This singular collection is nothing less than a political,spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuousmodern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators,activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group ofworks that are both intimate and important, essays that move frompersonal experience to larger significance without severing theconnection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingwaycovering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s"Letter from Birmingham Jail," these essays fit, in the words ofJoyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest ing] wherewe've come from, and who we are, and where we are going." Amongthose whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S.Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe,Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, CynthiaOzick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and AnnieDillard.

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In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writerSteve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrationsof our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years.Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human Historyis a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on awide range of sources, including the latest genetic research,linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals thesurprising unity among modern humans and "demonstrates just hownaive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been"(Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining,for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius asforebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on theinvention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the originsof language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging andlucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how wethink about ourselves and our relations with others.

The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece fornearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strangeaccounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In thisgroundbreaking work, three experts—a mycologist, a chemist, and ahistorian—argue persuasively that the sacred potion given toparticipants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactiveentheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show thatnatural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual ritualsacross history and cultures. Although controversial when firstpublished in 1978, the book’s hypothesis has become more widelyaccepted in recent years, as knowledge of ethnobotany has deepened.The authors have played critical roles in the modern rediscovery ofentheogens, and The Road to Eleusis presents an authoritativeexposition of their views. The book’s themes of the universality ofexperiential religion, the suppression of that knowledge byexploitative forces, and the use of psychedelics to reconcile theh

In this gripping memoir, the daughter of a man who conspiredto assassinate Hitler tells the story of three generations of herfamily and offers unparalleled insight into the German experiencein the last century. On August 15, 1944, Major Hans Georg Klamroth was tried fortreason for his part in the July Plot to kill Hitler. Eleven dayslater, he was executed. His youngest daughter, Wibke Bruhns, wassix years old. Decades later, watching a documentary about theevents of July 20, she saw images of her father in court suddenlyappear on-screen. “I stare at this man with the empty face. I don'tknow him. But I can see myself in him.” How could her familysuccumb to Nazi sympathies? And what made her father finallyrenounce Hitler?

Robert V. Brulle, who flew seventy ground support missionswith the 366th Fighter Group, links his daily experiences in thecockpit not only with the battles in which he participated but alsowith events in the wider European theater. Combining anecdotes fromhis personal diary, research in US and German records, andinterviews with participants from both sides, Brulle details acombat career that began just after D-Day, when he flew columncover for Allied troops as they chased the German military out ofFrance. He then describes the brutal, six-week Hürtgen Forestcampaign, during which his fighter group lost 15 pilots and 18aircraft. He also tells how the otherwise bitterly fought Battle ofthe Bulge provided the 366th with an opportunity to successfullyengage 60 Luftwaffe airplanes in a dogfight directly over theirairfield. Angels Zero combines both personal and historical detail tovividly re-create a lesser-known aspect of the air war inEurope.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Garry Wills makes a compelling argumentfor a reassessment of Henry Adams as our nations greatest historianand his History as the "nonfiction prose masterpiece of thenineteenth century in America." Adams drew on his own southernfixations, his extensive foreign travel, his political service inthe Lincoln administration, and much more to invent the study ofhistory as we know it. His nine-volume chronicle of America from1800 to 1816 established new standards for employing archivalsources, firsthand reportage, eyewitness accounts, and othertechniques that have become the essence of modern history.Ambitious in scope, nuanced in detail, Henry Adams and the Makingof America throws brilliant light on the historian and the makingof history.

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousandsof years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their godsdevelop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicistRobin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of the ancientworld, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuingit through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how theintrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around theMediterranean, encountering strange new sights—volcanic mountains,vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones—and weaving them into themyths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become thecornerstone of Western civilization.

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A derangedactor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre,escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he methis fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteriathat followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of thosewere executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classicelements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even morefascinating. Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremostLincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to adeeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account ofthe Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array ofarchival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on thebackground and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of hisplot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates ofthe conspirators. Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects commonmisperceptions and analy

A "full-dress history of the war by one of our mostdistinguished military writers" (NEW YORK TIMES), WORLD WAR I takesus from the first shots in Sarajevo to the signing of the peacetreaty in Versailles and through every bunker, foxhole, andminefield in between. General S.L.A. Marshall drew on his uniquefirsthand experience as a soldier and a lifetime of militaryservice to pen this forthright, forward-thinking history of whatpeople once believed would be the last great war. Newly introducedby the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David M. Kennedy, WORLDWAR I is a classic example of unflinching military history that iscertain to inform, enrich, and deepen our understanding of thisgreat cataclysm.

In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth,Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted theConfederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against theConfederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones Countyengaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyondthe scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almostforgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and JohnStauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroicand unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within Civil-Warera Southern society. No man better exemplified these complexitiesthan Newton Knight, a pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South whorefused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton.

An examination of the polarized characters and careers ofWilliam Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson creates a work thatis at once a dual biography, military history, and analysis of theAmerican penchant for patriotic bloodshed. Reprint. NYT.

Published when Theodore Roosevelt was only twenty-three yearsold, The Naval War of 1812 was immediately hailed as aliterary and scholarly triumph, and it is still considered thedefinitive book on the subject. It caused considerable controversyfor its bold refutation of earlier accounts of the war, but itsbrilliant analysis and balanced tone left critics floundering,changed the course of U.S. military history by renewing interest inour obsolete forces, and set the young author and political hopefulon a path to greatness. Roosevelt's inimitable style and robustnarrative make The Naval War of 1812 enthralling, illuminating, andutterly essential to every armchair historian.

In this luminous portrait of wartime Washington, Ernest B.Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville1863 , Ashes of Glory , and Not War butMurder --brings to vivid life the personalities and events thatanimated the Capital during its most tumultuous time. Here amongthe sharpsters and prostitutes, slaves and statesmen are detectiveAllan Pinkerton, tracking down Southern sympathizers; poet WaltWhitman, nursing the wounded; and accused Confederate spy AntoniaFord, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard. Here aregenerals George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, railroad crew bossAndrew Carnegie, and architect Thomas Walter, striving to finishthe Capitol dome. And here is Abraham Lincoln, wrangling withofficers, pardoning deserters, and inspiring the nation. FreedomRising is a gripping account of the era that transformedWashington into the world’s most influential city.

Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immenselypleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Romanempire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see theburgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats,artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and founda self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, thiseconomically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-awaresociety stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczektraces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe andRussia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combiningfamily anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keenunderstanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us anexceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearlyextinguished, has an influential radiance still.

In Lone Star Nation , Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W.Brands demythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores thegenuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in Americanhistory. From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholicSam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisisand glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionistaspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story ofTexas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history.Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking inthe shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad,its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, andits day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ livelyhistory draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters toanimate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits,and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.

This acclaimed book on the Wright Brothers takes the readerstraight to the heart of their remarkable achievement, focusing onthe technology and offering a clear, concise chronicle of preciselywhat they accomplished and how they did it. This book deals withthe process of the invention of the airplane and how the brothersidentified and resolved a range of technical puzzles that othershad attempted to solve for a century. Step by step, the book details the path of invention (includingthe important wind tunnel experiments of 1901) which culminated inthe momentous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the first majormilestone in aviation history. Enhanced by original photos,designs, drawings, notebooks, letters and diaries of the WrightBrothers, Visions of a Flying Machine is a fascinating book thatwill be of interest to engineers, historians, enthusiasts, oranyone interested in the process of invention.

In mid-1943 James Megellas, known as “Maggie” to his fellowparatroopers, joined the 82d Airborne Division, his new “home” forthe duration. His first taste of combat was in the rugged mountainsoutside Naples. In October 1943, when most of the 82d departed Italy to preparefor the D-Day invasion of France, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, the FifthArmy commander, requested that the division’s 504th ParachuteInfantry Regiment, Maggie’s outfit, stay behind for a daring newoperation that would outflank the Nazis’ stubborn defensive linesand open the road to Rome. On 22 January 1944, Megellas and therest of the 504th landed across the beach at Anzio. Followinginitial success, Fifth Army’s amphibious assault, OperationShingle, bogged down in the face of heavy German counterattacksthat threatened to drive the Allies into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Anzioturned into a fiasco, one of the bloodiest Allied operations of thewar. Not until April were the remnants of the regiment withdrawnand shipped to England to r

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner Over a frigid few weeks in the winter of 1741, ten fires blazedacross Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw moreevidence of a slave uprising. In the end, thirteen black men wereburned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than onehundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath CityHall. In New York Burning , Bancroft Prize-winning historian JillLepore recounts these dramatic events, re-creating, withpath-breaking research, the nascent New York of the seventeenthcentury. Even then, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures,communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth ofthe population. Exploring the political and social climate of thetimes, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with stateintrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the whitepolitical pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear andviolence.

From the author of the widely acclaimed King Leopold's Ghostcomes the taut, gripping account of the world's first grass-rootshuman rights movementthe fight to free the British Empire's slaves.In early 1787, twelve mena printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, andothers united by their hatred of slaverycame together in a Londonprinting shop and, combining fiery devotion with cool practicality,began one of the most brilliantly organized campaigns of all time.Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaderspioneered a variety of techniques used by citizens" movements eversince, from consumer boycotts to posters and lapel buttons tocelebrity endorsements. A deft account of the precipitous rise ofthis popular crusade and its fierce, powerful enemies, Bury theChains delivers all the drama, sweep, and surprise of Hochschild'sprevious histories.

The experience of war has affected every generation in thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries, and every soldier has a storyto tell. Since the year 2000, the Veteran's History Project, a newpermanent department of the Library of Congress, has beencollecting and preserving the memories of veterans. In addition tomore than 50,000 recorded oral histories, the Veteran's HistoryProject has amassed thousands of letters, photographs, scrapbooks,and invaluable mementos from nearly a century of warfare. In the first book to showcase the richness and depth of thiscollection, Voices of War tells a compelling, emotional, history ofthe experience of war, weaving together veterans' stories from inWorld Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Thestories are organized thematically into sections-from signing up tocoming home, generations of veterans recall individual experiencesthat together tell the extraordinary story of America at war.Letters, photographs, sketches and paintings enrich the compellingoral hi

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Marine Corps’ ground campaignup the Tigris and Euphrates was notable for speed andaggressiveness unparalleled in military history. Little has beenwritten, however, of the air support that guaranteed the drive’ssuccess. Paving the way for the rush to Baghdad was “the hammerfrom above”–in the form of attack helicopters, jet fighters,transport, and other support aircraft. Now a former Marine fighterpilot shares the gripping never-before-told stories of the Marineswho helped bring to an end the regime of Saddam Hussein. As Jay Stout reveals, the air war had actually been in theplanning stages ever since the victory of Operation Desert Storm,twelve years earlier. But when Operation Iraqi Freedom officiallycommenced on March 20, 2003, the Marine Corps entered the fightwith an aviation arm at its smallest since before World War II.Still, with the motto “Speed Equals Success,” the separate air andground units acted as a team to get the job done. Drawing

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the CivilWar, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lostits philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” withits seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance andperspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as amore cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, inthe course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to aninternational power. This great wave of historical and culturalreciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified duringthe late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-lifepersonalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures promptedpilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knitgroup of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, andscientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving OldJapan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, forthe