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Throughout his long and influential career, Michael Fellman has explored the tragic side of American history. Best known for his path-breaking work on the American Civil War and for an interdisciplinary methodology that utilizes social psychology, cultural anthropology, and comparative history, he has delved into issues of domination, exploitation, political violence, racism, terrorism, and the experiences of war. Incorporating essays written over the past thirty years -- two of them previously unpublished, and the others not widely available -- Views from the Dark Side of American History reveals some of the major personal and scholarly concerns of his career and illuminates his approach to history, research, applied theory, and analysis. Each essay includes a thought-provoking preface and afterword that situate it in its time and explore its intellectual and political contexts. Fellman also grapples with the personal elements of developing as a historian -- the people with whom he argued or agreed with, the settings in which he gave or published the papers, and the subjective as well as historical issues that he addressed. The collection encourages history students, historians, and general readers of history to think through the layers of their historical engagement and to connect their personal experiences and social commitments to their explorations.
The story of the notorious Jewish gangster who ascended from impoverished beginnings to the glittering Las Vegas strip "[A] brisk-reading chronicle of Siegel’s life and crimes."—Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal "Fast-paced and absorbing. . . . With a keen eye for the amusing, and humanizing detail, [Shnayerson] enlivens the traditional rise-and-fall narrative."—Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York Times Book Review In a brief life that led to a violent end, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (1906–1947) rose from desperate poverty to ill‑gotten riches, from an early‑twentieth‑century family of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side to a kingdom of his own making in Las Vegas. In this captivating portrait, author Michael Shnayerson sets out not to absolve Bugsy Siegel but rather to understand him in all his complexity. Through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of the 1940s, Bugsy Siegel and his longtime partner in crime Meyer Lansky engaged in innumerable acts of violence. As World War II came to an end, Siegel saw the potential for a huge, elegant casino resort in the sands of Las Vegas. Jewish gangsters built nearly all of the Vegas casinos that followed. Then, one by one, they disappeared. Siegel’s story laces through a larger, generational story of eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early‑ to mid‑twentieth century.
The Dark Side is a dramatic, riveting, and definitive narrative account of how the United States made self-destructive decisions in the pursuit of terrorists around the world—decisions that not only violated the Constitution, but also hampered the pursuit of Al Qaeda. In spellbinding detail, Jane Mayer relates the impact of these decisions by which key players, namely Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, exploited September 11 to further a long held agenda to enhance presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment. With a new afterward. One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year National Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A Best Book of the Year: Salon, Slate, The Economist, The Washington Post, Cleveland Plain-Dealer
“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. He invokes Shakespearean models to show that the concept of the tragic hero can help us understand why we are both repelled by and drawn to figures such as Vito and Michael Corleone or Walter White. Beginning with Huckleberry Finn and ending with The Walking Dead, Cantor also uncovers the link between the American dream and frontier life. In imaginative variants of a Wild West setting, popular culture has served up disturbing—and yet strangely compelling—images of what happens when people move beyond the borders of law and order. Cantor demonstrates that, at its best, popular culture raises thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name. In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt's mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul. In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he though would secure America's westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America's hands for a century.
In A Necessary Evil, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills shows that distrust of government is embedded deep in the American psyche. From the revolt of the colonies against king and parliament to present-day tax revolts, militia movements, and debates about term limits, Wills shows that American antigovernment sentiment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our history. By debunking some of our fondest myths about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the taming of the frontier, Wills shows us how our tendency to hold our elected government in disdain is misguided.
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Race and the American Military provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding race in the American military establishment from the French and Indian War to the present day. By broadly incorporating the latest research on race and ethnicity into the field of military history, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades at the intersection of these two fields. The discussion goes beyond the study of battles and generals to look at the other peoples who were involved in American military campaigns and analyzes how African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Chicanos helped shape the course of American History—both at home and on the battlefield. The book also includes coverage of American imperial ambitions and the national response to encountering other peoples in their own countries. The Routledge Handbook of the History of Race in the American Military defines how the history of race and ethnicity impacts military history, over time and comparatively, while encouraging scholarship on specific groups, periods, and places. This important collection presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field.
Throughout the Civil War, irregular warfare—including the use of hit-and-run assaults, ambushes, and raiding tactics—thrived in localized guerrilla fights within the Border States and the Confederate South. The Guerrilla Hunters offers a comprehensive overview of the tactics, motives, and actors in these conflicts, from the Confederate-authorized Partisan Rangers, a military force directed to spy on, harass, and steal from Union forces, to men like John Gatewood, who deserted the Confederate army in favor of targeting Tennessee civilians believed to be in sympathy with the Union. With a foreword by Kenneth W. Noe and an afterword by Daniel E. Sutherland, this collection represents an impressive array of the foremost experts on guerrilla fighting in the Civil War. Providing new interpretations of this long-misconstrued aspect of warfare, these scholars go beyond the conventional battlefield to examine the stories of irregular combatants across all theaters of the Civil War, bringing geographic breadth to what is often treated as local and regional history. The Guerrilla Hunters shows that instances of unorthodox combat, once thought isolated and infrequent, were numerous, and many clashes defy easy categorization. Novel methodological approaches and a staggering diversity of research and topics allow this volume to support multiple areas for debate and discovery within this growing field of Civil War scholarship.
Throughout his long and influential career, Michael Fellman has explored the tragic side of American history. Incorporating essays written over the past thirty years -- two of them previously unpublished, and the others not widely available -- Views from the Dark Side of American History reveals some of the major personal and scholarly concerns of his career and illuminates his approach to history, research, applied theory, and analysis.