History - United States - 20th Century

Our nation's transportation system is crumbling: highways are collapsing, roads are pockmarked, and commuter trains are unreliable. But as acclaimed scholar and ACLU president Deborah Archer warns in Dividing Lines, before we can think about rebuilding and repairing, we must consider the role race...

Our nation's transportation system is crumbling: highways are collapsing, roads are pockmarked, and commuter trains are unreliable. But as acclaimed scholar and ACLU president Deborah Archer warns in Dividing Lines, before we can think about rebuilding and repairing, we must consider the role race...

A landmark reissue of Studs Terkel's classic microcosm of America, with a new foreword by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-creator of the Division Street Revisited podcast"Remarkable. . . . Division Street astonishes, dismays, exhilarates."-The New York Times When New Press founder Andréeacute; Schiffrin...

"A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane" (Kirkus Reviews), Don't Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips--before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps. The birth of America's first interstate highways in the 1950s hit...

A powerful multicultural history of Americans in World War II, from the acclaimed author of A Different Mirror. A history of America in World War II is told through the lives of an ethnically diverse group of ordinary Americans struggling for equality at home...

Driven brings a seasoned perspective to today's conversations about government, media, and the future of truth in the form of a deeply personal and long-awaited autobiography by Tom Johnson, an award-winning journalist who helped shape the twenty-four-hour news media as we know it. Johnson's...

"The best book by far on the Pacific War" (The New York Times Book Review), this classic one-volume history of World War II in the Pacific draws on declassified intelligence files; British, American, and Japanese archival material; and military memoirs to provide a stunning...

Publishers Weekly Best Summer Reads Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known. "As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is...

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the...

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town. El Paso has been called the "Ellis Island" of America's southern border, a mountain pass cum border...

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was involved in almost every major campaign of the U.S. Left in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. An outstanding orator, writer, and tactician, Flynn is one of the most important figures in the history of the American labor...

One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer,...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Written with the style of a great novelist and the intrigue of a Cold War thriller, Embers of War is a landmark work that will forever change your understanding of how and why America went to war in Vietnam....

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for...

A sweeping cultural history of two iconic landmarks that reflect the spirit, character, and values of the US--the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty--and the role they play in shaping American culture, US history, and international relations In Empire and Liberty, historian...

From an eminent surgeon and historian comes the "by turns fascinating and ghastly" (The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice) story of surgery's development--from the Stone Age to the present day--blending meticulous medical research with vivid storytelling. There are not many life events...

"A pathbreaking work about how policies forged in blood and fire in Latin America were then exported to every corner of the globe. This brilliant and up-to-the-minute new edition is absolutely crucial to understanding our perilous present." --Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine...

The gripping story of the Ruby Ridge siege, showing how the historic standoff between federal agents and a white-separatist family set the stage for the conspiracy-laced politics of the Trump era. "Vivid, frightening, and fascinating...This book blew me away and opened my eyes."--Walter Isaacson,...

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Ingrassia comes a narrative of America like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the national experience--from the Model T to the Prius. From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the...

Jeffrey Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat...