Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours.Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. She dated and traveled ceaselessly before scandalizing the world by marrying a foreign...

After September 11, Americans agonized over why nineteen men hated the United States enough to kill three thousand civilians in an unprovoked assault. Analysts have offered a wide variety of explanations for the attack, but the one voice missing is that of the terrorists themselves. This penetrating book is the first to present the inner logic of al-Qaeda and like-minded extremist groups by which they justify September 11 and other terrorist attacks.Mary Habeck explains that these ...

You can make a difference on a daily basis, and it’s not as difficult as you might think. Simple Giving includes more than 40 ideas to make the world a better place.Most people think they have to donate a lot of time and money in order to make a difference. But there are simple ways to integrate giving into our personal and professional lives that don’t involve either. In Simple Giving, Jennifer Iacovelli shows us how to make giving a part of our daily routines. It can involve some...

The Lowells of Massachusetts were a remarkable family. They were settlers in the New World in the 1600s, revolutionaries creating a new nation in the 1700s, merchants and manufacturers building prosperity in the 1800s, and scientists and artists flourishing in the 1900s.Though no strangers to controversy, the family boasted some of the most astonishing individuals in America's history: Percival Lowle, the patriarch who planted the roots of the family tree; Reverend John Lowell, the...

As the 1960s drew to a close, the United States was coming apart at the seams. From August 1969 to August 1970, the nation witnessed nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson or bombings at schools across the country. It was the year of the My Lai massacre investigation, the Cambodia invasion, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War. The American death toll in Vietnam was approaching fifty thousand, and the ascendant counterculture was challenging nearly every aspect of Ame...

"I know that nothing can be done perfectly at the first trial; I also know that each day brings its little quota of experiences, which with honest intentions, will lead to perfection after a while." —Washington RoeblingHis father conceived of the Brooklyn Bridge, but after John Roebling's sudden death, Washington Roebling built what has become one of American's most iconic structures—as much a part of New York as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Yet, as ...

Snowbound: A company of traveling actors gets snowbound during a storm while venturing to their next locale. In order to pass the time, the actors share stories with each other. The Manager begins with one about the time he spent in an unsavory saloon before his time with the company. Next the Leading Lady shares a story about a certain play she worked on. The Wardrobe Mistress, a matronly woman not known among the company for speaking much, continues on with the promise of a story about a...

In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writ...

Words matter. Every day in schools, language is used—whether in the classroom, in a student-teacher meeting, or by principals, guidance counselors, or other school professionals—implying, intentionally or not, that some subset of students have little potential. As a result, countless students "underachieve," others become disengaged, and, ultimately, we all lose.Mica Pollock, editor of Everyday Antiracism, now turns to what it takes for those working in schools to match th...

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. I...

A deeply personal memoir about finding family and belonging from White House staffer Robin F. Schepper.Growing up torn between her single Pan Am–stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City, Robin F. Schepper never imagined that she’d one day have an office in the East Wing of the White House. Her childhood in a German American neighborhood on the Upper East Side was peppered with half-truths, from the family secrets surrounding her grandmot...

The fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer; a sidekick, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that 'fudge' can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood. In time, their friendship is tested - by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them, and by the first, startling, ...