In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating grey area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts, and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story - while also telling us true.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the divorce rate in the United States rose by a staggering 2,000 percent. To understand this dramatic rise, Elaine Tyler May studied over one thousand detailed divorce cases. She found that contrary to common assumptions, divorce was not simply a by-product of women's increasing economic and sexual independence, or a rebellion against marriage. Rather, thwarted hopes for fulfillment in the public sphere drove both men and women to wed at a greater rate and to bring higher expectations to their marriages.

Though it ended more than thirty years ago, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American society. Red Reckoning examines how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century transformed the nation and forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the volume's contributors examine a broad array of topics, including the Cold War's impact on national security, race relations, gun culture and masculinity, law, college football, advertising, music, film, free speech, religion, and even board games. Above all, Red Reckoning brings a vitally important era back to life for those who lived through it and for students and scholars wishing to understand it.