Newly updated: "An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history." — The American ProspectPraised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Sil...

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book "[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor", enlive...

The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900. Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its commu...

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody—it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the political leader of India, believed that Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in str...

**"**The work is clear-eyed but naturally imbued with a granddaughter's affection. Narrator Bernadette Dunne's amiable manner is a good match for the author's tone, objective but tinged with warmth...Dunne manages to go beyond the plain sense of the text to give us the author as an intelligent, sensible, well-spoken person who is examining an important life in a way that informs, pleases, and serves as a lesson for the present day." -- AudioFile MagazineThis progra...

"Sean Patrick Hopkins offers exactly the kind of narration this audiobook deserves...He makes this story of America's first significant overseas aid effort and the two people most responsible--a sea captain and a Catholic priest--come alive." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award WinnerThe remarkable story of the mission that inspired a nation to donate massive relief to Ireland during the potato famine and began America's tradition of providing h...

In the last days of World War II, a new and baffling weapon terrorized the United States Navy in the Pacific. To the sailors who learned to fear them, the body-crashing warriors of Japan were known as "suiciders"; among the Japanese, they were named for a divine wind that once saved the home islands from invasion: kamikaze.Told from the perspective of the men who endured this horrifying tactic, At War with the Wind is the first book to recount in nail-biting detai...

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa...

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than a hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in Georgia. In thi...

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the righ...

“What makes Trump immune is that he is not a president within the context of a healthy Republican government. He is a cult leader of a movement that has taken over a political party – and he specifically campaigned on a platform of one-man rule. This fact permeates “Can It Happen Here? . . . which concludes, if you read between the lines, that “it” already has.” – New York Times Book Review"Several of the contributors...ag...

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mot...