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Author
Summary
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) presented an essay at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 that would change the study of American History forever. This essay would ultimately be published with twelve supporting articles to form "The Frontier in American History". Turner was an innovator in that he was one of the first to call attention to the Frontier as an integral part of the study of The United States of America. Turner himself grew up on...
Author
Pub. Date
c2002
Summary
Reflecting on his career, Stephen E. Ambrose - one of the country's most influential historians - confronts America's failures and struggles as he explores both its moral and pragmatic triumphs. To America celebrates the men and women who invented the United States and made it exceptional. Taking a few swings at today's political correctness, Ambrose grapples with the country's historic sins of racism, its neglect and ill treatment of Native Americans,...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Formats
Summary
"From the birth of the Republican Party to the Confederacy's first convention, the Underground Railroad to the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Gettysburg to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Civil War reveals the amazing and often little known stories behind the battle lines of America's bloodiest war and debunks the myths that surround its greatest figures, including Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln,...
Author
Formats
Summary
"A fascinating, epic exploration of who gets to record the world's history -- from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns -- and how their biases influence our understanding about the past. There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as "objective" history? In this lively and thought-provoking book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other...
Pub. Date
2022.
Summary
"The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Inaccurate interpretations and outright misrepresentations of the past-cultivated within and promoted by the conservative movement and right-wing media over the last several decades-hold sway among large numbers of Americans, damaging our public discourse. In Myth America, historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of historians to provide textured analysis...
Author
Series
Summary
A two-time National Book Award finalist's "ambitious and provocative" look at Custer's Last Stand, capitalism, and the rise of the cowboys-and-Indians legend (The New York Review of Books).
In The Fatal Environment, historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of Native Americans helped justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans...
Author
Pub. Date
c2013
Summary
"In October 1641 a rebellion broke out in Ireland. Dispossessed Irish Catholics rose up against British Protestant settlers whom they held responsible for their plight. This uprising, the first significant sectarian rebellion in Irish history, gave rise to a decade of war that would culminate in the brutal re-conquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell. It also set in motion one of the most enduring and acrimonious debates in Irish history. Was the 1641...
Author
Series
Summary
The first volume of Decline and Fall was published in 1776, and by the time the final volume appeared in 1787, Gibbon had produced an exhaustive, million-and-a-half-word account of a 'revolution, which shall ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth'.
This panoramic work, covering 13 centuries from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, has been described as 'a bridge that carries one from the ancient world to the...
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Summary
History is to society what memory is to the individual: without it, we don't know who we are, and we can't make wise decisions about where we should be going. But while the nature of memory is a constant, the nature of history has changed radically over the past forty years, for good but also for ill. Historian Wood examines the sea change in the field, offers insight into what historians do, and how they can stumble. New currents of thought have...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Summary
Co-founder of The Carlyle Group and patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein takes readers on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with our greatest historians. In these lively dialogues, the biggest names in American history explore the subjects they've come to so intimately know and understand: David McCullough on John Adams, Jon Meacham on Thomas Jefferson, Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton,...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Summary
"When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Summary
"In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction-with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through...
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Formats
Summary
The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A...