Search Results: History from I Cannot Live Without Books

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued -- through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raul Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country's future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington -- Barack Obama's opening to the island, Donald Trump's reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden -- have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more.
Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an ambitious and moving chronicle written for a moment that demands a new reckoning with both the island's past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row… Read More

Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia by Diana Preston
The mutiny on the Bounty in April 1789 and the survival of William Bligh and his men on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles have become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British incursions into the Pacific. At almost the same time, nine convicts, including a woman fled the new penal colony in Australia to sail 3,250 miles across partly uncharted seas to the same port as Bligh. Within weeks, survivors of a third dramatic open-boat voyage -- members of the British naval expedition sent to hunt down the Bounty mutineers and some of the captured mutineers themselves -- followed.
Diana Preston sets the intertwined stories of the Bounty and the founding of the first British penal colony in Aust6ralia against the backdrop of the Age of Enlightenment, when British colonial aspirations clashed with new ideas about humankind's natural nobility and right to… Read More