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Image one - E-book titled Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music (2018) - synopsis: Examines a tension in certain expressions of American music and music communities since the 1980s between the artists’ striving for authenticity in the values they want to communicate on the one hand, and the demands of the marketplace on the other. The results are “weird” in both the economic and artistic sense.
Image two - E-book titled The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (2013) - synopsis: A complete history of how the telegraph revolutionized technological practice and life in America. Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.
Image three - E-book titled The CIA in Ecuador (2021) - synopsis: Draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, this book details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted.
Image one - E-book titled Harnessed to the Pole: Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic, 1853-1909 (2014) - synopsis: Harnessed to the Pole follows the adventures of eight American explorers and their dog teams, starting with Elisha Kent Kane and ending with Robert Peary, controversial claimant of the title of first to reach the North Pole. While history has long forgotten these “little camels of the north,” Sheila Nickerson reveals how critical dogs were to the Arctic conquest. Besides providing transportation in extreme conditions, sledge dogs protected against wolves and polar bears, helped in hunting, found their way through storms, and provided warmth in extreme cold. They also faced rough handling, starvation, and the possibility of being left behind as expeditions plunged ahead. Harnessed to the Pole is an extraordinary—and unflinching—look at the dogs that raced to the top of the world.
Image two - E-book titled We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (2015) - synopsis: In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and 'grunts'—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative.
Image three - E-book titled Born To Be Wild: The Rise of the American Motorcyclist (2015) - synopsis: In 1947, 4,000 motorcycle hobbyists converged on Hollister, California. As images of dissolute bikers graced the pages of newspapers and magazines, the three-day gathering sparked the growth of a new subculture while also touching off national alarm. Author Randy D. McBee narrates the evolution of motorcycle culture since World War II, examining the rebelliousness of early riders of the 1940s and 1950s, riders‘ increasing connection to violence and the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, the rich urban bikers of the 1990s and 2000s, and the factors that gave rise to a motorcycle rights movement.
Image one - E-book titled Stranger in a Strange State: The Politics of Carpetbagging from Robert Kennedy to Scott Brown (2019) - synopsis: Candidates normally run for office in the places where they live. Occasionally, however, a politician will run as a carpetbagger—someone who moves to a new state for the express purpose of running, or who runs in one state after holding office in another. Stranger in a Strange State examines what makes some politicians take this drastic step and how that shapes their campaigns and chances for victory. Focusing on races for the US Senate from 1964 forward, Christopher J. Galdieri analyzes the campaigns of nine carpetbaggers, including nationally known figures such as Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton and less well-known candidates like Elizabeth Cheney and Scott Brown.
Image two - E-book titled Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America's Heartland (2015) - synopsis: Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War represents path-breaking research on the rise of U.S. Army intelligence operations in the Midwest during the American Civil War and counters long-standing assumptions about Northern politics and society. Starting in 1862, army commanders took it upon themselves to initiate investigations of antiwar sentiment in several Southern states. By 1863, several of them had established intelligence operations staffed by hired civilian detectives and by soldiers detailed from their units to chase down deserters and draft dodgers, to maintain surveillance on suspected persons and groups, and to investigate organized resistance to the draft. By 1864, these spies had infiltrated secret organizations that, sometimes in collaboration with Confederate rebels, aimed to subvert the war effort.
Image three - E-book titled How Outer Space Made America: Geography, Organization, and the Cosmic Sublime (2014) - synopsis: Author Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the ‘transcendental state.’ While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, Sage shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes (including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma, and memory) can be informed by the study of space exploration.
Image one - E-book titled Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (2013) - synopsis: In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Image two - E-book titled Winnebago Nation: The Peculiar Place of the RV in American Culture (2014) - synopsis: In Winnebago Nation, popular critic James B. Twitchell takes a light-hearted look at the culture and industry behind the yearning to spend the night in one's car. For the young, the road trip is a coming-of-age ceremony; for those later in life, it is the realization of a lifelong desire to be spontaneous, nomadic, and free. Informed by his own experiences on the road, Twitchell recounts the RV's origins and evolution over the twentieth century; its rise, fall, and rebirth as a cultural icon; its growing mechanical complexity as it evolved from an estate wagon to a converted bus to a mobile home; and its role in bolstering and challenging conceptions of American identity.
Image three - E-book titled The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (2019) - synopsis: In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
Image one - E-book titled The Jewish Unions in America: Pages of History and Memories (2018) - synopsis: Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles, and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.
Image two - E-book titled A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) (2017) - synopsis: A Time To Rise is an intimate look into the workings of the KDP, the only revolutionary organization that emerged in the Filipino American community during the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Overcoming cultural and class differences, members of the KDP banded together in a single national organization to mobilize their community into civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States and in the fight for democracy and national liberation in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Image three - E-book titled Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968-1992 (2018) - synopsis: In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left.
Image one - E-book titled The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014) - synopsis: This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of “discovery,” the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life.
Image two - E-book titled Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation (2016) - synopsis: The essays in this book examine the route Lincoln took to achieve emancipation and how it is remembered both in the United States and abroad. The ten contributors—all on the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship on Lincoln and the Civil War—push our understanding of this watershed moment in US history in new directions. They present wide-ranging contributions to Lincoln studies, including a parsing of the sixteenth president’s career in Congress in the 1840s and a brilliant critique of the historical choices made by Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner in the movie Lincoln, about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
Image three - E-book titled Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society (2011) - synopsis: Do Americans live in a liberal capitalist society, where evenhanded competition rules the day, or a society in which big money, private security, and personal relations determine key social outcomes? Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods argue that the answer to these questions cannot be found among the conventional models used to describe the nation. Offering a new analytical tool, the authors present a provocative explanation of the nature of contemporary society by comparing its essential characteristics to those of medieval European societies.
Image one - America: Government, History, Culture
Image two - E-book titled A Constitutional History of the U.S. Supreme Court (2015) - synopsis: In A Constitutional History of the U.S. Supreme Court, Richard Regan presents a concise overview and general history for readers and students in constitutional history and politics, one that will also make an excellent fact-filled source book for lawyers and political scientists. The chapters deal with leading decisions of successive courts and begin with brief biographies of the justices on the courts. Famous cases from Marbury v Madison, to the Dred-Scott decision, Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, up to the Roberts court decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare are discussed. Four appendices deal with the text of the Constitution and amendments, the court system, a chronological list of the justices with biographical details, and a chronological list of the membership on successive courts.
Image three - E-book titled Fit for the Presidency?: Winners, Losers, What-Ifs, and Also-Rans (2017) - synopsis: In Fit for the Presidency?, Seymour Morris Jr. applies an executive recruiter's approach to fifteen presidential prospects from 1789 to 1980, analyzing their résumés and references to determine their fitness for the job. Were they qualified? How real were their actual accomplishments? Could they be trusted, or were their campaign promises unrealistic? The result is a fresh and original look at a host of contenders from George Washington to William McAdoo, from DeWitt Clinton to Ronald Reagan.
Image four - E-book titled John Adams's Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many (2016) - synopsis: Of all the founding fathers, author Richard Alan Ryerson argues, John Adams may have worried the most about the problem of social jealousy and political conflict in the new republic. Ryerson explains how these concerns, coupled with Adams's concept of executive authority and his fear of aristocracy, deeply influenced his political mindset. He weaves together a close analysis of Adams's public writings, a comprehensive chronological narrative beginning in the 1760s, and an exploration of the second president's private diary, manuscript autobiography, and personal and family letters, revealing Adams's most intimate political thoughts across six decades.
