"The Roaring Twenties" is the only decade in American history with a widely applied nickname, and our collective fascination with this era continues. But how did this surge of innovation and cultural milestones emerge out of the ashes of The Great War? No one has yet written a book about the decade's beginning. Acclaimed author Eric Burns investigates the year of 1920, which was not only a crucial twelve-month period of its own, but one that foretold the future, foreshadowing the rest of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, whether it was Sacco and Vanzetti or the stock market crash that brought this era to a close. Burns sets the record straight about this most misunderstood and iconic of periods. Despite being the first full year of armistice, 1920 was not, in fact, a peaceful time-it contained the greatest act of terrorism in American history to date. And while 1920 is thought of as starting a prosperous era, for most people, life had never been more unaffordable. Meanwhile, African Americans were putting their stamp on culture and though people today imagine the frivolous image of the flapper dancing the night away, the truth was that a new kind of power had been bestowed on women, and it had nothing to do with the dance floor. . . From prohibition to immigration, the birth of jazz, the rise of expatriate literature, and the original Ponzi scheme, 1920 was truly a year like no other.

In 1957, America turned its back on its earlier self and jumped headlong into the nation it has become today. From Sputnik and the beginning of the space race to Little Richard and the underappreciated influence of rock n' roll in bringing blacks and whites closer together, to President Eisenhower's Interstate Highway Act, which forever changed the landscape, 1957 represents the year when all of the energy and anxiety that had followed the end of World War II exploded. In compelling stories from politics, pop culture, business, and the media, Eric Burns captures the excitement of a headspinning year and the lingering fallout that continues to resonate seven decades later. For baby boomers seeking to relive their formative years or readers seeking a window into midcentury America, 1957 provides a highly readable tour through one of the most fascinating years in American history.

Jane Taylor is independent and happy raising her daughter, Britt any, as a single mother. With a fulfilling and lucrative job, she and Brittany have a good life together. But it's all cut short when Jane is attacked and murdered by an unknown, masked assailant. The same man also goes after fourteen year-old Brittany, who barely manages to escape his clutches. Five years later, she is still struggling to cope with the loss.

Now a sophomore in college, Brittany is getting ready for a celebratory spring break vacation when a mysterious phone call from an old neighbor halts her plans. It sounds as though someone in her hometown has information about her mother's murder, and Brittany can't help but go back to her hometown to see if she can discover the truth.

Word spreads fast that Brittany is back in town, and the killer soon hears of her return. He knows she is trying to solve her mother's murder, and he will stop at nothing to keep his identity secret-even if it means killing again.

\u0022Thousands of years ago, before Christ or Buddha or Muhammad...before the Roman Empire rose or the Colossus of Rhodes fell,\u0022 Eric Burns writes, \u0022people in Asia Minor were drinking beer.\u0022 So begins an account as entertaining as it is extensive, of alcohol's journey through world-and, more important, American-history. In The Spirits of America, Burns relates that drinking was \u0022the first national pastime,\u0022 and shows how it shaped American politics and culture from the earliest colonial days. He details the transformation of alcohol from virtue to vice and back again, how it was thought of as both scourge and medicine. He tells us how \u0022the great American thirst\u0022 developed over the centuries, and how reform movements and laws (some of which, Burn s says, were \u0022comic masterpieces of the legislator's art\u0022) sprang up to combat it. Burns brings back to life such vivid characters as Carrie Nation and other crusaders against drink. He informs us that, in the final analysis, Prohibition, the culmination of the reformers' quest, had as much to do with politics and economics and geography as it did with spirituous beverage. Filled with the famous, the infamous, and the undeservedly anonymous, The Spirits of America is a masterpiece of the historian's art. It will stand as a classic chronicle-witty, perceptive, and comprehensive-of how this country was created by and continues to be shaped by its ever-changing relationship to the cocktail shaker and the keg.

Infamous Scribblers is a perceptive and witty exploration of the most volatile period in the history of the American press. News correspondent and renonwned media historian Eric Burns tells of Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Sam Adams,the leading journalists among the Founding Fathers of George Washington and John Adams, the leading disdainers of journalists and Thomas Jefferson, the leading manipulator of journalists. These men and the writers who abused and praised them in print (there was, at the time, no job description of "journalist") included the incendiary James Franklin, Ben's brother and one of the first muckrakers the high minded Thomas Paine the hatchet man James Callender, and a rebellious crowd of propagandists, pamphleteers, and publishers. It was Washington who gave this book its title. He once wrote of his dismay at being "buffited in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers." The journalism of the era was often partisan, fabricated, overheated, scandalous, sensationalistic and sometimes stirring, brilliant, and indispensable. Despite its flaws,even because of some of them,the participants hashed out publicly the issues that would lead America to declare its independence and, after the war, to determine what sort of nation it would be.