Americans pride themselves on being doers rather than thinkers, but ideas are at the very root of what it means to be an American. Behind this nation's diverse views on religion, education, social equality, democracy, and other vital issues is a long-running intellectual debate about the right ordering of the human, natural, and divine worlds. Indeed, America is an enduring hotbed of ideas. Such great thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson,

...

"Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism"--

"Wyatt Gwyon forges not from larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals"- pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and the fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch- cannot even recognize. First published in 1955, this lively, witty, and labyrinthine...

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"-- At the beginning, everyone's name and address was listed in the phone book, and everyone answered their landline because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their cell phone if they didn't know who was calling. Klosterman shows that in the 1990s there was a wholesale shift in how society...

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of its defining national drama, "1861" presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began. The text introduces a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes--among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer's wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become...

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion. The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"-each...