Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/01/2013
ISBN-13: 9781451678970
ISBN-10: 1451678975

The King Years distills the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning writings on civil rights history into a slim, elegant, quick-reading volume that highlights eighteen crucial events in America's struggle toward racial equality. Although Martin Luther King's life frames the events treated here -- beginning with his first public address during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and ending with his assassination in 1968 -- this is not a biography. Instead, readers will discover a well-rendered, compressed historical narrative that illuminates a period of radical social change in American history.

Publisher: Viking
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 12/31/2012
ISBN-13: 9780670024810
ISBN-10: 0670024813

Author Jared Diamond returns with another thoughtful history of who we are, how we got that way, and what might be next. In just 11,000 years (since pretty much only "yesterday" in geological time), we have transformed from simple tribes of hunter-gatherers into civilized modern nation states. Drawing upon his extensive field work in New Guinea among traditional societies plus in-depth research into those elsewhere, Diamond convincingly argues the pros and cons of what we have gained and lost along the way. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature offers a related read about humanity's progress.

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Publisher: Random House
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/08/2013
ISBN-13: 9781400067039
ISBN-10: 1400067030

Told in the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the radical transformation of the American South during and after the Civil War. Award-winning author Bruce Levine employs a wealth of primary sources -- diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more -- to vividly bring to life the perspectives of slaves, shopkeepers, soldiers, and others in a stellar history of the South's social, political and economic deconstruction and rebuilding. Levine delivers "a deep, rich, and complex analysis" (Publishers Weekly) with signature verve; Andrew Ward's The Slaves' War also relies on primary sources, in another intimate look at the period.

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Publisher: PublicAffairs
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 07/31/2012
ISBN-13: 9781586489694
ISBN-10: 1586489690

The story of how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite is at the heart of this extraordinarily timely and revealing book, whose devastating findings from the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the best-selling America: What Went Wrong will leave you astonished and angry.

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Publisher: Random House
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/29/2013
ISBN-13: 9781400067619
ISBN-10: 1400067618

The renowned historian and author of Preparing for the Twenty-First Century analyzes previously unexplored strategic factors he believes to be responsible for the Allied victory in World War II, sharing behind-the-scenes assessments of ambitious goals successfully pursued by FDR, Churchill and other attendees at the Casablanca Conference.

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Publisher: Crown Publishers
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/27/2009
ISBN-13: 9780307382405
ISBN-10: 0307382400

Henry Louis Gates explores family history, a powerful nexus of pride, secrecy, and confusion in African American communities. Few African Americans can trace their families past the 19th century: birth, deaths, and marriages among slaves were seldom recorded; race mixing remained taboo, and discussions of ancestry were stifled among even close kin for many generations afterward. Gates uncovers the roots of 19 prominent African Americans (including media mogul Oprah Winfrey, writer Maya Angelou, and Hollywood star Morgan Freeman) in a supremely approachable look at slavery's legacy as well as the individuals' own fascinating pasts. For similar peek into Michelle Obama's ancestry, follow up with Rachel Swarns' American Tapestry.

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Publisher: City Lights Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/01/2011
ISBN-13: 9780872865327
ISBN-10: 0872865320

In this examination of the White House -- itself a microcosm of the nation's historical racial divide -- author Clarence Lusane reminds readers that ten presidents were slaveholders. He also illuminates the lives of many previously unknown but fascinating African Americans (like Blind Tom, famed as a musical prodigy during his time as a White House slave) as well as more famous figures. An authoritative survey of African Americans' roles there (including as president), The Black History of the White House delivers "a sweeping portrayal of changing historical tides at the White House" (Booklist).

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Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/03/2012
ISBN-13: 9780230108936
ISBN-10: 0230108938

As a household slave to James and Dolley Madison from childhood, Paul Jennings later faithfully served as President Madison's personal valet in the White House. Despite this, Mrs. Madison sold Jennings upon her husband's death. Author Elizabeth Dowling Taylor examines the Madisons' conflicting and hypocritical beliefs about human freedom and emancipation in this informative and engaging chronicle of Jennings' life from slavery to eventual post-emancipation achievements as one of the White House's earliest memoirists and the father of two Union Army soldiers.

Publisher: Anchor Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 01/08/2008
ISBN-13: 9781400079360
ISBN-10: 1400079365

Author Jacqueline Tobin's compelling history of the famous escape route that took runaway slaves to new lives in Canada follows the lives of those who aided them, as well as the dangerous journeys and later adventures of the fugitive slaves themselves. From Midnight to Dawn brings to life the true stories behind well-known figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Equally heroic if less well-known individuals profiled here include Mary Ann Shadd, who became the first black female newspaper editor in North America, and Osborne Perry Anderson, the only black survivor of the fighting at Harper's Ferry.

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