In early American society, one's identity was determined in large part by gender. The ways in which men and women engaged with their communities were generally not equal: married women fell under the legal control of their husbands, who handled all negotiations with the outside world, as well as many domestic interactions. The death of a husband enabled women to transcend this strict gender divide. Yet, as a widow, a woman occupied a third, liminal gender in early America, performing an un...

In Book One of the Plowed Fields trilogy, we met Joe Baker and his large family as a rare white Christmas descended on their South Georgia farm. It was 1960, and the family seemed poised on the brink of a grand experience in the years to come.As the decade progresses, the Bakers see their fortunes rise and fall, beginning with an illness that shakes the family at its very core. Prosperity comes calling when it’s least expected, but a harrowing ordeal forces a reckoning with faith t...

On a cold December day in 1960, Joe Baker finishes plowing the largest field on his family’s farm in South Georgia and acknowledges the well of restlessness running deep inside him. Joe appreciates the good life provided by his parents, but his heart yearns for something else. So begins "Plowed Fields," setting the stage for a conflict that will nag at Joe for the next decade as he tries to reconcile his own desire and ambition with loyalty and responsibility to his family. Book One in the...

For much of the Sixties, Joe Baker has wrestled with reconciling his own desire and ambition with loyalty and responsibility to his family. The oldest of six children, he has led his brothers and sisters with quiet charisma. But what happens when his instincts fail him? When we first met Joe and his family, it was December 1960, and a rare white Christmas was blowing toward their farm in South Georgia. As the decade unfolded, they battled drought, fire and other hardships that threatened t...

It was Atlanta's Titanic.On December 7, 1946 at 3:42 a.m. the first alarm came into Atlanta Fire Department headquarters:"The Winecoff Hotel is on fire!"Twenty minutes later the fourth, final and "general alarm" - the one reserved for a citywide conflagration - went out.For the next two hours everything good, bad, improbable and certain about the human experience played out. Few events in history can match the Winecoff fire for extremes.No one who wa...

Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: “[A] commanding and important book.”—Jill Lepore, The New YorkerThis epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history...

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even...

*Includes descriptions of the trials and executions of the accused.*Includes testimony from some of the cases and the petitions of some of the accused asking for clemency. *Includes pictures depicting important people, places, and events. *Includes a Bibliography for further reading.*Includes a Table of Contents. "More than once it has been said, too, that the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered." George Lincoln BurrA lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives ...

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and ami...

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble,nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings remarked. “It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.”In this bold and brilliantly argued book, acclaimed author and talk-radio host Michael Medved zeroes in on ten of the biggest fallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country—in spite of incontrovertible facts to the contrary. In The 10 Big Lies About America, Medved pinpoints the most pernicious ...

In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State Hou...

One of the most famous revolutions in history, the American Revolution (1775-1783) was the political upheaval in which 13 distinct colonies in North America banded together to cast off British rule, forming the United States of America. After the shot heard round the world on April 19, 1775, at the Battle of Lexington, the colonies sent representatives to the Second Continental Congress, the new states joined together at first to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed...