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H. W. Brands

From the New York Times–bestselling historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, “[a] compact summation of our nation’s monetary history” (Shepherd Express).
 
 The world runs on the US dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the credit—and credibility—of the federal government?
 
 In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar’s astonishing rise to become the world’s principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar’s changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America’s economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan’s bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar’s dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power—and the enormous risks—of the dollar’s worldwide reign.

University of Texas Press

Discovering America

Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It

Paul Youngquist

“Youngquist brings considerable skills to the life and work of the legendary but underappreciated and often misunderstood composer, keyboardist, and poet.” —PopMatters 
 
 Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the “Arkestra.” Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created “space music” as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth.
 
 In A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra’s wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.
 
“A welcome invitation to the spaceways.” —Jazzwise

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism

Margaret Guroff

“Guroff has broken new ground with this masterful account of the bicycle revolution set in the broad context of American social and cultural history. ” —Tom Crouch, author of The Bishop’s Boys

With cities across the country adding miles of bike lanes and building bike-share stations, bicycling is enjoying a new surge of popularity in America. It seems that every generation or two, Americans rediscover the freedom of movement, convenience, and relative affordability of the bicycle. The earliest two-wheeler, the draisine, arrived in Philadelphia in 1819 and astonished onlookers with the possibility of propelling themselves “like lightning. ” Two centuries later, the bicycle is still the fastest way to cover ground on gridlocked city streets.

Filled with lively stories, The Mechanical Horse reveals how the bicycle transformed American life. As bicycling caught on in the nineteenth century, many of the country’s rough, rutted roads were paved for the first time, laying a foundation for the interstate highway system. Cyclists were among the first to see the possibilities of self-directed, long-distance travel, and some of them (including a fellow named Henry Ford) went on to develop the automobile. 

Women shed their cumbersome Victorian dresses—as well as their restricted gender roles—so they could ride. And doctors recognized that aerobic exercise actually benefits the body, which helped to modernize medicine. Margaret Guroff demonstrates that the bicycle’s story is really the story of a more mobile America—one in which physical mobility has opened wider horizons of thought and new opportunities for people in all avenues of life.

“A fascinating volume … Like them or loathe them, cyclists are reprising their initial role as adapters of disruptive technology. ” —The Wall Street Journal

The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life

Judith E. Smith

This biography of the singer, actor, and fearless anti-racism activist is “so engaging that readers will crave a sequel” (Kirkus Reviews).

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive study of this multitalented artist. She sets Belafonte’s compelling story within a history of American race relations, black theater and film history, McCarthy-era hysteria, and the challenges of introducing multifaceted black culture in a moment of expanding media possibilities and constrained political expression. 

Smith traces Belafonte’s roots in the radical politics of the 1940s, his careful negotiation of the complex challenges of the Cold War 1950s, and his full flowering as a civil rights advocate and internationally acclaimed performer in the 1960s. In Smith’s account, Belafonte emerges as a relentless activist, a questing intellectual, and a tireless organizer—and a performer who never shied away from the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet.

Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical

Kate Shindle

“[Shindler] tells the story of her year wearing the crown while offering an incisive history and analysis of an always-controversial beauty contest.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
 In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America’s “ideal,” especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant’s inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant’s story, with a special focus on Miss America’s iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant’s pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle’s own account of her work as an AIDS activist—and finding ways to circumvent the “gown and crown” stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sex—illuminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America.
 
“Kate Shindle’s sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who’s thought about what it takes to be America’s ideal.” —Jennifer Weiner, New York Times-bestselling author
 
“This memoir offers a captivating cultural history of the last 100 years in America through the lens of the Miss America Pageant and its white-knuckled struggle to remain relevant.” —Library Journal

Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain

Stephen Cox

This wide-ranging study examines the ever-evolving forms of Christianity in the US, and why this constant reinvention is a vital part of American faith.
 
 Christianity takes an astonishing variety of forms in America: from traditional chapels to modern megachurches, from evangelical fellowships to social-action groups, and from Pentecostal faith to apocalyptic movements. Stephen Cox argues that radical and unpredictable change is one of the few dependable features of Christianity in America. It is in a necessary and ongoing state of revolution and has been throughout our history.
 
 Cox explores how both Catholic and Protestant churches have evolved in ways that would make them seem alien to their past adherents. He traces the rise of uniquely American movements, from the Mormons to the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and brings to life the vivid personalities—Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, and many others—who have taken the gospel to the masses.
 
 Cox also sheds new light on such issues as American Christians’ constantly changing political involvements, their controversial revisions in the style and substance of worship, and their chronic expectation that God is about to intervene conclusively in human life. Asserting that “a church that doesn’t promise new beginnings can never prosper in America,” Cox demonstrates that American Christianity must be seen not as a sociological phenomenon but as the ever-changing story of individual seekers.

American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution

William Hogeland

The author of The Whiskey Rebellion “dig[s] beneath history’s surface and note[s] both the populist and anti-populist dimensions of the nation’s founding” (Library Journal).

Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax “constitutional conservatism” lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America’s founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution—conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today.

Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America’s founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America’s economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors’ prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial—by movements across the political spectrum—of America’s all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most.

Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation

Josh Ozersky

The James Beard Award–winning food writer serves up “a quirky and rewarding exploration of a ‘very real time, place, product, and person’” (TriQuarterly).
 
 Among the most recognizable corporate icons, only one was ever a real person: Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. From a 1930s roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, Harland Sanders launched a fried chicken business that now circles the globe, serving “finger lickin’ good” chicken to more than twelve million people every day. But to get there, he had to give up control of his company and even his own image, becoming a mere symbol to people today who don’t know that Colonel Sanders was a very real human being. This book tells his story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who personified the American Dream.
 
 Acclaimed cultural historian Josh Ozersky defines the American Dream as being able to transcend your roots and create yourself as you see fit. Harland Sanders did exactly that. At the age of sixty-five—after failed jobs and misfortune—he packed his car with a pressure cooker and his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices and began peddling the recipe for “Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken” to small-town diners. Ozersky traces the rise of Kentucky Fried Chicken from this unlikely beginning, telling the dramatic story of Sanders’ self-transformation into “The Colonel,” his truculent relationship with KFC management as their often-disregarded goodwill ambassador, and his equally turbulent afterlife as the world’s most recognizable commercial icon.
 
“Nobody finishing this book will look at their local KFC in the same way again.” —The National

Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

Ginger Strand

True crime meets cultural history in this story of how America’s interstate highway system opened a world of mobility and opportunity … for serial killers.

Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them: the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher, ” the “Freeway Killer, ” the “Killer on the Road, ” the “I-5 Strangler, ” and the “Beltway Sniper. ” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time.

Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation—and how we came to equate them with violence.

Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road, ” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell.

“Strand … Explores the connection between America’s sprawling highway system and the pathology of the murderers who have made them a killing ground… . The grim stories of murder on the highway may do for road trips what Jaws did for surfing. An interesting detour into a true-crime niche. ” ―Kirkus Reviews

“Strand’s cross-threaded tales of drifters, stranded motorists, and madmen got its hooks into me. Reading Ms. Strand’s thoughtful book is like driving a Nash Rambler after midnight on a highway to hell. ” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A titillating, clever volume that mixes the sweeping sociological assertions of an urban-studies textbook with the chilling gore of true-crime stories. ” —Bookforum

“Ginger Strand is in possession of a sharp eye, a biting wit, a beguiling sense of fun—and a magnificent obsession. ” —Bloomberg

Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate

From the New York Times–bestselling historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, “a compact summation of our nation’s monetary history” (Shepherd Express).

The world runs on the US dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the credit—and credibility—of the federal government?

In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar’s astonishing rise to become the world’s principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U. S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar’s changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America’s economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. 

He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan’s bailout of the U. S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U. S. monetary policy, and how the dollar’s dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power—and the enormous risks—of the dollar’s worldwide reign.

Discovering America - The book series

Discovering America - The book series

Discovering America books in order

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