Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Explains how the influences of dreamers, zealots, hucksters, and superstitious groups shaped America's tendency toward a rich fantasy life, citing the roles of individuals from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump in perpetuating conspiracy theories, self-delusion, and magical thinking.
"In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, one of our sharpest observers, Kurt Andersen, demonstrates that what's happening in our country today--this strange, post-truth,...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
Collects some of the author's speeches delivered throughout the course of his career that celebrate distinctly American principles and characteristics.
"This timely collection of speeches by David McCullough, the most honored historian in the United States--winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among many other honors--reminds us of fundamental American principles. Over the course of his distinguished...
4) On democracy
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"Anchored by an introduction by Jon Meacham, this concise collection of essays, letters, and poems from one of this country's most eminent literary voices sheds much-needed historical context on the state of the nation and offers a ray of hope for the future of our society; for "as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman...the scene is not desolate.""--
Author
Language
English
Description
"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of presidents including, besides Lincoln,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The author of American Nations returns to the historical study of a fractured America by examining how a myth of national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us today. Union tells the story of how the myth of our national origins, identity, and purpose was intentionally created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese...
Author
Language
English
Description
"As a boy, Robert Kaplan recalls his father driving trucks across the country to earn a living for his family, a man who witnessed and understood America from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline--increasingly cosmopolitan cities...
Author
Language
English
Description
"With light and airy illustrations, Mahdavian tackles these complex themes with humor and wit."
—NPR, Books We Love 2023
NPR BEST BOOKS OF 2023 ● NEW YORKER BEST BOOKS WE'VE READ IN 2023 ● A gorgeously illustrated and written debut graphic memoir about belonging, identity, and making a home in the remote American West, by New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian.
Before...
—NPR, Books We Love 2023
NPR BEST BOOKS OF 2023 ● NEW YORKER BEST BOOKS WE'VE READ IN 2023 ● A gorgeously illustrated and written debut graphic memoir about belonging, identity, and making a home in the remote American West, by New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian.
Before...
Author
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Language
English
Description
"In The Long Shadow of War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War retains such a hold on our national psyche and identity. Though the drama and tragedy of the subject, from the war's scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than all the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the...
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