Land America

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.

Motivated by the idea of turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "master builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964/65 World's Fair was a sixties flash point in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the fair.

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.

For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them.

Ever stood frozen in a grocery aisle, paralyzed by 37 types of orange juice or milk options that require a PhD to decode? Welcome to America—the land of freedom, fries, and fifty wildly different grocery store experiences. In this delightfully quirky road trip, Robert Okine trades tourist traps for frozen food sections and souvenir shops for snack aisles.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.

The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world.

This Noble Land is Michener's most personal statement about America, an examination of the issues that threaten to fragment and undermine the nation - racial conflict, the widening gulf between rich and poor, the decline of education, the inadequacies of our health care system - as well as a thought-provoking prescription for sustaining our "outstanding success". First published shortly before Michener's death, This Noble Land stands as a wake-up call for a troubled era, infused with the wisdom and passion of a lifetime.

A groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class - its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.

In 1848 an English physician, Nathaniel Trennant, accepts an offer to serve as doctor on a ship carrying immigrants to America. When arriving in Baltimore, Trennant stumbles onto its slave market and witnesses the horrors of human bondage. One night in a boardinghouse he discovers under his bed a runaway slave. Disturbed and angered by the selling of human lives, he offers to help the young man escape, a criminal action that will put the fugitive slave and physician into flight from both the law and opportunistic slave hunters.

When It’s Darkness on the Delta is a book that will change its audiences’ way of seeing not only the Mississippi Delta, but the issue of poverty and income inequality in this country. Weaving together personal history, archival research, reporting, blues, and popular culture, historian W. Ralph Eubanks’ tells a deeper history of this famous alluvial plain, exploring why many residents of this region persist in trying to transform a place that has been deemed broken and beyond repair.

In Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in 11 Pies, food writer Rossi Anastopoulo cracks open our relationship to pie with wit and good humor. She traces the pies woven into our history, following the evolution of our country across centuries of innovation and change and examining how America’s relationship with this iconic dessert impacted culture across eras—and vice versa.

A 20-year world war is fought on American soil leaving the United States in ruins.

Following his long military service in the war, Falcon is left to raise his two small children alone when his wife passes away.

To learn of life and what has become of the country, he packs up and takes the children across the wastelands in search of something very special from his childhood. However, the heart-wrenching journey is not easy and Falcon ends up being the one who learns about life.

America’s public lands include more than 600 million acres of forests, plains, mountains, wetlands, deserts, and shorelines. In this book, John Leshy, a leading expert in public lands policy, discusses the key political decisions that led to this, beginning at the very founding of the nation. He traces the emergence of a bipartisan political consensus in favor of the national government holding these vast land areas primarily for recreation, education, and conservation of biodiversity and cultural resources.

Despite all that has been published on the American Civil War, one aspect that has never received the in-depth attention it deserves is the widespread use of landmines across the Confederacy. These “infernal devices” dealt death and injury in nearly every Confederate state and influenced the course of the war. Kenneth R. Rutherford rectifies this oversight with America’s Buried History: Landmines in the Civil War, the first book devoted to a comprehensive analysis and history of the fascinating and important topic.

Benson and Jensen treat a number of crucial ways in which anti-realism—popularly known as social constructivism—pervades and ultimately corrodes American culture, everything from soccer to more serious matters such as scientific objectivity and moral realism. Establishment elites in academia, the judiciary, and the media increasingly determine the acceptability of various kinds of political and social views, moral beliefs, even the language we use.

After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds - and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it.

The number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States in the 1960s was 300,000 a year. This increased reasonably to 600,000 by the 1980s. But in the 1990s, the rate accelerated to an average of more than a million a year. When the number of illegal immigrants is added to this, the total inflow during the 1990s was approximately twelve million.

In Our National Forests, Greg Peters gives an inside look at America’s most important public lands and the people committed to protecting them and ensuring access for all. From the Forest Service growing millions of seedlings in the West each year, to their efforts to save the hellbender salamander in Appalachia, the story spans the breadth of the country and its diverse ecology. And people are at the center, whether the dedicated Forest Service members or the everyday citizens who support and tend to the protected lands near their homes.