Showing titles in Americas

Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences but also from our cultures. Wisdom Sits in Places, the first sustained study of places and place explores place, places, and what they mean to a particular group of people, the Western Apache in Arizona. For more than 30 years, Keith Basso has been doing fieldwork among the Western Apache, and now he shares with us what he has learned of Apache place-names.

With its thunderous assault on the Mariana Islands in June 1944, the United States crossed the threshold of total war. In this tour de force of dramatic storytelling, distilled from extensive research in newly discovered primary sources, James D. Hornfischer brings to life the campaign that was the fulcrum of the drive to compel Tokyo to surrender—and that forever changed the art of modern war.

1936 was a great year for the movie industry - the financial setbacks of the Great Depression were subsiding, so theater attendance was up. Americans everywhere were watching the stars, and few stars shined as brightly as one of America's most enduring screen favorites, Mary Astor. But Astor's personal story wasn't a happy one. Born poor and widowed at 24, Mary Astor had spent years looking for stability when she met and wed Dr. Franklyn Thorpe.

Internationally best-selling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become over the course of half a century a poet-interruptus, an air force weatherman, a radio dj, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counter-culture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Union-controlled Midwest and New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The Union navy tried to take Vicksburg, which sat on a high bluff overlooking the river, but couldn't do it. It took Grant's army and Admiral David Porter's navy to successfully invade Mississippi and lay siege to Vicksburg, forcing the city to surrender.

Geoff Shepard had a ringside seat to the unfolding Watergate debacle. As the youngest lawyer on Richard Nixon’s staff, he personally transcribed the Oval Office tape in which Nixon appeared to authorize getting the CIA to interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation, and even coined the phrase “the smoking gun.” Like many others, the idealistic Shepard was deeply disappointed in the president. But as time went on, the meticulous lawyer was nagged by the persistent sense that something wasn’t right with the case against Nixon.

What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels?  That is the question H. W. Brands answers in his powerful new history of the American Revolution.

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a corrupt baby business at the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents - hiding the fact that many weren't orphans at all but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died. The publication of Lisa Wingate's novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann's child trafficking.

Coup in Dallas leaves speculation and theory aside to give the hard details of who killed President John F. Kennedy, how the murder was carried out, and why Kennedy was assassinated.

In 10 Big Questions of the American Civil War, join noted author and Civil War historian Dr. Caroline E. Janney, a professor at the University of Virginia, for a pointed examination of some of the most intriguing, provocative, and enduring questions about the Civil War era. The aim of these 10 eye-opening lectures is to separate myth from memory.

With Fire and Fury, Wolff defined the first phase of the Trump administration; in Siege, he wrote an explosive account of a presidency under fire. In Landslide, Wolff closes the story of Trump's four years in office and his tumultuous last months at the helm of the country, based on Wolff's extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world.

Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours. Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. But the story of Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, US intelligence caught three high-profile Russian spies. However, these arrests left major questions unanswered, and rumours have long swirled of another mole, often referred to as the Fourth Man. Three pioneering female veterans of counterintelligence were tasked with unearthing him. With steadfast determination and expertise, they came to a shocking conclusion, one which had, and continues to harbour, dramatic consequences for American security.

One of the best selling History titles of 2009. Examining the Second World War on every front, Andrew Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, Hitler’s Axis might even have won. Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once he was safely beyond defending himself?

Bob Woodward exposes one of the final pieces of the Richard Nixon puzzle in his new book, The Last of the President's Men. Woodward reveals the untold story of Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the secret White House taping system that changed history and led to Nixon's resignation.

With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today. In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents.

Hell Above Earth tells an unforgettable story of two World War II American bomber pilots who forged an unexpected but enduring bond in the flak-filled skies over Nazi Germany. But there's a twist: one of them was related to the head of the Luftwaffe, Reich Marshal Herman Goering, and the other had secret orders from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to kill him if anything went wrong during their missions.

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward - and black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right. Where do I start?" Being an introvert in a world that glorifies cool isn't easy. But when Issa Rae, the creator of the Shorty Award-winning hit series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, is that introvert - whether she's navigating love, work, friendships, or "rapping" - it sure is entertaining.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.