Lifetime Members focuses on the investigation by Attorney Walter Chauncey Coleman into the violent death of a black migrant worker in Anthracite County, Pennsylvania, and on the various men and women drawn into the orbit of that investigation. In the course of his often reluctant search for the truth in the maze of lies and coverup --- a search that concludes with a second violent fatality--- Coleman learns not only that we are all members, more or less for life, of families, of neighborho...

Planning. These things have got to be planned, thought through, down to the last detail. Take your jewel thief: he doesnt just walk into tiffanys and start filling his pockets with rocks, like Virignia Woolf Not to worry. Certain members of the Living Nativity in front of the First National Bank of Pound Ridge (N.Y.) have definite plans for the several hundred thousand dollars in cash sitting inside the bank on Christmas Eve. They plan on taking it and yes, they have considered everything ...

When a historic battlefield site is discovered and studied, the focus is often on the “hardware”: remnants of weaponry, ammunition, supplies, and equipment that archaeologists carefully unearth, analyze, conserve, and frequently place on display in museums.But what about the “software”? What can archaeology teach us about the humans involved in the conflict: their social mores and cultural assumptions; their use and understanding of power?In The Archaeology of Engagemen...

The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birthA horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.By 1776, when military action and political ferment ...

The 1996 discovery, near Kennewick, Washington, of a 9,000-year-old Caucasoid skeleton brought more to the surface than bones. The explosive controversy and resulting lawsuit also raised a far more fundamental question: Who owns history? Many Indians see archeologists as desecrators of tribal rites and traditions; archeologists see their livelihoods and science threatened by the 1990 Federal reparation law, which gives tribes control over remains in their traditional territories. In this n...

Tom Wolfe's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES defined an era and established Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. In his #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist, A MAN IN FULL, the setting shifts to Atlanta, Georgia—a racially mixed late-century boomtown teeming with fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians."Don’t miss the star-studded mini series adaptation of A Man in Ful...

A fascinating account of how the Mississippi River shaped AmericaIn Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history—the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in...

**Claudio Saunt is an advisor for THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBSThis panoramic account of 1776 chronicles the other revolutions unfolding that year across North America, far beyond the British colonies.**In this unique history of 1776, Claudio Saunt looks beyond the familiar story of the thirteen colonies to explore the many other revolutions roiling the turbulent American continent. In that fateful year, the Spanish l...

The first complete history of the nineteenth-century revolt, drawing on original Texan and Mexican sources and on-site inspections of almost every battlefield.Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a “Texian Iliad” in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends “almost burlesque.”In this highly re...

So many books about the American West leave out the more intriguing details:When, in 1803, the young USA doubled its size with the purchase from France of an unexplored vastness called La Louisiane, it was a British bank which lent the Americans most of the 15 million that they didn’t have. So the financial papers for the biggest real-estate deal in history are, to this day, held in a London vault. Not many people know that… If his ranching uncle-by-marriage had had his way, the teenaged W...

The main characters from the first of the series, "Hard Press'd", Preston Andrews--Press to his friends, Rachel Wilding--FBI Special Agent and hot babe, and Trace Evans--Press's new, young partner are back.Press is "volunteered" by FBI Director, Malcolm Probst, to help the Bureau solve a serial killer's deadly habit. This guy takes a victim one year, then returns it the next--in slightly altered condition.With next to nothing to go on, the Senior Homicide Detective for the ...

In this, the 3rd of The Preston Andrews Mysteries, Press thinks everything in his little world is exactly what it should be. He and Rachel are a couple--their future is looking bright. Then Press gets the phone call no man wants to get.Rachel is missing!In Seattle, a madman has been killing women for approximately a year. SPD's Chief Maddox is desperate to keep his city safe, so he calls in the FBI. That, of course, means Probst--the Bureau's Director and Press's worst nigh...