History -- United States from I Cannot Live Without Books

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers, and… Read more about this item

Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, The Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission by Stephen Puleo THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The first vessel to… Read more about this item

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America by Carol Anderson In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a "pro-gun" nor… Read more about this item

The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free by Paulina Bren THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. The Barbizon is the first history of New York's most glamorous women-only residential hotel and the remarkable women who passed through its doors. Liberated from home and hearth by World War I, politically enfranchised and ready to work, women arrived… Read more about this item

To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America by Andrew Baker On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a Black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the… Read more about this item

They Came for Freedom: The Forgotten, Epic Adventure of the Pilgrims by Jay Milbrandt Once a year at Thanksgiving, we encounter Pilgrims as folksy people in funny hats before promptly forgetting them. In the centuries since America began, the Pilgrims have been relegated to folklore and children's stories, fairy-tale mascots for holiday parties and greeting cards. The true story of the Pilgrim… Read more about this item

The Long War: The Inside Story of America and Afghanistan Since 9/11 by David Loyn Three American presidents tried to defeat the Taliban -- sending 150,000 international troops at the peak and spending a trillion dollars. But early policy mistakes that allowed Osama bin Laden to escape made the task far more difficult. Deceived by easy victories, they backed ruthless corrupt… Read more about this item

Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. In January 1944, a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle accompanied his boss to a meeting with the president. For more than a decade, the Jews of Germany had sought refuge in the United… Read more about this item

The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, & the World They Made and Lost by Marilyn J. Westerkamp When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they When English colonizers landed in New England in 1630, they constructed a godly commonwealth according to precepts gleaned from Scripture. For these 'Puritan' Christians, religion both provided the center… Read more about this item

The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America by Rebecca Fraser The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped group of English puritans who ventured across the Atlantic in the early autumn o f1620 had no sense they would pass into legend.… Read more about this item

The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena Zabin THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. The story of the Boston Massacre -- when, on a late-winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death -- is familiar to generations. But the history of the event has always obscured a fascinating truth: the massacre arose… Read more about this item

They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty by John G. Turner In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting… Read more about this item

The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor,… Read more about this item

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism by J.D. Dickey In November 1739, the American colonies felt an earthquake. It arrived not in the form of a natural disaster, but with a twenty-five-year-old preacher, George Whitefield. He had come to the New World to tell his listeners to repent their sins and be reborn, to reject… Read more about this item

"Not a Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many of us, regardless of party affiliation, proudly say that the United States is "a nation of immigrants." This pervasive myth emerged in the 1950s when John F. Kennedy, then… Read more about this item

Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster -- The Second Generation of American Giants by H.W. Brands In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator… Read more about this item

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson THERE IS A RED "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. On December 14, 2012, a gunman killed twenty first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Ten years later, Sandy Hook has become a foundational story of how false conspiracy narratives and misinformation… Read more about this item

The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America by Jack Kelly THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine… Read more about this item

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff Over the past eighteen years, monumental literature has been published about 9/11, from Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, which traced the birth and rise of al-Qaeda, to The 9/11 Commission Report, the government's definitive factual retrospective of the attacks. But one perspective has been missing up… Read more about this item

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES. Stockholm, 1968. A thousand American deserters and draft resisters are arriving to escape the war in Vietnam. They're young, they're radical, and they want to start a revolution. Some of them even want to take… Read more about this item