Kenneth C. Davis, author of the phenomenal New York Times bestseller Don't Know Much About History, presents a collection of extraordinary stories, each detailing an overlooked episode that shaped the nation's destiny and character. Davis's dramatic narratives set the record straight, busting myths and bringing to light little-known but fascinating facts from a time when the nation's fate hung in the balance.
Daily Life of the New Americans: Immigration since 1965
In the last decades, a growing number of immigrants from around the world have arrived in the United States. Daily Life of the New Americans: Immigration since 1965 provides a thematic overview of their everyday lives and underscores the diversity and complexity of the newcomer experience.Organized into six thematic chapters, the book examines how immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe are changing the face of the American nation, and, at the same time, are themselves being changed by living in America. The stories told here are enhanced through the use of oral histories that bring immigrant experiences vividly to life.
Marie-Ange Hawkins has the kind of childhood that most people dream of - freedom, love and security in a beautiful old French chateau. But when she is just eleven, a tragic accident marks the end of her idyllic life. Orphaned and alone, she is sent to America to live with her great-aunt on a farm in Iowa, where she is forced to work while dreaming of returning to her beloved chateau.
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity
What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity.
Benjamin Banneker - American Mathematician and Astronomer
Wildcats and wolves and a few bears hid in the nearby woods when Benjamin Banneker was born. It was November 9, 1731. The new baby slept peacefully in the sturdy log cabin where he lived with his family. The Banneker family lived in Maryland. It was still an English colony in 1731. Thirteen colonies made up the new land of America. They weren’t states yet because the king of England was the ruler.