistic experiment would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
We have long known these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. Now, celebrated historian Michael Wallis -- "our greatest living writer of Americana" (Allen Barra) -- continues his life's work of parsing… Read More

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallis
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
"Westward Ho! For Oregon and California!"
In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
We have long known these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. Now, celebrated historian Michael Wallis continues his life's work of parsing fact from fiction to tell the true story of one of the most… Read More

The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt by Jill Watts
In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied basic citizenship rights, and terrorized by white violence. Indeed, as Roosevelt announced what would be his signature initiative, the black press wondered "Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?" The Black Cabinet tells the story of the 'black Brain Trust" who joined the administration with an eye to squaring that deal, in an environment reluctant, often hostile, to change.
Economists, sociologists, lawyers, and journalists, the people who joined the Black Cabinet -- the black press's sobriquet -- had in common a desire to document and address the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced, and to put the need for reform on the… Read More

Bourbon Street: A History by Richard Campanella
New Orleans is a city of many-storied streets, but only one conjures up as much unbridled passion as it does fervent hatred, simultaneously polarizing the public while drawing millions of visitors every year. A fascinating investigation into the mile-long urban space that is Bourbon Street, Richard Campanella's comprehensive cultural history spans from the street's inception during the colonial period through three tumultuous centuries, arriving at the world-famous entertainment strip of today.
Clearly written and carefully researched, Campanella's book interweaves world events -- from the Louisiana Purchase to World War II to Hurricane Katrina -- with local and national characters, ranging from presidents to showgirls, to explain how Bourbon Street became an intriguing and singular artifact, uniquely informative of both New Orleans history and American society.
An epic narrative detailing the influence of politics, money, race, sex, organized crime, and… Read More

Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person with Richard Rooker
At eighteen, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. civil rights movement who left Washington, D.C., by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female activists -- including future Congressman John Lewis, Congress of Racial Equality Director James Farmer, Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox, journalist, and pacifist James Peck, and CORE field secretary Genevieve Hughes -- set out to discover whether America would abide by a Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation unconstitutional in bus depots, waiting areas, restaurants, and restrooms nationwide.
Two buses proceeded through Virginia and North and South Carolina to Georgia, where they were greeted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to Alabama. There the Freedom Riders found their answer: no. Southern states would continue to disregard federal law and use violence to… Read More

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham
In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period -- and through to today.
Drawing on an extensive database collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been… Read More

The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky
On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries -- Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph -- for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the U.S. Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own.
Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges -- and finding congressional help lacking -- Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. In the early days, the cabined served at the president's pleasure. Washington tinkered with its structure throughout his administration, at times calling regular meetings, at other times preferring written advice and individual discussions.
Lindsay Chervinsky… Read More

Camelot's End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party by Jon Ward
The Carter presidency was on life support. The Democrats, desperate to keep power and yearning to resurrect former glory, turned to Kennedy. And so, 1980 became a civil war. It was the last time an American president received a serious reelection challenge from inside his own party, the last contested convention, and the last, all-out floor fight, where political combatants fought in real-time to decide who would be the nominee. It was the last gasp of an outdated system, an insider's game that old Kennedy hands thought they had mastered, and the year that marked the unraveling of the Democratic Party as America had known it.
Camelot's End details the incredible drama of Kennedy's challenge -- what led to it, how it unfolded, and its lasting effects -- with cinematic sweep. It is a story about what happened to the Democratic Party when the country's long string of successes, luck, and global dominance following… Read More

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, and stigma. Using riveting stories about people -- including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, and Wilkerson herself -- she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to… Read More

The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773 - 1783 by Joseph J. Ellis
In one of the most "exciting and engaging" (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America's revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.
For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis -- one of our most celebrated scholars of American history -- throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he, at last, brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with "surprising relevance" (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American… Read More

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert G. Parkinson
When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkins argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians.
Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like "domestic insurrectionists" and "merciless savages," the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new republic.
In a fresh reading of… Read More

Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest by Fernando Cervantes
Over the few short decades that followed Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean in 1492, Spain conquered the two most formidable civilizations of the Americas: the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizzaro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. But centuries later, these conquistadores have become the stuff of nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers spreading Christian culture. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation as men who decimated ancient civilizations and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory.
In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes -- himself a descendent of one of the conquistadores -- cuts… Read More

Coronado's Well-Equipped Army: The Spanish Invasion of the American Southwest by John M. Hutchins
The historic 1540 - 1542 expedition of Captain-General Francisco Vasquez de Coronado is popularly remembered as a luckless party of exploration which wandered the American Southwest and then blundered onto the central Great Plains of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The expedition, as historian John M. Hutchins relates in Coronado's Well-Equipped Army, was a military force of about 1,500 individuals, made up of Spanish soldiers, Indian warrior allies, and camp followers. Despite the hopes for a peaceful conquest of new lands -- including those of a legendary kingdom of Cibola -- the expedition was obliged to fight a series of battles with the natives in present-day Sonora, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The final phase of the invasion was less warlike, as the members of the expedition searched the Great Plains in vain for a wealthy civilization called Quivira. While much has been written about the march… Read More

Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers by Doug J. Swanson
The Texas Rangers came to life in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico. Nearly two hundred years later, the Rangers are still going -- one of the most famous of all law enforcement agencies. In Cult of Glory, Doug J. Swanson has written asweeping account of the Rangers that chronicles their epic, daring escapades while showing how the white and propertied power structures of Texas used them as enforcers, protectors, and officially sanctioned killers.
Cult of Glory begins with the Rangers' emergence as conquerors of the wild and violent Texas frontier. They fought the fierce Comanches, chased outlaws, and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. As Texas developed, the Rangers were called upon to catch rustlers, tame oil boomtowns, and patrol the perilous Texas-Mexico border. In the 1930s they began their transformation into a professionally trained police force.
Countless movies, television shows, and pulp… Read More

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris
In the first few decades of the nineteenth century America went from being a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to a fledgling industrial powerhouse -- setting the stage for the vast fortunes that would be made in the golden age of American capitalism. The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies owed their colossal opportunities to the earlier pioneering era, and it is that time that Charle R. Morris brings vividly to life in The Dawn of Innovation.
Three stupendous American innovations -- universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from elites to the middle classes, and a broad commitment to mechanized mass-production -- gave rise to the world's first democratic, middle-class, mass-consumption society, a shining beacon to nations and peoples ever since. Behind that ideal were the machines, the men, and the trading and transportation networks that created a new… Read More

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson tells the spellbinding true story of two men, an architect and a serial killer, whose fates were linked by the greatest fair in American history: The Chicago World's Fair of 1893, nicknamed "The White City."
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York, and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds -- a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham… Read More

The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the literary punks, renegade artists, DIY filmmakers, mad playwrights, and rock 'n' roll glitter queens who revolutionized culture by Kembrew McLeod
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the inhabitants of a small, roughly one-square-mile area of lower Manhattan were smashing the status quo of music, art, film, performance, and sexuality. These profound transformations were set in motion by a tight-knit community of theatrical performers, playwrights, poets, musicians, video-makers, visual artists, activists, and gender rebels who made sparks fly when they brushed up against each other. Paving the way for everything from punk rock, disco, indie media, and performance art to the gradual acceptance of gay and transgender life, this motley assemblage expressed themselves without a thought about career development, marketing, or sound business plans -- and, most importantly, they did it collectively in the spirit of fun and adventure.
In The Downtown Pop… Read More