White America

The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development.

Paul Jennings was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia, later becoming part of the Madison household staff at the White House. Once finally emancipated by Senator Daniel Webster later in life, he would give an aged and impoverished Dolley Madison, his former owner, money from his own pocket, write the first White House memoir, and see his sons fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.

When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary's skin was so light that she "passed" as White, and this fact would make her the key to his White audience's sympathy.

Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice.

Antonia Felix's many interviews reveal a quiet, centered woman, who from her early childhood in Texas to the White House has risen to the challenges put in front of her. Travel with Laura Bush through her happy childhood to the tragedy that strengthened her, through her courtship and marriage to a dashing young Navy Pilot and the raising of her twin daughters, to the White House and the aftermath of the recent attacks. Probing and revelatory, Laura is a fitting tribute to our First Lady.

This audiobook examines some of the ways in which, beginning very early in their interactions with European-Americans, the Cherokee began to adopt white culture and make it their own. They modeled much of their way of life on the way of life of their white neighbors, so much so that many of them sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

With an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the United States Marine Corps - the last all-white branch of the U.S. military - was forced to begin recruiting and enlisting African Americans. The first black recruits received basic training at the segregated Camp Montford Point, adjacent to Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Walking around Chicago today, it's easy to forget about its past as a rural frontier. That's due in no small part to the way Chicago responded to the Great Fire of 1871. Immediately after the fire, Chicago encouraged inhabitants and architects to build over the ruins, spurring creative architecture with elaborate designs. Architects descended upon the city for the opportunity to rebuild the area, and over the next few decades they had rebuilt Chicago with the country's most modern architecture and monuments.

For 36 years, from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Pendel saw the daily comings and goings at the center of American political life in the White House. As doorkeeper, he saw senators, congressmen, royalty, citizens, and scoundrels appear on the White House steps.

In 1893, the 27.5 million visitors to the Chicago World’s Fair feasted their eyes on the impressive architecture of the White City, lit at night by thousands of electric lights. In addition to marveling at the revolutionary exhibits, most visitors discovered something else: beyond the fair’s 633 acres lay a modern metropolis that rivaled the world’s greatest cities. The Columbian Exposition marked Chicago’s arrival on the world stage, but even without the splendor of the fair, 1893 would still have been Chicago’s greatest year.

This revelatory and gripping nonfiction middle grade book explores a deeply troubling chapter in American history that is still playing out today: the strange case of Prince Edward County, Virginia, the only place in the United States to ever formally deny its citizens a public education, and the students who pushed back.

History, race, and politics converged in the 1960s in ways that indelibly changed America. In Justice Rising, a landmark reconsideration of Robert Kennedy’s life and legacy, Patricia Sullivan draws on government files, personal papers, and oral interviews to reveal how he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader.

November 10, 1898, is a day that North Carolina will quietly remember forever. By sunset of that very day, a confirmed 60 people had been massacred, and white supremacists had overthrown the local Black government (elected only two days prior) in a violent and deadly coup d’état. The United States of America may have seen vast amounts of violence, a lot of which had been on its soil, but this massacre was unique - this was the only coup to ever occur on American soil. 

With a sweeping forward momentum, this collection of thoughtful, provocative, short essays navigates the complex, sensitive, and often-concealed history of the African American experience. Moving from African ancestry through the underground railroad to Barack Obama, this captivating book journeys through timeline of African American revolution and defining moments in black history.

Through extensive, detailed research, Nancy Isenberg has moved the story of American class tensions out from the shadows and given it new voice. This FastReads Summary and Analysis offers supplementary material to White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America to help you distill the key takeaways, review the book's content, and further understand the writing style and overall themes from an editorial perspective.

In Monticello on the Potomac, James B. Conroy, author of the award-winning Lincoln’s White House offers a vivid, highly listenable account of how life was lived in Jefferson’s White House and the young nation’s rustic capital.

God in the White House explores the paradox of Americans' expectation that presidents should simultaneously trumpet their religious views and relationship to God while supporting the separation of church and state. Balmer tells the story of the politicization of religion in the last half of the 20th century, as well as the "religionization" of our politics. He reflects on the implications of this shift, which have reverberated in both our religious and political worlds, and offers a new lens through which to see not only these extraordinary individuals, but also our current political situation.

Tom Daniels and "Cookie" Marsh will be the first to tell you that race isn't everything. But it did shape the way they experienced the world growing up in Detroit in the 1950s and '60s. Tom “Cookie” Marsh grew up in a black neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. Tom Daniels grew up in a mixed working-class neighborhood on Detroit's east side. Both men grew up in strict households, and both saw their city, their country, and their world transform around them through the Civil Rights movement, riots, and the Vietnam War.

Historians have long discussed the interracial families of prominent slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere, yet, until now, the story of slave trader Bacon Tait remained untold. Among the most prominent and wealthy citizens of Richmond, Bacon Tait embarked upon a striking and unexpected double life: that of a White slave trader married to a free Black woman. Here, Hank Trent tells Tait's complete story for the first time, reconstructing the hidden aspects of his strange and often paradoxical life through meticulous research.

A poetic and inspiring tribute to the beauty and wonder of America's history, landscape, and symbols. With wonderfully spare, deceptively simple verses, Sarvinder Naberhaus has composed a lyrical celebration of the iconic imagery of our nation, beginning with the American flag. Each spread depicts a richly evocative tableau, from the view of the Statue of Library at Ellis Island to civil rights marchers banded together, to a spacecraft at Cape Canaveral blasting off. This book is an ode to America then and now, from sea to shining sea.