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Carl F. Kaestle

Pillars of the Republic is a pioneering study of common-school development in the years before the Civil War. Public acceptance of state school systems, Kaestle argues, was encouraged by the people's commitment to republican government, by their trust in Protestant values, and by the development of capitalism. The author also examines the opposition to the Founding Fathers' educational ideas and shows what effects these had on our school system.

Hill and Wang

American Century

Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860

Richard A. Gabriel

A military intelligence expert makes a persuasive case for leadership reform with in-depth analysis of operations and how they went wrong.

The history of American military operations in the post-Vietnam era has been marked by failure and near-disaster. Since 1970, American forces have been committed in five operations—in Sontay to rescue prisoners, in Cambodia on behalf of the crew of the SS Mayaguez, in Iran to rescue the American hostages, in Beirut, and in Grenada. In each case they have failed. 

Gabriel tells how and why each of these operations was crippled by faulty intelligence, clumsy execution, or poor planning by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Much of his information was still classified by the Pentagon when it was revealed in this book for the first time.

Military Incompetence: Why the American Military Doesn't Win

Langston Hughes

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.

I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiography

Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition.

Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof."

As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations."

The Best of Simple

John F. Kasson

Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America's changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity--and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis.

Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century

Robert A. Gross

The Bancroft Prize–winning classic of American history now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The “shot heard round the world” catapulted this sleepy New England town into the height of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The town—future home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne—soon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life.

In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

The Minutemen and Their World

With an introduction by Hughes’ award-winning biographer, this memoir is “excellent reading . . . remarkable as a self portrait and a record” (New York Times).

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade—Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet—at the center of the Harlem Renaissance.

Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic: “This is American writing at its best—simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer . . . Mark Twain.”

“Langston Hughes is the Jazz Poet! The constant communicator of Blues. He is the singer, philosopher, the folk and urban lyricist. This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” —Amiri Baraka, award-winning poet, dramatist and author

American Century - The book series

American Century - The book series

American Century books in order

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