History -- United States from I Cannot Live Without Books

Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre by Thomas A. Bogar An actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage shouting, "Sic semper tyrannis!" ("Thus always to tyrants!") and escapes -- leaving the president fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified stagehands, actors, and theatre workers… Read more about this item

Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution. Opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. All envision a better society, even a great society. In the 1960s, Americans also dreamed of a great society. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus… Read more about this item

Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960 by Irwin F. Gellman The 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is one of the most frequently described political events of the twentieth century, yet the accounts to date have been remarkably unbalanced. Far more attention is given to Kennedy's side than to Nixon's. The imbalance… Read more about this item

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse We are often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of "Christian America" is an invention -- and a relatively recent one at that. As Kruse argues,… Read more about this item

Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions by Caitlin Fitz THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. In the early nineteenth century, the United States emerged from its second war with England and turned its idealistic gaze southward, imagining a legacy of republican revolution it hoped would dominate the American hemisphere. In Our… Read more about this item

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers, and… Read more about this item

Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, The Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission by Stephen Puleo THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The first vessel to… Read more about this item

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America by Carol Anderson In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a "pro-gun" nor… Read more about this item

The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free by Paulina Bren THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. The Barbizon is the first history of New York's most glamorous women-only residential hotel and the remarkable women who passed through its doors. Liberated from home and hearth by World War I, politically enfranchised and ready to work, women arrived… Read more about this item

To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America by Andrew Baker On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a Black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the… Read more about this item

They Came for Freedom: The Forgotten, Epic Adventure of the Pilgrims by Jay Milbrandt Once a year at Thanksgiving, we encounter Pilgrims as folksy people in funny hats before promptly forgetting them. In the centuries since America began, the Pilgrims have been relegated to folklore and children's stories, fairy-tale mascots for holiday parties and greeting cards. The true story of the Pilgrim… Read more about this item

The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11 by David Loyn Three American presidents tried to defeat the Taliban -- sending 150,000 international troops at the peak and spending a trillion dollars. But early policy mistakes that allowed Osama bin Laden to escape made the task far more difficult. Deceived by easy victories, they backed ruthless corrupt… Read more about this item

Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. In January 1944, a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle accompanied his boss to a meeting with the president. For more than a decade, the Jews of Germany had sought refuge in the United… Read more about this item

The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, & the World They Made and Lost by Marilyn J. Westerkamp When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they constructed a godly commonwealth according to precepts gleaned from Scripture. For these 'Puritan' Christians, religion both provided the center… Read more about this item

The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America by Rebecca Fraser The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped group of English puritans who ventured across the Atlantic in the early autumn o f1620 had no sense they would pass into legend.… Read more about this item

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. The story of the Boston Massacre -- when, on a late-winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death -- is familiar to generations. But the history of the event has always obscured a fascinating truth: the massacre arose… Read more about this item

They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty by John G. Turner In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting… Read more about this item

The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor,… Read more about this item

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J.D. Dickey In November 1739, the American colonies felt an earthquake. It arrived not in the form of a natural disaster, but with a twenty-five-year-old preacher, George Whitefield. He had come to the New World to tell his listeners to repent their sins and be reborn, to reject… Read more about this item

Not "a Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many of us, regardless of party affiliation, proudly say that the United States is "a nation of immigrants." This pervasive myth emerged in the 1950s when John F. Kennedy, then… Read more about this item