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Books > Humanities > History > American history > General
Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague?
Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it?
For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?
Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.
v
TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world.
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.
The abridged edition of the enduring masterwork--a classic
portrait of America's culture and people
Originally penned in the mid-nineteenth century by Frenchman
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America" remains the most
comprehensive, penetrating, and astute picture of American life,
politics, and morals ever written, as relevant today as when it
first appeared in print nearly two hundred years ago.
This abridged edition by scholar and historian Scott A. Sandage
includes a new introduction and editorial notes, and offers
students and the general reader alike easy access to the preeminent
translation by George Lawrence, widely recognized as the best
translation based on the second revised and corrected text of the
1961 French edition, edited by J. P. Mayer.
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.
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.
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