American High

Crusades against the automobile are nothing new. Its arrival sparked battles over street space, pitting the masses against the millionaires who terrorized pedestrians. When the masses got cars of their own, they learned to love driving, too. During World War II, Washington nationalized Detroit and postwar Americans embraced car and country as if they were one.

Early on, the United States imposed war taxes that both demanded sacrifices from all Americans and served as reminders of their participation. Since the Korean War, the United States has increasingly moved away from war taxes. Instead, borrowing has become a permanent feature of contemporary wars. The move serves leaders well because reducing the apparent burden of war has helped mute public opposition and any decision-making constraints. But by masking accountability, however, the move away from war taxes undermines the basis for democratic restraint in wartime.

Ralph Branca is best known for throwing the pitch that resulted in Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard ‘Round the World", the historic homerun that capped an incredible comeback and won the pennant for the Giants in 1951. And so Branca was on the losing end of what many consider to be baseball's most thrilling moment, but that notoriety belies a profoundly successful life and career.

By early 1951, American forces and their UN allies had been driven more than 100 miles down the Korean peninsula by the Chinese. The situation was bleak when Gen. Matthew Ridgway ordered a last stand at the village of Chipyong-ni. There a single regiment (the 23rd Infantry) of fewer than 5,000 U.S. soldiers defeated a Chinese division of 25,000 men in what has been called the Gettysburg of the Korean War.

We live in a world of seemingly limitless consumer choice. Yet, as every shopper knows without thinking about it, many everyday goods—from beds to batteries to printer paper—are available in a finite number of "standard sizes." What makes these sizes "standard" is an agreement among competing firms to make or sell products with the same limited dimensions. But how did firms—often hotly competing firms—reach such collective agreements?

What is boarding school really like? What are my chances of getting into U.S. boarding schools? How do I evaluate private schools vs. public schools? What is boarding school really like? U.S. boarding schools offer a superb preparation for college bound students, but they are not for everyone. American Prep is the only comprehensive guide for parents and students interested in investigating, applying to, and succeeding at these great schools.

Without question, the most famous battle of the war took place outside of the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. From July 1 to 3, Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia tried everything in its power to decisively defeat George Meade’s Union Army of the Potomac, unleashing ferocious assaults that inflicted nearly 50,000 casualties in all.

Kelly Hopkins is ready to break away, from her small apartment, loneliness, and most important, her past. Struggling to cope with her parents’ double murder five years prior, she’s finally ready to leave her reality-TV-show-addicted grandmother and the tense reality of being half-white in Koreatown. Receiving a scholarship from Columbia University, it is time to achieve her dreams of becoming a successful lawyer. Nothing can break her steadfast focus - that is, until she meets Ian.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it. Edward L. Ayers's rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs.

In 1913, an unlikely friendship blossomed between Henry Ford and famed naturalist John Burroughs. When their mutual interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson led them to set out in one of Ford's Model Ts to explore the Transcendentalist's New England, the trip would prove to be the first of many excursions that would take Ford and Burroughs, together with Thomas Edison, across America.

High Tension is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's battle against the "Power Trust", an elaborate Wall Street-controlled web of holding companies, to electrify all of America. Here is the tale of how FDR's efforts brought affordable electricity to all Americans, powered the industrial might that won World War II, and established a model for public-private solutions today in areas such as transportation infrastructure, broadband, and health care.

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture.

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? We have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding.

Join David Denby, New Yorker critic and otherwise sensible man, on a whirlwind ride through an exuberant stock market, investment feeding frenzy, and the cataclysmic result of greed and illusion.

Here are the stories of political power struggles, reconstruction, western expansion, Ellis Island immigrants, the rise of American tycoons and labor unions, and the country's entry into World War I.

In 1870, a 26-year-old Paiute, Sarah Winnemucca, wrote to an army officer requesting that Paiutes be given a chance to settle and farm their ancestral land. The eloquence of her letter was such that it made its way into Harper’s Weekly. Ten years later, as her people languished in confinement as a result of the Bannock War, she convinced Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to grant the requests in her letter and free the Paiutes as well.

This book, edited by April Myung of Bergen County Academies in New Jersey, contains autobiographies of ten Korean teenagers, currently studying in American high schools.

Kara DioGuardi is an award-winning hitmaker, a savvy record executive, and a successful music publisher whose songs have been recorded by such superstars as Pink, Carrie Underwood, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Gwen Stefani, Santana, Steven Tyler, CÉline Dion, and so many others. She was also the feisty fourth judge on American Idol. But success wouldn’t have happened for this songwriter, artist, and producer without the dark times of defeat. Filled with the grace, raw honesty, and haunting emotion of her hit songs, A Helluva High Note is the soundtrack to Kara’s life....

Too many Americans have been disenfranchised or faced needless barriers to vote. Part of the blame falls on the Constitution, which does not contain an affirmative right to vote. The Supreme Court has made matters worse by failing to protect voting rights and limiting Congress's ability to do so. The time has come for voters to take action and push for an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee this right for all. Richard Hasen argues that American democracy can and should do better in assuring that all eligible voters can cast a meaningful vote that will be fairly counted.

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.