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This fresh interpretation explains how an untutored musician changed music while at the same time playing an inadvertent role in the youth rebellion that has shaped the Baby Boomer generation into the 21st century. Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a two-room house in Tupelo, MS, on January 8, 1935. He died at his Memphis home, Graceland, on August 16, 1977. In those 42 years, Elvis made an indelible impression on pop culture the world over. Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times probes both the man and his influence, delving deeply into the personality of its protagonist, his needs and motivations, and the social and musical forces that shaped his career. Elvis's musical talents and liabilities are explored, as are his records, films, and live performances and his relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, whom he allowed to manipulate him as a money-making machine. Readers will learn about Elvis's personal life, his devotion to conventional religious and political beliefs, and his decline into self-destruction and death. Finally, the book explores Elvis's impact on the musical and racial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, his legacy, and his importance in shaping a generation of Baby Boomers. Photographs A bibliography

In this lively and provocative synthesis, distinguished historian Glen Jeansonne explores the people and events that shaped America in the decades since World War II. Comprehensive in scope, A Time of Paradox offers a balanced look at the political, diplomatic, social and cultural developments of the post-war period, while focusing on the diverse and sometimes contradictory human experiences that characterized this dynamic era. Designed with the student in mind, this cogent text provides the most up to date analysis available, offering insight into the divisive election of 2004, the War on Terror and the Gulf Coast hurricanes. Substantive biographies on figures ranging from Jackie Robinson to Madonna give students a more personalized view of the men and women who influenced American society over the last half century.

In this lively and provocative synthesis, distinguished historian Glen Jeansonne explores the people and events that shaped America in the twentieth century. Comprehensive in scope, A Time of Paradox offers a balanced look at the political, diplomatic, social and cultural developments of the last century while focusing on the diverse and sometimes contradictory human experiences that characterized this dynamic period. Designed with the student in mind, this cogent text provides the most up to date analysis available, offering insight into the divisive election of 2004, the War on Terror and the Gulf Coast hurricanes. Substantive biographies on figures ranging from Samuel Insull to Madonna give students a more personalized view of the men and women who influenced American society over the past hundred years.

Leander Perez 1891-1969) was more than simply another Neanderthal segregationist. He was a political boss who held absolute power in Plaquemines Parish to an extent unsurpassed by any parish leader in Louisiana's history. Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta is his full history. A bit of a social reformer, a political figure of national stature, an oil tycoon worth millions of dollars, Perez was known to one and all, including himself, as the Judge, although the office he held for most of his career was that of district attorney. He got his political start in the early 1920s, when Huey Long was beginning to attract statewide attention. But, even after Long was gunned down in 1935, the Judge continued to dominate life in the lower delta for thirty-four years, until he died from a heart attack in 1969. Above all, Perez relished power, and the essence of his might lay in his skill as a backroom broker and in his personal friendships with such idologues as J. Strom Thurmond, Ross Barnett, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace. his grip on the parish was partly economic and partly political, and it was enforced by an iron will stronger than the will of any other man in the lower delta.

Americans have been almost constantly at war since 1917. In addition to two world wars, the United States has fought proxy wars, propaganda wars, and a "war on terror," among others. But even with the constant presence of war in American life, much of what Americans remember about those conflicts still comes from Hollywood depictions. In War on the Silver Screen, Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen vividly demonstrate how war movies have burned the images and impressions of those wars onto the American psyche more concretely than has the reality of the wars themselves. That is, our feelings about wars are generated less by what we learn through study and discourse than by powerful cinematic images and dialogue. Films are compressed, intense, and immediate, and often a collective experience rather than a solitary one. Actors and drama provide the visceral impact necessary to form perceptions of history that are much more enduring than those generated by other media or experiences. Drawing on more than a century of war films and history, War on the Silver Screen examines the legacy of American war cinema on twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about war.

The majority of American women supported the Allied cause during World War II and made sacrifices on the home-front to benefit the war effort. But US intervention was opposed by a movement led by ultra-right women whose professed desire to keep their sons out of combat was mixed with militant Christianity, anticommunism and anti-Semitism. This book is a history of the self-styled "mothers' movement", so called because among its component groups were the National Legion of Mothers of America, the Mothers of Sons Forum and the National Blue Star Mothers. Unlike leftist antiwar movements, the mothers' movement was not pacifist; its members opposed the war on Germany because they regarded Hitler as an ally against the spread of atheistic communism. They also differed from leftist women in their endorsement of patriarchy and nationalism. God, they believed, wanted them to fight the New Deal liberalism that imperiled their values and the internationalists, communists and Jews, whom they saw as subjugating Christian America. Drawing on files kept by the FBI and other confidential documents, Jeansonne examines the motivations of these women, the political and social impact of their movement, and their collaborations with men of the Far Right and also with mainstream isolationists such as Charles Lindbergh. Glen Jeansonne's books include "Transformation and Reaction: America, 1921-45" and biographies of Huey P. Long, Gerald L.K. Smith and Leander Perez.