F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, at the young age of twenty-eight. Taking Things Hard reveals the story behind the now-iconic Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald's struggle to write anything that matched its brilliance.
Robert R. Garnett's new biographical study of Fitzgerald's life and work begins by constructing a portrait of the young man who would wholly and uniquely pour himself into writing Gatsby. In the years following its publication, Fitzgerald continued penning stories, some of them among his finest, yet it took him nine years to complete another novel. The downward trajectory of his career had interweaving causes, among them arrogance, irresponsibility, his troubled marriage to Zelda Sayre, financial improvidence, and a destructive alcoholism. At the root of it all, though, lingered the simple fact that Fitzgerald's most intense and profound experiences had come early, during his truncated undergraduate years at Princeton and the months following his February 1919 discharge from the army.
Taking Things Hard provides a fresh look at the imaginative sources of Fitzgerald's fiction and considers the elements, drawn from the keen impressions and salient emotions of its author's youth, that make Gatsby a book that still speaks powerfully to readers.
The most enduring feature of US history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; and twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of US history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
Details how the US State Department attempted, and failed, to save South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression and the powerful domestic political influences that ultimately led to America's defeat.
Ten years after the end of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, a career Foreign Service officer, Thomas J. Corcoran, set down in writing his thoughts on the history of US State Department policy during America's involvement with South Vietnam. Like many Americans of his generation, he was perplexed by the failure of America to achieve its goals in South Vietnam. As an ambassador and with over thirty years of diplomatic experience-beginning in 1948 when he was assigned to Hanoi and involving other postings in Southeast Asia-he brought to his analysis a long and rich personal experience with events in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
The result is a thoughtful, objective, and well-researched study that chronicles the key policy decisions made by the US State Department throughout the entire period from 1945 to 1975; decisions that ultimately led to the first war lost by the United States. In his extensive study, Corcoran does an excellent job of exposing many of the myths and falsehoods found in orthodox histories of US involvement in Vietnam.
Fiorello LaGuardia was one of the twentieth century's most colorful politicians-on the New York and national stage. He was also quintessentially American: the son of Italian immigrants, who rose in society through sheer will and chutzpah. Almost one hundred years later, America is once again grappling with issues that would have been familiar to the Little Flower, as he was affectionately known. It's time to bring back LaGuardia, argues historian and journalist Terry Golway, to remind us all what an effective municipal officer (as he preferred to call himself) can achieve . . .
Golway examines LaGuardia's extraordinary career through four essential qualities: As a patriot, a dissenter, a leader, and a statesman. He needed them all when he stood against the nativism, religious and racial bigotry, and reactionary economic policies of the 1920s, and again when he faced the realities of Depression-era New York and the rise of fascism at home and abroad in the 1930s. Just before World War II, the Roosevelt administration formally apologized to the Nazis when LaGuardia referred to Hitler as a 'brown-shirted fanatic.'
There was nobody quite like Fiorello LaGuardia. In this immensely listenable book, as entertaining as the man himself, Terry Golway captures the enduring appeal of one of America's greatest leaders.
Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else—a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes. Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets? As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham’s powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall.
Who set the mysterious fire that burned down much of New York City shortly after the British took the city during the Revolutionary War?
New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown's forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground.
This is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
A pivotal moment in American history, as told by our forefathers
On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form-the soldiers' own words-unedited and unabridged. Rife with previously unpublished details of this historic turning point in the American Revolution, described as the war's 'largest all-American fight,' these accounts expose the dramatic happenings of the battle, including new perspectives on the debate over Patriot Colonel William Campbell's bravery during the fight. Robert M. Dunkerley's work is an invaluable resource to historians studying the flow of combat, genealogists tracing their ancestors, and anyone interested in Kings Mountain and the Southern Campaign.
James Longstreet's countermarch and Samuel Johnston's morning reconnaissance are two of the most enigmatic events of the Battle of Gettysburg. Both have been viewed as major factors in the Confederacy's loss of the battle and, in turn, the war. Yet much of it lies shrouded in mystery.
Though the battle is one of the most well-documented events in history, the vast majority of our knowledge comes from the words of the veterans and civilians who experienced it. Without action photography, video, or audio recordings, our primary window into what happened is the memory of those who were there. The story of the Battle of Gettysburg is simply the compilation of the memories of those who fought it. But memory is anything but objective.
Recognizing the multitude of factors that affect human memory, In the Shadow of the Round Tops explores how the individual soldiers experienced, remembered, and wrote about the battle, and how those memories have created a cloud over James Longstreet's bewildering countermarch and Samuel Johnston's infamous reconnaissance. Each soldier had a particular view of these historic events. By comparing the veterans' memories and sifting through the factors that affected each memory, the picture of the countermarch, reconnaissance, and the entire battle, comes into sharper focus.
Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. Laboratories against Democracy shows how national political conflicts are increasingly flowing through the subnational institutions of state politics-with profound consequences for public policy and American democracy.
Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today's state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time-or accelerating them.
American forces entered World War I combat in October 1917, but it was not until July 1918 that they went on the offensive for the first time. Among the units selected for this operation was the 42nd Division, or the 'Rainbow Division' as it was known popularly. This division, which was composed of National Guard units from twenty-six states, including Joyce Kilmer's 69th New York Infantry, would spend 164 days in combat, a number exceeded by only two other American divisions. However, it was the nine days from July 25 to August 2, 1918, that were the most terrible and heroic in the division's history. Facing an enemy who was determined to hold its positions, these National Guardsmen fought with courage and determination to gain what was often only yards of ground, and did so at a deadly cost.
In Nine Desperate Days: America's Rainbow Division in the Aisne-Marne Offensive, historian Robert Thompson chronicles the hardships and tenacity of the men from the 42nd Division during this pivotal campaign. The Americans did not break despite heavy losses, and were able to drive the Germans back from territory they initially gained. The efforts of the Rainbow Division during Aisne-Marne were key to the ultimate Allied victory and are a symbol of American valor and sacrifice during the 'war to end all wars.'
