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History and Current Events September 2026 |
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| The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-MortonThe Cut columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Wake Up: Essays on Redefining Our Relationship with Time and Technology) utilizes intimate interviews with everyday social media users to explore how social media complicates identity and impacts how people represent (or mis-represent) themselves to others. Try this next: All the Feels: How to Stay Human in the Digital World by Pamela Pavliscak. |
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| But Have You Read the Book? Romance Edition: 40 Love Stories That Inspired Our... by Kristen LopezIn her lively and richly detailed follow-up to But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films, pop culture essayist Kristen Lopez spotlights 40 literary romances and their film adaptations. For fans of: Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today by Esther Zuckerman. |
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The Cherokee War of 1776: Native Destruction at the Dawn of American Independence
by Kevin Kokomoor
The forgotten history of the US war against the Cherokee offers a crucial reframing of America's origin story.Americans remember 1776 as the year liberty was declared, the moment they cast off tyranny and proclaimed the self-evident truths of equality and freedom. But that same summer, as patriots celebrated their defiant new nation, American armies launched another campaign--this one aimed at destroying the Cherokee nation.The Cherokee War of 1776 recasts America's founding moment by tracing the importance of westward ambition and settler violence to the origins of the Revolutionary War. In this gripping and sobering book, historian Kevin Kokomoor uncovers the rarely acknowledged war waged by the emerging United States against the Cherokee people just days after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Far from a spontaneous frontier skirmish, this war was a coordinated, state-backed campaign with a clear aim: seize Indigenous land and crush Native resistance. Many of the very men who championed liberty on parchment simultaneously advocated for the wholesale destruction of a sovereign Native nation.At the heart of this story is Cherokee resistance, which was strategic, determined, and deeply rooted in community dynamics. Figures like Dragging Canoe emerged to lead a movement that endured long after American armies had burned Cherokee towns to the ground. Kokomoor foregrounds Cherokee voices, motivations, and resilience, challenging the notion that they were merely pawns in a colonial struggle and forcing us to reckon with the real costs of independence and the long fight for Indigenous sovereignty.
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The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915
by Joseph Kelly
Historian Joseph Kelly's well-researched revisionist account explores the origins of American fascism in the Antebellum South, detailing how the 1818 Missouri Compromise helped advance the ideology. Further reading: The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy by Steven J. Ross.
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The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776
by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
For America 250, a provocative argument that a Long Revolution formed the violently beating heart of American politics for decades after 1776. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal's delightful The Long Revolution shows how much the story of America remains unsettled--and ours to make anew. --Garrett M. Graff, bestselling author of The Only Plane in the Sky In the century after Independence, many Americans believed that their Revolution was still in progress. Far from a unifying national myth, the Revolution was for generations of Americans a source of radically conflicting political ideas. Nowhere was this clearer than on the Fourth of July, when Americans gathered for speeches that, as one orator put it in 1834, aimed to examine the present, and to look forward to the future. In The Long Revolution, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal mines thousands of Independence Day orations to offer a stirring and revelatory new history of this long American Revolution. In the words of local notables and national celebrities, men and women, white and Black, he identifies the contrasting visions, intense anxieties, and radical power evoked by the Revolution deep into the nineteenth century. This is a history of the American founding for today's fragmented and anxious political moment, helping us find a usable past to guide us toward our own uncertain future.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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