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History Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution-from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality-and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation"--
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Brower draws on a wide array of untapped, candid sources to tell the stories of the ten remarkable women who have defined the role of First Lady of the United States since 1960. From Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama, she offers new insights into this privileged group, and shares stories exploring everything from the first ladies' political crusades to their rivalries with Washington figures; from their friendships with other first ladies to their...
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America's First Families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, The Residence reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others who tend to the needs of the President and First...
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From journalist, activist, and international icon Gloria Steinem comes her first book in twenty years, an all-new memoir of a lifetime of listening and learning from people, traveling America and the world. Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. Every fall, her father would pack the family into the car and they would drive across the country, in search of their next adventure. The seeds were planted: Steinem would spend much of her life on the...
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"The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper--and a gripping portrait of Victorian London--[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from the factory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, ran coffeehouses, lived on...
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"In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals...
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A definitive chronicle of the 1871 Chicago Fire as remembered by those who experienced it—from the author of Chicago and the American Literary Imagination.
Over three days in October, 1871, much of Chicago, Illinois, was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in the intervening decades—and much of the hastily-built city...
Over three days in October, 1871, much of Chicago, Illinois, was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in the intervening decades—and much of the hastily-built city...
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"The current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America, Meacham shows us how what Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and others, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists...
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In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
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Explains how the influences of dreamers, zealots, hucksters, and superstitious groups shaped America's tendency toward a rich fantasy life, citing the roles of individuals from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump in perpetuating conspiracy theories, self-delusion, and magical thinking.
"In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, one of our sharpest observers, Kurt Andersen, demonstrates that what's happening in our country today--this strange, post-truth,...
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Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
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"The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis frames climate change and the Anthropocene as the culmination of a history that begins with the discovery of the New World and of the sea route to the Indian Ocean. Ghosh makes the case that the political dynamics of climate change today are rooted in the centuries-old geopolitical order that was constructed by Western colonialism. This argument is set within a broader narrative about human entanglements...
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"Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools--with its emphasis on great men in high places--to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's...
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"In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what's shifted over time--and what hasn't. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes, deriding women as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. In contrast, drawing on accounts...
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"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...
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