1215: the year of Magna Carta

By Danziger, Danny

Publishing Date: 2005

Classification: 900

Call Number: 942.033 DAN

"From bestselling author Danny Danziger and medieval expert John Gillingham comes a vivid look at the signing of the Magna Carta and how this event illuminates one of the most compelling and romantic periods in history. Surveying a broad landscape through a narrow lens, 1215 sweeps readers back eight centuries in an absorbing portrait of life during a time of global upheaval, the ripples of which can still be felt today. At the center of this fascinating period is the document that has become the root of modern freedom: the Magna Carta. It was a time of political revolution and domestic change that saw the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart, King John, and, in legend, Robin Hood all make their marks on history. The events leading up to King Johns setting his seal to the famous document at Runnymede in June 1215 form this rich and riveting narrative that vividly describes everyday life from castle to countryside, from school to church, and from hunting in the forest to trial by ordeal. For instance, women wore no underwear, though men did, the average temperatures were actually higher than they are now, and the austere kitchen at Westminster Abbey allowed each monk two pounds of meat and a gallon of ale per day. Broad in scope and rich in detail, 1215 ingeniously illuminates what may have been the most important year of our history." --

The last empire: the final days of the Soviet Union

By Plokhy, Serhii

Publishing Date: [2014]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 947.0854 PLO

Describes the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, dispelling the myth that the event was spurred on in part by the close relationship between George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.

A land so strange: the epic journey of Cabeza de Vaca : the extraordinary tale of a shipwrecked Spaniard who walked across America in the sixteenth century

By Resendez, Andres

Publishing Date: 2007

Classification: 900

Call Number: 970.01 RES

Chronicles the story of a small band of Spanish explorers who became separated from their ships in Florida and began a trek across the continent during the early sixteenth century.

NEW RELEASE

Bad Mexicans: race, empire, and revolution in the borderlands

By Hernandez, Kelly Lytle

Publishing Date: [2022]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 972.1 HER

"Rebel historian" Kelly Lytle Hernandez reframes our understanding of U.S. history in this groundbreaking narrative of revolution in the borderlands. Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magon, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers--and American dissidents--to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico's dictator, Porfirio Diaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by U.S. imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The U.S. Departments of War, State, Treasury, and Justice as well as police, sheriffs, and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magon was one of the FBI's first cases. But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code, and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world's first social revolution of the twentieth century. Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernandez puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas' story integral to modern American life."--

1774: the long year of Revolution

By Norton, Mary Beth

Publishing Date: [2020]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.3 NOR

"A book on the American Revolution that looks at the critical "long year" of 1774, and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the first Continental Congress to the Battle of Lexington and Concord."--

1775: a good year for revolution

By Phillips, Kevin

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.3 PHI

What if the year that has long been commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact, misleading? In this book the author, a historian punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. 1775 was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian border to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a secrecy-shrouded Congress. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775 such as Congress's belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England's 'rage militaire, ' the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, the new provincial congresses and hundreds of local committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands, were the events that delivered a sweeping Patriot control of territory and local government that Britain was never able to overcome. Here the author surveys the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class to demonstrate how they had a huge effect on how the country shaped itself. This work attempts to revolutionize the understanding of America's origins.

American republics: a continental history of the United States, 1783-1850

By Taylor, Alan

Publishing Date: [2021]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.318 TAY

"From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America's formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor's elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period"--

Lincoln on race and slavery

By Lincoln, Abraham

Publishing Date: 2009

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.7092 LIN

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents the full range of Lincoln's views, gathered from his private letters, speeches, official documents, and even race jokes, arranged chronologically from the late 1830s to the 1860s. --from publisher description.

Hell with the fire out: a history of the Modoc War

By Quinn, Arthur

Publishing Date: 1997

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.82 QUI

"With a scholar's insight and a storyteller's passion, Arthur Quinn vividly brings to life a violent and important chapter in the history of the American West. On the morning of December 22, 1869, Alfred B. Meacham, Oregon's head federal Indian agent, traveled to the borderlands of northern California. His mission was to convince a band of wayward Modocs to return to the reservation the United States government had set aside for them. However, in a stunning lack of foresight on the government's part, the Modocs were expected to share the reservation with another tribe: their longtime rivals, the Klamaths. This peaceful compromise was short-lived, and the Modocs refused to remain on the reservation. Thus ignited a bloody war in the treacherous Lava Beds of California, described by one soldier as "a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder, of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness . . . all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting--fettered, paralyzed and left to glower at heaven in important rage for evermore." The Modoc War, pivotal in American history, pitted the peace policies of President Ulysses S. Grant and Quaker activist Lucretia Mott against William Tecumseh Sherman - the destroyer of Georgia - and his outspoken desire for the Modocs' "utter extermination." When it ended in 1873, with the execution of the tribal leaders and the relocation of the Modoc tribe to Oklahoma, the federal government's Peace Commission was in tatters. The way was paved toward the more famous, but no bloodier, battle at Little Bighorn and the battle at Wounded Knee, the last battle of the western Indian wars and the final closing of the frontier." -- Publisher's description

Blood and sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's campaign for peace

By Von Tunzelmann, Alex

Publishing Date: [2016]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.92 VON

"A revelatory popular history that tells the story of the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956--a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower--which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today"--Jacket.

The great shark hunt: strange tales from a strange time

By Thompson, Hunter S.

Publishing Date: [1979]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.924 THO

"The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed "gonzo"--"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," which appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970. From this essay a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s."

NEW RELEASE

Confidence man: the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America

By Haberman, Maggie

Publishing Date: 2022

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.933 HAB

"From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist: a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that moves beyond simplistic caricature, chronicling his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency and his potential comeback. Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means. Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes. Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink. The through-line of Trump's life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests. Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the "Trump Disorganization." That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump's behavior as President had echoes in what came before. In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history"--

Tecumseh and the prophet: the Shawnee brothers who defied a nation

By Cozzens, Peter

Publishing Date: 2020

Classification: 900

Call Number: 977.004 COZ

"The riveting story of the Shawnee brothers who led the last great pan-Indian confederacy against the United States"--

Becoming Los Angeles: myth, memory, and a sense of place

By Waldie, D. J.

Publishing Date: [2020]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 979.494 WAL

Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city’s image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city’s conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing—or rejecting—an Angeleno identity has come to mean. - (Gibbs-Smith) Best-selling author and beloved chronicler of Los Angeles D.J. Waldie reconsiders the city in a collection of contemporary essays. Nobody sees Los Angeles with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie. – Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor

Going to extremes

By McGinniss, Joe

Publishing Date: 1980

Classification: 900

Call Number: 979.8 MCG

An account of life in today's Alaska takes in whites, Eskimos, and Native Indians, cities, towns, and wilderness, industry and trapping, and the idiosyncrasies, dangers, vastness, and wonders of America's last frontier.