"A history of the 1960 US presidential election with a focus on the role played by the imprisonment of Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of an Atlanta sit-in"-- Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta. An earlier, minor traffic ticket served as a pretext for keeping King locked up, and he was transfered to Reidsville, the notorious Georgia state prison where Black inmates...

"When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark. Dedman...

Too often, Native American history is treated as a finished chapter instead of relevant and ongoing. This companion book to the award-winning We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga offers readers everything they never learned in school about Native American people's past, present, and future. Precise, lyrical writing presents topics including: forced assimilation (such as boarding schools), land allotment and Native tribal reorganization, termination (the...

"The prizewinning author of Founding Brothers and American Sphinx now gives us the unexpected story--brilliantly told--of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal...

"The Carter presidency is the most underappreciated of the last century. Often considered just a smiling but ineffectual Southerner in a sweater, Jimmy Carter deserves to be remembered instead as a risk taker who did what he felt was right, not what would be politically expedient, whose legacy led to presidential successes long after his term, and whose list of lasting achievements reshaped the country. Stuart Eizenstat saw everything firsthand. As...

Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race, " a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can...

"We have been here before. In this timely and revealing book ... author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. With clarity and purpose, Meacham explores contentious periods and how presidents and citizens came together to defeat the forces of anger, intolerance, and extremism. Our current climate of partisan fury is not...

"Four experts on the American presidency review the only three impeachment cases from history--against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton--and explore its power and meaning for today. Impeachment is rare, and for good reason. Designed to check tyrants or defend the nation from a commander-in-chief who refuses to do so, the process of impeachment outlined in the Constitution is what Thomas Jefferson called "the most formidable weapon for...

A brilliant, authoritative, and riveting account of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln's presidency, when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War.

"The UFO enigma has been part of our culture since the 1940s and building to a worldwide explosion of acceptance today. Now, as governments around the world open their files and records on internal UFO investigations, the US remains steadfast in its denial of interest in the UFO issue. As more of the world's population accepts the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence, the demand is building for disclosure from the United States. Using newly...