Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - 20th Century

Ernest Vandiver was elected governor of the state of Georgia in 1958 on a platform of fiscal conservatism and steadfast resistance to desegregation. Having vowed to defend Georgia s segregated social system at all costs, Vandiver nevertheless concluded that the state could not close its schools to avoid desegregation. Because of his decision to reject the path taken by George Wallace in Alabama and Orval Faubus in Arkansas and to protect public education in the state by complying with federal court mandates, Vandiver was denounced by the state s more vocal proponents of...

In 1919, the United States embarked on the country's boldest attempt at moral and social reform: Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol around the country. This "noble experiment," as President Hoover called it, was intended to usher in a healthier, more moral, and more efficient society. Nowhere was such reform needed more, proponents argued, than in New York City--and nowhere did Prohibition fail more spectacularly. Dry Manhattan is the first major work on Prohibition in nearly a quarter century, and the...

In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For more than a century, black southerners learned to live with betrayed expectations, diminishing prospects, and devastated aspirations. Their odyssey includes some of the most appalling examples of terrorism, violence, and dehumanization in the history of this nation. But, as Leon Litwack graphically demonstrates, it is at the same time an odyssey of resilience and resistance defined by day-to-day acts of protest: the fight for justice poignantly recorded in the stories, songs,...

As the cold war took shape during the late 1940s, policymakers in the United States and Great Britain displayed a marked tendency to regard international communism as a "monolithic" conspiratorial movement. The image of a "communist monolith" distilled the messy realities of international relations into a neat, comprehensible formula. Its lesson was that all communists, regardless of their native land or political program, were essentially tools of the Kremlin.

Marc Selverstone recreates the manner in which the "monolith" emerged as a perpetual framework on both sides of the...

Bernard Mergen's captivating and kaleidoscopic new book illuminates our inevitable obsession with weather--as both physical reality and evocative metaphor--in all of its myriad forms, focusing on the ways in which it is perceived, feared, embraced, managed, and even marketed. From the roaring winds atop Mount Washington to the reflective calm of the poet's lair, he...

Kurtz presents an objective accounting of what we actually know and don't know about the assassination, underlining both the logic and...