American Century

Diane Arbus brings to life the full story of one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century, a visionary who revolutionized photography and altered the course of contemporary art with her striking, now iconic images. Arbus comes startlingly to life here, a strong-minded child of unnerving originality who grew into a formidable artist. Arresting, unsettling, and poignant, her photographs stick in our minds. Why did these people fascinate her? And what was it about her that captivated them?

Seventeenth-century North America was truly a new world for both the European and indigenous First Nations native cultures that interfaced upon that spectacular wilderness theater. For both the native people and the European, this stage forged new understandings from all things thought familiar to previous generations. Throughout this historical period were episodes that defined the era, episodes that captured the essence of the human spirit, and episodes that abase a work of fiction.

Liberty or Justice for All? brings to life four of America's greatest thinkers, whose dialogue across the ages has never been more relevant.

Grace knows what people see. She’s the Cinderella story. An icon of glamor and elegance frozen in dazzling Technicolor. The picture of perfection. The girl in white gloves. But behind the lens, beyond the panoramic views of glistening Mediterranean azure, she knows the truth. The sacrifices it takes for an unappreciated girl from Philadelphia to defy her family and become the reigning queen of the screen

In 1991, the Kennedy brothers first published The South Was Right!, launching the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism. To date, the first and second edition of this book have sold more than 135,000 copies! Not for the faint of heart, The South Was Right! is an authoritative and well-documented study of the mythology behind “Civil War” history and its ongoing effects. In their new edition for a 21st-century audience, the Kennedys have updated their message to provide guidance for the harsh conditions against liberty.

No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty. Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate - on identity and what it is that defines us - from which he cannot break free. Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie.

In the early days of Prohibition, long before Al Capone became a household name, a German immigrant named George Remus quits practicing law and starts trafficking whiskey. Within two years he's a multi-millionaire. The press calls him "King of the Bootleggers", writing breathless stories about the Gatsby-esque events he and his glamorous second wife, Imogene, host at their Cincinnati mansion, with party favors ranging from diamond jewelry for the men to brand-new cars for the women. By the summer of 1921, Remus owns 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.

In a narrative that moves from Washington's headquarters on the Hudson River, to the wooded hillside in North Carolina where Nathanael Greene fought Lord Cornwallis to a vicious draw, to Lafayette's brilliant series of maneuvers across Tidewater Virginia, author Nathaniel Philbrick details the epic and suspenseful year through to its triumphant conclusion. A riveting and wide-ranging story, full of dramatic, unexpected turns, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.

Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to listeners. Like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Wagner-Martin examines the ironies, contradictions, and achievements of Plath's life.

Distinguished historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a powerful and personal new interpretation of recent history. The racial reckoning that unfolded in 2020, he argues, marked the climax of a Third Reconstruction: a new struggle for citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that arose after the Civil War and during the civil rights era. Joseph draws revealing connections and insights across centuries as he traces this Third Reconstruction from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter to the failed assault on the Capitol.

Victor Chin’s life is turned upside down at the tender age of 15. Diagnosed with Hansen’s disease, otherwise known as leprosy, he’s forced to leave the familiar confines of his father’s laundry business in the Bronx–the only home he’s known since emigrating from China with his older brother—to quarantine alongside patients from all over the country at a federal institution in Carville. At first, Victor is scared not only of the disease, but of the confinement, and wants nothing more than to flee.

Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.

The Presidency of George W. Bush is the first balanced academic study to analyze the entirety of his presidency - domestic, social, economic, and national security policies - as well as the administration's response to 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. In so doing, John Robert Greene argues persuasively that the judgment of most scholars - that the Bush administration was a complete failure - has been made in haste and without the benefit of primary sources.

Robert L. Fleegler's narrative history of the 1988 election draws from untapped archival sources and revealing oral history interviews to uncover just how consequential this moment was for American politics. Identifying the seeds of political issues to come, Fleegler delivers an engaging review of an election that set a template for the political dynamics that define our lives to this day.

When Mary Beth McIntire settles into a vacation house on June 2, 2017, she anticipates a quiet morning with coffee. Then she hears a noise, peers out a window, and spots a man in 1950s attire standing in the backyard. She panics when the trespasser sees her and enters the house though a door to the basement. She questions her sanity when she cannot find him.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. As its peak the work force approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as 15,000 workers on each line. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, lived off buffalo, deer, and antelope.

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power.