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

Scott Fitzgerald, a romantic and tragic figure who embodied the decades between the two world wars, was a writer who took his material almost entirely from his life. Despite his early success with The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald battled against failure and disappointment.

This book, by the acclaimed biographer of Hemingway, is the first to analyze frankly the meaning as well as the events of Fitzgerald's life and to illuminate the recurrent patterns that reveal his inner self. Meyers emphasizes Fitzgerald's alcoholism, Zelda's illnesses and her doctors, Fitzgerald's love...

This is a book about politics and politicians; about elections, lawmaking, governing, and how they work. It is also about power, its increasing concentration in American society, and its implications at home and abroad especially for those who exercise it. It is a book about the Republican Party during the period in which it developed the forces and frictions which still characterize it today. Finally, it is a book about a remarkably successful and vibrant man who contained within himself much of the best and the worst of his environment, who contributed generously to American life, who...

Far from the storm centers of the American civil rights movement, off-camera and outside most reporters' beats, countless, nameless individuals reached their own accords with the era's massive changes. Unsure what was expected of them--or even who expected it--blacks and whites taught themselves how to live and work in a new world, often not of their own making.

Drawing on the author's long career as a southern journalist, this series of closely related sketches, stories, and essays recounts what James calls the "hidden story of the civil rights movement." Set mainly in Georgia, North...

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level...

On October 6, 1948, a U.S. Air Force B-29 Superfortress crashed soon after takeoff, killing three civilian engineers and six crew members. In June 1949, the engineers' widows filed suit against the government, determined to find out what exactly had happened to their husbands and why the three civilians had been on board the airplane in the first place. But it was the dawn of the Cold War and the Air Force refused to hand over any documents, claiming they contained classified information. The legal battle ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which in 1953 handed down a landmark decision...

It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals--too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most...

Includes a bonus excerpt from Bob Greene's forthcoming Late Edition: A Love Story

"There is something absolutely magical about Bob Greene's voice."--Jeffrey Zaslow, coauthor, The Last Lecture

Running away to join the circus is a dream we're told to put away once we're no longer young. But for the last fifteen summers, Bob Greene has stepped into a universe that is hiding in plain sight: the touring world of the great early rock bands who gave America the car-radio-and-jukebox music it still loves best.

Singing backup with the legendary Jan and Dean as...

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience.

The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers' education societies, Yiddish...

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked "African American" in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects...