Showing results for "Was" in Americas

Stories of "The American West" often rely on tired tropes of tough cowboys, but real history is much less straight and narrow and way more interesting. Join host Niecy Nash-Betts for a wild round-up of LGBTQ+ lives that got buried in the dust of popular culture and history, and a look at how queer people continue to shape the West today–from gay rodeo to two-spirit identity to trans truckers.

Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf book club choice NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER All they wanted was the chance to shine. Be careful what you wish for… ‘The first thing we asked was, “Does this stuff hurt you?” And they said, “No.” The company said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we...

In the summer of 1967, Mark Garrison had dropped out of college at Southern Illinois University just before entering his third year. He had run out of money and had to work for a while. These were the days before the lottery and the draft soon came calling. In order to somewhat control his own future, he enlisted in the US Army's helicopter flight school program. Little did he know that this adventure would be the most profound experience of his life.

Was the Civil War really about slavery? Or was it a war fought over money? Civil War historian Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., (Vicksburg, Bust Hell Wide Open) opens his fascinating new book, It Wasn't About Slavery, with Dr. Grady McWhiney's claim that "what passes as standard American history is really Yankee history written by New Englanders or their puppets to glorify Yankee heroes and ideals".   

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Meacham has given us the Lincoln for...

Esmeralda Santiago reminisces about her childhood in Puerto Rico and her early years in Brooklyn as the oldest of seven (soon to be 11) children. Her upbringing is turbulent on account of her parents’ relentless fighting, which only ever seems to stop when they have another baby. When her youngest brother has an accident, her mother decides to move to New York with her children to seek medical treatment. Arriving in the United States, 13-year-old Santiago experiences uprooting and a loss of identity while she tries to adapt to a culture and language that are foreign to her.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the...

In this lively book, Warren Throckmorton, coauthor of Getting Jefferson Right, investigates the gloss that Christian nationalist storytellers put on history and equips listeners to debunk seven myths that they propagate. Working in the tradition of muckraking journalists, Throckmorton picks a...

Après le succès de Nouvelle-France. Ce qu'on aurait dû vous enseigner, Gilles Proulx revient à la charge pour revaloriser la mémoire collective du Québec.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives. And so the National Story...

A thought-provoking exploration of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic album, Born in the U.S.A.—a record that both chronicled and foreshadowed the changing tides of modern America On June 4, 1984, Columbia Records issued what would become one of the best-selling and most impactful rock albums of all...

Soon after WWII, U.S. statesman Dean Acheson warned that creating Israel on land already inhabited by Palestinians would "imperil" both American and all Western interests in the region. Despite warnings such as this one, President Truman supported establishing a Jewish state on land primarily inhabited by Muslims and Christians.

On December 15, 1985, powerful mafia don Carlos Marcello, referring to JFK's death, told a fellow Texas prison inmate, in part, that, "Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed." This changes everything about not only the president's assassination but also reveals Marcello's complicity in the deaths...

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and Black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre".

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world's most powerful country? And what happened to the "American dream"? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt examines the past century of American history, from the Great Depression to today's Great Stagnation, in search of an answer.

In 1991, the Kennedy brothers first published The South Was Right!, launching the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism. To date, the first and second edition of this book have sold more than 135,000 copies! Not for the faint of heart, The South Was Right! is an authoritative and well-documented study of the mythology behind “Civil War” history and its ongoing effects. In their new edition for a 21st-century audience, the Kennedys have updated their message to provide guidance for the harsh conditions against liberty.

John Fea offers a thoroughly researched, evenhanded primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title's question from a historical perspective, helping listeners see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. This updated edition reports on the many issues that have arisen in recent years concerning religion's place in American society.

Ever since researchers and commentators began questioning the conclusions of the Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the response has been: Why would the US national-security establishment - that is, the military and the CIA - kill Kennedy? As Douglas P. Horne details in this audiobook, JFK's War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, the answer is because Kennedy's ideas about foreign policy collided with those of the US national-security establishment during the height of the Cold War.

One of the biggest concerns as the Civil War wrapped up was that Confederate troops might disappear into the Appalachian Mountains where they could conduct guerrilla raids with relative impunity. If they did, the war could have been extended for years, maybe even decades as the insurgents crept out of their strongholds to conduct hit-and-run raids.