An anecdotal, rollicking tour through America's most colorful region.From the Tidewater through Appalachia, down the Blue Ridge country and into the sunbelt, B.C. Hall and C.T. Wood take us through the American South, inviting us to listen to its music -- blues, country, gospel, and rock -- and to the voices that have shaped its extraordinary, distinctive literature. Interweaving interviews with people both ordinary and famous with thought-provoking reflections on ...

**The New York Times bestsellerA New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for NonfictionOne of NPR's 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head OnNPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great ReadsSan Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2016: 100 recommended booksA Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016“Formidable...

New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s This American Life Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history.Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERDiscover 365 reasons to love America as you read the storied history of the United States.The fife and drum of history mark the time of each passing day. And within their cadence, personalities, conflicts, discoveries, ideas, and nations peal and fade. American history is no different. Best-selling author and educator Dr. William J. Bennett is a master of the story that is the United States...

A National Book Award Nominee and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year.Over the centuries, Florida has been many things: an unconquered realm protected by geography, a wilderness that ruined Spanish conquistadors, “God’s waiting room,” and a place to start over. Depopulated after the extermination of its original native population, today it’s home to nineteen million. The site of vicious racial violence, including massacres, slavery, and the r...

New York City -- what a city, what a history!If it happened anywhere in America, it probably happened in New York City. Reading the history of this city is fascinating and exciting, as if watching the people and the events, that traveled through the region and across the years.This little ebook is an annotated timeline of the major events of this incredible city.

Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies—in New York and New Jersey and the parts of Pennsylvania that on a clear day you can almost see from the Empire State Building. In My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan delves into this first Middle America, digging for a glorious, heroic part of the past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of tod...

To most Americans, Mississippi is not a state but a scar, the place where segregation took its ugliest form and struck most savagely at its challengers. But to many Americans, Mississippi is also home. And it is this paradox, with all its overtones of history and heartache, that Anthony Walton—whose parents escaped Mississippi for the relative civility of the Midwest—explores in this resonant and disquieting work of travel writing, history, and memoir.Traveling from the Natchez Tra...

"Leave now, or die!" Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widesp...

In the mid-1970s, the Mashantucket Pequot tribe had only one member -- an elderly woman who pleaded with her grandson to come live on the impoverished reservation and save it from falling into government hands upon her death. In Revenge of the Pequots, journalist Kim Isaac Eisler tells the remarkable story of how Richard "Skip" Hayward, then an unemployed ship-worker, granted his grandmother's dying wish, revived the moribund clan, and transformed the Pequots into the richest and ...

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians--but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By met...

With a new preface, a "profound, chilling, and heartbreaking, contribution to American history" that investigates the causes of the twentieth century's deadliest race riot and how its legacy has scarred and shaped a community ( Boston Globe).On May 30, 1921, a misunderstanding between a white elevator operator and a Black delivery boy escalated into the worse race riot in U.S. history. In this compelling and deeply human account, James Hirsch investigates h...