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Books > History > American history
Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of
the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020
National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for
the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A
New York Times Editors' Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for
2020 "Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling,
quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts
often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all
runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with
America's sins." --Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri
Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where
for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that
provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three
generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years
after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that
childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the
social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to
its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction,
investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the
rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and
leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with
the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for
our own survival?
At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was
escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no
shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under
his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame
into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix
the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly
too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the
switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the
youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth
century.How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a
child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on
circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours?
Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's
contemporaries-men and women alive today who still carry
distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of
Alcolu and the entire state-Eli Faber pieces together the chain of
events that led to this tragic injustice. The first book to fully
explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the
Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously
researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived-the era of
lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black
Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired
with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind
eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American
legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. As
society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice,
the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons
about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney
case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just
a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but
rather one that continues to resonate in our own time. A foreword
is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History
Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and
author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and
Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent
Grant.
Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and
energy. American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have
portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at
classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan,
and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that
films have both reflected existing beliefs and conjured new visions
for Americans about the role of energy in their lives and their
history. The essays in this collection show how film provides a
unique and informative lens to understand perceptions of energy
production, consumption, and infrastructure networks. By placing
films that prominently feature energy within historical context and
analyzing them as historical objects, the contributing authors
demonstrate how energy systems of all kinds are both integral to
the daily life of Americans and inextricable from larger societal
changes and global politics.
Since the days of conquistador Hernan Cortes, rumours have
circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the
Honduran interior. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled
there to escape the Spanish invaders, and warn the legendary city
is cursed: to enter it is a death sentence. They call it the Lost
City of the Monkey God. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore
Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artefacts and
an electrifying story of having found the City - but then committed
suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century
later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists
on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a
single-engine plane carrying a highly advanced, classified
technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest
canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that
flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis,
tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but a lost
civilization. To confirm the discovery, Preston and the team
battled torrential rains, quickmud, plagues of insects, jaguars,
and deadly snakes. They emerged from the jungle with proof of the
legend... and the curse. They had contracted a horrifying,
incurable and sometimes lethal disease. Suspenseful and shocking,
filled with history, adventure and dramatic twists of fortune, The
Lost City of the Monkey God is the absolutely true, eyewitness
account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first
century.
WINNER OF THE LINCOLN FORUM BOOK PRIZE "A Lincoln
classic...superb." -The Washington Post "A book for our
time."-Doris Kearns Goodwin Lincoln on the Verge tells the dramatic
story of America's greatest president discovering his own strength
to save the Republic. As a divided nation plunges into the deepest
crisis in its history, Abraham Lincoln boards a train for
Washington and his inauguration-an inauguration Southerners have
vowed to prevent. Lincoln on the Verge charts these pivotal
thirteen days of travel, as Lincoln discovers his power, speaks
directly to the public, and sees his country up close. Drawing on
new research, this riveting account reveals the president-elect as
a work in progress, showing him on the verge of greatness, as he
foils an assassination attempt, forges an unbreakable bond with the
American people, and overcomes formidable obstacles in order to
take his oath of office.
A Times History Book of the Year 2022 From Sunday Times bestselling
historian Saul David, the dramatic tale of the first American
troops to take the fight to the enemy in the Second World War, and
also the last. The 'Devil Dogs' of K Company, 3/5 Marines, were
part of the legendary first Marine Division. They landed on the
beaches of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942 - the first
US ground offensive of the war - and were present when Okinawa,
Japan's most southerly prefecture, finally fell to American troops
after a bitter struggle in June 1945. In between they fought in the
'Green Hell' of Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, and
across the coral wasteland of Peleliu in the Palau Islands, a
campaign described by one K Company veteran as 'thirty days of the
meanest, around-the-clock slaughter that desperate men can inflict
on each other.' Ordinary men from very different backgrounds, and
drawn from cities, towns, and settlements across America, the Devil
Dogs were asked to do something extraordinary: take on the
victorious Imperial Japanese Army, composed of some of the most
effective soldiers in world history - and defeat it. This is the
story of how they did just that and, in the process, forged bonds
of brotherhood that still survive today. Remarkably, the company
contained an unusually high number of talented writers, whose
first-hand accounts and memoirs provide the colour, emotion, and
context for this extraordinary story. In Devil Dogs, award-winning
historian Saul David sets the searing experience of K Company into
the broader context of the brutal war in the Pacific and does for
the U.S. Marines what Band of Brothers did for the 101st Airborne.
Gripping, intimate, authoritative and far-reaching, this is a
unique and incredibly personal narrative of war. Saul David's
previous book SBS -Silent Warriors was in the Sunday Times
Bestseller Chart in the 35th and 36th week of 2021.
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