#hardcover #jfk #history #president #Americanhistory 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Tennessee

An Unfinished Life is the first major, single-volume life of John F. Kennedy to be written by a historian in nearly four decades. Drawing upon previously unavailable material and never-before-opened archives to tell Kennedy's story.We learn for the first time just how sick Kennedy was, what medications he took and concealed from all but a few, and how severely his medical condition affected his actions as President. We learn for the first time the real story of how Bobby was selected as Attorney General. Dallek reveals exactly what Jack's father did to help his election to the presidency, and he follows previously unknown evidence to show what path JFK would have taken in the Vietnam entanglement had he survived.Dallek (LIFTS) JFK out of the gossips and back onto the world stage, showing that while he was the son of privilege, he faced great obstacles and fought on with remarkable courage. Never shying away from Kennedy's weaknesses, Dallek also brilliantly explores his strengths. The result is a portrait of a bold, brave, human Kennedy, once again a hero.

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

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#hardcover #civilwar #history #Americanhistory 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom, among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. Now, in this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPhersonoffers fresh insight into many of the most enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history.McPherson sheds light on topics large and small, from the average soldier's avid love of newspapers to the postwar creation of the mystique of a Lost Cause in the South. Readers will find insightful pieces on such intriguing figures as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jesse James, and WilliamTecumseh Sherman, and on such vital issues such as Confederate military strategy, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and the realities and myths of the Confederacy. This Mighty Scourge includes several never-before-published essays--pieces on General Robert E. Lee's goals in theGettysburg campaign, on Lincoln and Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. In that capacity, Lincoln invented the concept of presidential war powers that are again at the center of controversy today. All of the essays have been updated and revised to give the volumegreater thematic coherence and continuity, so that it can be read in sequence as an interpretive history of the war and its meaning for America and the world.Combining the finest scholarship with luminous prose, and packed with new information and fresh ideas, this book brings together the most recent thinking by the nation's leading authority on the Civil War. It will be must reading for everyone interested in the war and American history."James McPherson is the master historian of the Civil War in our time."--Gabor Borritt, Director, Civil War Institute, Gettysburg College"Not merely is McPherson the leading living historian of the Civil War, but he is a scholar whose knowledge and authority are unsurpassed; when McPherson speaks, even in a minor key, people listen."--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

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#hardcover #history #Americanhistory #Lincoln 

"Many books have been written about the Gettysburg Address and yet, as Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt shows, there is much that we don't know about the speech. In The Gettysburg Gospel he reconstructs what really happened in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863. Boritt tears away a century of myths, lies, and legends to give us a clear understanding of the greatest American's greatest speech."--BOOK JACKET.

The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows

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#hardcover #history #Americanhistory #president 

Four extraordinary men sought the presidency in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt was the charismatic and still wildly popular former president who sought to redirect the Republican Party toward a more nationalistic, less materialistic brand of conservatism and the cause of social justice.His handpicked successor and close friend, William Howard Taft, was a reluctant politician whose sole ambition was to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Amiable and easygoing, Taft was the very opposite of the restless Roosevelt. After Taft failed to carry forward his predecessor's reformist policies, an embittered Roosevelt decided to challenge Taft for the party's nomination. Thwarted by a convention controlled by Taft, Roosevelt abandoned the GOP and ran in the general election as the candidate of a third party of his own creation, the Bull Moose Progressives.Woodrow Wilson, the former president of Princeton University, astonished everyone by seizing the Democratic nomination from the party bosses who had made him New Jersey's governor. A noted political theorist, he was a relative newcomer to the practice of governing, torn between his fear of radical reform and his belief in limited government.The fourth candidate, labor leader Eugene V. Debs, had run for president on the Socialist ticket twice before. A fervent warrior in the cause of economic justice for the laboring class, he was a force to be reckoned with in the great debate over how to mitigate the excesses of industrial capitalism that was at the heart of the 1912 election.Chace recounts all the excitement and pathos of a singular moment in American history: the crucial primaries, the Republicans' bitter nominating convention that forever split the party, Wilson's stunning victory on the forty-sixth ballot at the Democratic convention, Roosevelt's spectacular coast-to-coast whistle-stop electioneering, Taft's stubborn refusal to fight back against his former mentor, Debs's electrifying campaign appearances, and Wilson's "accidental election" by less than a majority of the popular vote.Had Roosevelt received the Republican nomination, he almost surely would have been elected president once again and the Republicans would likely have become a party of reform. Instead, the GOP passed into the hands of a conservative ascendancy that reached its fullness with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and the party remains to this day riven by the struggle between reform and reaction, isolationism and internationalism.The 1912 presidential contest was the first since the days of Jefferson and Hamilton in which the great question of America's exceptional destiny was debated. 1912 changed America.

1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs - The Election That Changed the Country

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#hardcover #history #military #American-History 

The American Army, 1898-1941

In 1898 the American Regular Army was a small frontier constabulary engaged in skirmishes with Indians and protesting workers. Forty-three years later, in 1941, it was a large modern army ready to wage global war against the Germans and the Japanese. In this definitive social history of America's standing army, military historian Edward Coffman tells how that critical transformation was accomplished.

Coffman has spent years immersed in the official records, personal papers, memoirs, and biographies of regular army men, including such famous leaders as George Marshall, George Patton, and Douglas MacArthur. He weaves their stories, and those of others he has interviewed, into the story of an army which grew from a small community of posts in China and the Philippines to a highly effective mechanized ground and air force. During these years, the U.S. Army conquered and controlled a colonial empire, military staff lived in exotic locales with their families, and soldiers engaged in combat in Cuba and the Pacific. In the twentieth century, the United States entered into alliances to fight the German army in World War I, and then again to meet the challenge of the Axis Powers in World War II.

Coffman explains how a managerial revolution in the early 1900s provided the organizational framework and educational foundation for change, and how the combination of inspired leadership, technological advances, and a supportive society made it successful. In a stirring account of all aspects of garrison life, including race relations, we meet the men and women who helped reconfigure America's frontier army into a modern global force.

The Regulars

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#hardcover #history #president #AmericanHistory 

Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game

It's a perennial pastime to rate U.S. presidents on an all-time ranking: Certain presidents were "Great," others were "Near-Great," and so on down to "Failures" and "Unmitigated Disasters." (OK, we made that last category up.) But as Alvin Felzenberg points out, there are many flaws with these rating systems. Despite reams of new historical information, the rankings never seem to change very much. They all favor a certain kind of president-those who tended to increase executive power. That aside, the idea of rating presidential performance on a simple linear scale is absurd.The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't) breaks presidential performance into easily understandable categories-character, vision, competence, foreign policy, economic policy, human rights, and legacy-and assesses, for each category, the best and worst. The result is a surprisingly fresh look at how the various presidents stack up against each other, with some of the "greats" coming off far worse than their supposedly mediocre colleagues.

The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't)

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#hardcover #history #civilwar #Americanhistory 

"A superb piece of historical scholarship. Rafuse has crafted a book that is groundbreaking in its conception." -- Joseph L. Harsh, author of Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861--1862"Brings something new, or at least relatively unknown, to the 'McClellan debate.'... It is the first work I have read that explains McClellan's approach in a way that is both somewhat favorable and satisfactory, showing the basis of McClellan's views." -- Brian K. Burton, author of Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days BattlesThis biography of the controversial Union general George B. McClellan examines the influences and political antecedents that shaped his behavior on the battlefield, behavior that so frustrated Lincoln and others in Washington that he was removed from his command soon after the Union loss at Antietam. Rather than take sides in the controversy, Ethan S. Rafuse finds in McClellan's politics and his desire to restore sectional harmony ample explanation for his actions. Rafuse sheds new light on the general who believed in the rule of reason and moderation, who sought a policy of conciliation with the South, and who wanted to manage the North's military resources in a way that would impose rational order on the battlefield.

McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union

d98171e4-8b32-4b36-85d9-06ddab65d2d3-1

#hardcover #history #civilwar #American-History #blue

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat

Could the South have won the Civil War? To many, the very question seems absurd. After all, the Confederacy had only a third of the population and one-eleventh of the industry of the North. Wasn’t the South’s defeat inevitable? Not at all, as acclaimed military historian Bevin Alexander reveals in this provocative and counterintuitive new look at the Civil War. In fact, the South most definitely could have won the war, and Alexander documents exactly how a Confederate victory could have come about—and how close it came to happening. Moving beyond fanciful theoretical conjectures to explore actual plans that Confederate generals proposed and the tactics ultimately adopted in the war’s key battles,How the South Could Have Won the Civil Waroffers surprising analysis on topics such as: •How the Confederacy had its greatest chance to win the war just three months into the fighting—but blew it •How the Confederacy’s three most important leaders—President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—clashed over how to fight the war •How the Civil War’s decisive turning point came in a battle that the Rebel army never needed to fight •How the Confederate army devised—but never fully exploited—a way to negate the Union’s huge advantages in manpower and weaponry •How Abraham Lincoln and other Northern leaders understood the Union’s true vulnerability better than the Confederacy’s top leaders did •How it is a myth that the Union army’s accidental discovery of Lee’s order of battle doomed the South’s 1862 Maryland campaign •How the South failed to heed the important lessons of its 1863 victory at Chancellorsville How the South Could Have Won the Civil Warshows why there is nothing inevitable about military victory, even for a state with overwhelming strength. Alexander provides a startling account of how a relatively small number of tactical and strategic mistakes cost the South the war—and changed the course of history. From the Hardcover edition.

How the South Could Have Won the Civil War

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#hardcover #jfk #American-History #biography 

A Question of Character A Life of John F. Kennedy

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#hardcover #history #civilwar #Lincoln #Douglas #politics #Americanhistory 


In early 1860, pundits across America confidently predicted the election of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas in the coming presidential race. Douglas, after all, led the only party that bridged North and South. But the Democrats would split over the issue ofslavery, leading Southerners in the party to run their own presidential slate. This opened the door for the upstart Republicans, exclusively Northern, to steal the Oval Office. Dark horse Abraham Lincoln, not the first choice even of his own party, won the presidency with a record-low 39.8 percent of the popular vote. Acclaimed scholar Douglas R. Egerton chronicles the contest with a historian's keen insight and a veteran political reporter's eye for detail. Vividly, Egerton re-creates the cascade of unforeseen events that confounded political bosses, set North and South on the road to disunion, and put not Stephen Douglas, but his greatest rival, in the White House. We see Lincoln and his team outmaneuvering more prominent Republicans, like New York's grandiose William Seward, while Democratic conventions collapse in confusion. And we see the gifted, flawed Douglas marking his finest hour in defeat, as he strives, and fails, to save the Union. Year of Meteors delivers a teeming cast of characters, minor and major, and a breakneck narrative of this most momentous year in American history.

Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War

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The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew

Nixon and Agnew were an odd couple whose political love affair disintegrated over five years into a calamitous denouement. Agnew's divisive rhetoric skyrocketed his popularity, but he grew weary of exclusion from the Nixon inner circle. Nixon, concluding that Agnew was not the man to succeed him, conspired to dump him in 1972 and later to remove him from the line of presidential succession. But before Nixon's presidency collapsed in Watergate, a tawdry scandal of payoffs to Agnew in the White House accomplished the job.

Jules Witcover, a leading political reporter of that period, wrote political biographies of both men and coauthored the acclaimed account of the Agnew resignation, A Heartbeat Away. Now, with three decades of perspective, a trove of new material including Nixon's White House tapes and interviews with close Nixon-Agnew associates, Witcover has written a captivating narrative that reveals how the foibles, pettiness and weaknesses of each man destroyed that marriage, and ultimately their careers. Very Strange Bedfellows' revealing look into the flawed and fascinating Nixon presidency will be catnip to anyone interested in American politics and American history.

Very Strange Bedfellows

f9512e5f-96b2-443b-974b-7bf5e50faf7c-1

#hardcover #biography #jackson #American-History #president #blue

"The outgrowth of a series of lectures entitled 'A reinterpretation of Jacksonian democracy' delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in the fall of 1941."--Acknowledgements.

The Age of Jackson

589993c5-c0ac-4344-9e03-6e3d231c54c9-1

#hardcover #civilwar #Lincoln #history #Americanhistory 

It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more fascinating. Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of the Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of archival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on the background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of the conspirators. Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects common misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind Booth’s plan to unseat Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous autocrat, “an American Caesar.” In preparing his study, Kauffman spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth’s house, and re-created key parts of Booth’s escape. Thanks to Kauffman’s discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of this defining event in our nation’s history, and they will come to see how public sentiment about Booth at the time of the assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his actions and motives next to impossible–until now. In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of literature on the Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Kauffman finally makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed event in American history. From the Hardcover edition.

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies

76b206c9-41f7-4f31-ae07-d9ac50d5e519-1

#hardcover #history #American-History #president 

The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy

By the author of "The Summer of 1787" comes a dramatic re-creation of the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, which became the central battle of the struggle over how to reunite a nation after four years of war. bw photographs.

Impeached

a091b12e-c5d1-49e5-a032-d079105a2f8a-1

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Essential American

The epic life and times of one of the most important political figures in our history. He was the Great Compromiser, a canny and colorful legislator and leader whose life mirrors the story of America from its founding until the eve of the Civil War. Speaker of the House, senator, secretary of state, five-time presidential candidate, and idol to the young Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay is captured in full at last in this rich and sweeping biography that vividly portrays all the drama of his times. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler present Clay in his early years as a precocious, witty, and optimistic Virginia boy, raised on a farm, who at the age of twenty transformed himself from bumpkin to attorney-a shrewd and sincere defender of the ordinary man who would be his eventual political base. The authors reveal Clay's tumultuous career in Washington, one that transformed the capital and the country. Nicknamed "the Western Star," Clay became the youngest Speaker of the House shortly before the War of 1812 and transformed that position into one of unprecedented power. Then, as a senator, he joined and sometimes fought John Calhoun and Daniel Webster to push through crucial legislation affecting everything from slavery to banking. Commonly regarded as the greatest U.S. senator in history, Clay served under ten presidents and overshadowed most of them, with the notable exception of his archrival Andrew Jackson. Clay ran unsuccessfully for president five times, and his participation in the deadlocked election of 1824 brought about the "Corrupt Bargain" with John Quincy Adams that made Clay secretary of state-and haunted him for the rest of his career. As no other book, Henry Clay humanizes Clay's marriage to plain, wealthy Lucretia Hart, a union rumored to be mercenary on his part but that lasted fifty-three years and produced eleven children. Featuring an inimitable supporting cast including Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, James Polk, and Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay is beautifully written and replete with fresh anecdotes and insights. But it is Henry Clay who often rises above them all. Horse trader and risk taker, arm twister and joke teller, Clay was the consummate politician who gave ground, made deals, and changed the lives of millions. His life is an astounding tale-and here superbly told.

Henry Clay

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#hardcover #history #communist #American-History 

McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America

In this landmark work, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan examines the McCarthyite strain in American politics, from its origins in the period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Morgan argues that Senator Joseph McCarthy did not emerge in a vacuum—he was, rather, the most prominent in a long line of men who exploited the issue of Communism for political advantage. In 1918, America invaded Russia in an attempt at regime change. Meanwhile, on the home front, the first of many congressional investigations of Communism was conducted. Anarchist bombs exploded from coast to coast, leading to the political repression of the Red Scare. Soviet subversion and espionage in the United States began in 1920, under the cover of a trade mission. Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted the Soviets diplomatic recognition in 1933, which gave them an opportunity to expand their spy networks by using their embassy and consulates as espionage hubs. Simultaneously, the American Communist Party provided a recruitment pool for homegrown spies. Martin Dies, Jr., the first congressman to make his name as a Red hunter, developed solid information on Communist subversion through his Un-American Activities Committee. However, its hearings were marred by partisan attacks on the New Deal, presaging McCarthy. The most pervasive period of Soviet espionage came during World War II, when Russia, as an ally of the United States, received military equipment financed under the policy of lend-lease. It was then that highly placed spies operated inside the U.S. government and in America’s nuclear facilities. Thanks to the Venona transcripts of KGB cable traffic, we now have a detailed account of wartime Soviet espionage, down to the marital problems of Soviet spies and the KGB’s abject efforts to capture deserting Soviet seamen on American soil. During the Truman years, Soviet espionage was in disarray following the defections of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko. The American Communist Party was much diminished by a number of measures, including its expulsion from the labor unions, the prosecution of its leaders under the Smith Act, and the weeding out, under Truman’s loyalty program, of subversives in government. As Morgan persuasively establishes, by the time McCarthy exploited the Red issue in 1950, the battle against Communists had been all but won by the Truman administration. In this bold narrative history, Ted Morgan analyzes the paradoxical culture of fear that seized a nation at the height of its power. Using Joseph McCarthy’s previously unavailable private papers and recently released transcripts of closed hearings of McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee, Morgan provides many new insights into the notorious Red hunter’s methods and motives. Full of drama and intrigue, finely etched portraits, and political revelations,Redsbrings to life a critical period in American history that has profound relevance to our own time. From the Hardcover edition.

Reds

f1395642-5bc1-4230-b2bd-8088e86e6b20-1

#hardcover #bush #president #American-History #orange 

How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

What will be the legacy of President George Walker Bush? In this fascinating, timely book, Glenn Greenwald examines the Bush presidency and its long-term effect on the nation. What began on shaky, uncertain ground and was bolstered and propelled by tragedy, has ultimately faltered and failed on the back of the dichotomous worldview--good versus evil--that once served it so well. In A Tragic Legacy, Greenwald charts the rise and steep fall of the current administration, dissecting the rhetoric and revealing the faulty ideals upon which George W. Bush built his policies. On September 12, 2001, President Bush addressed the nation and presented a very clear view of what was to come--a view that can be said to define his entire presidency: This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. Based on his own Christian faith and backed by biblical allusions, Bush's worldview was basic and binary--and everyone was forced to choose a side. Riding high on public support, Bush sailed through the early War on Terror, easily defining our enemies and clearly setting an agenda for defeating them. But once the war became murkier--its target unclear, its combatants no longer seen in black-and-white--support for Bush and his policies dropped precipitously. Glenn Greenwald brilliantly reveals the reasons behind the collapse of Bush's power and approval, and argues that his greatest weakness is the same rhetoric that once propelled him so far forward. Facing issues that could not be turned into simple good versus evil choices--the disasterof Hurricane Katrina, his plans for Social Security reform, and, most ironic, the failed Dubai ports deal--Bush faltered and fell. Now, Greenwald argues, Bush is trapped by his own choices, unable to break out of the mold that once served him so well, and indifferent to the consequences. A Tragic Legacy is the first true character study of one of the most controversial men ever to hold the office of president. Enlightening, powerful, and eye-opening, this is an in-depth look at the man whose incapability and cowboy logic have left America at risk.

A Tragic Legacy

e4698264-24b5-4979-abb6-c6d42841e8aa-1

Louisiana

A Book of Advice for Young People

Our Country's Founders 

Pennsylvania

Sputnik. The first man on the moon. The Wright brothers and the Enola Gay. Television and e-mail. Dachau and Buchenwald. The Berlin Wall went up, and then it came crashing down. So did the stock market -- twice. It's been a century of elation and devastation -- of human greatness and of great tragedy. Here, from the archives of Time Life, is a poignant look at a century's worth of achievement, pathos, triumph, trends, and personalities. Here are the milestones and miracles, the inventions, explosions, heroes, and hurrahs that defined us in the 20th century. With hundreds of evocative images and countless moving stories, this chronicle recalls the faces, the moments, and the emotions of the century, as it draws to a close.

The Events That Shaped the Century

c642f133-db1d-47f7-8d31-32a463bff3e7-1

Gloria Skurzynski

Alaska

Against a backdrop of Pennsylvania steel mills during World War I, the story of 2 boys' bond despite different backgrounds. Awards: Jefferson Cup Honor Book; SLJ Best Book.

Good-Bye, Billy Radish

50dab357-9efa-4240-b8da-a65d1396501a-1

Nick Lloyd

Hardcover book in like new condition but listed as in excellent condition due underlining in pencil throughout the book as well as rippling across top and bottom of front cover and wear at top of jacket spine.

Maryland

The Campaign That Ended World War I

Describes the difficult and bloody four-month battle that tipped the stalemate on the Western Front in favor of the Allies in 1918 and drove back the Germans, bringing World War I to an end.

Hundred Days

bbea2088-3ff0-44bf-8798-d6d3ada83552-1

#biography #davidcrockett #americanhistory #history

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

South Carolina

The Lion of the West

A biography of the legendary frontiersman, soldier and martyr examines his life--from hunting bears in the unspoiled countryside to helping defend the Alamo--and aims to dispel long-held myths. By the author of Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. BOMC. Reprint.

David Crockett

22b73014-aaf8-4c26-9a5b-7adc52587850-1

Jon Meacham

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize author.
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR and The Christian Science Monitor

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The Battle for Our Better Angels

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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. ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Southern Living 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 Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always—or even often—been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before”—as, time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail. Praise for The Soul of America “Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time.”—Walter Isaacson “Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America.”—Newsday “Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”—USA Today

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Robert Dallek

An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

James M. McPherson

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

Gabor Boritt

The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows

James Chace

1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs - The Election That Changed the Country

Edward M. Coffman

The Regulars

Alvin S. Felzenberg

The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't)

Ethan S. Rafuse; Ethan Sepp Rafuse

McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union

Bevin Alexander

How the South Could Have Won the Civil War

Thomas C. Reeves

A Question of Character A Life of John F. Kennedy

Douglas R. Egerton

Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War

Jules Witcover

Very Strange Bedfellows

Arthur M. Schlesinger

The Age of Jackson

Michael W. Kauffman

American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies

David O. Stewart

Impeached

David S. Heidler; Jeanne T. Heidler

Henry Clay

Ted Morgan

Reds

Glenn Greenwald

A Tragic Legacy

William J. Bennett

Our Country's Founders

Richard B. Stolley; Time-Life Books Editors

The Events That Shaped the Century

Gloria Skurzynski

Good-Bye, Billy Radish

Nick Lloyd

Hundred Days

Michael Wallis

David Crockett

Jon Meacham

The Soul of America

Christine Wicker

Lily Dale