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Happy Birthday, America! July 2021
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Democracy in America : A New Translation by Arthur Goldhammer
by Alexis de Tocqueville
An influential study of America's national government, egalitarian ideals, and character offers reflections on the effect of majority rule on the rights of individuals and provides insight into the rewards and responsibilities of a democratic government, in a clear new translation of the nineteenth-century classic.
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Until justice be done : America's first civil rights movement, from the revolution to reconstruction
by Kate Masur
"A groundbreaking history of the antebellum movement for equal rights that reshaped the institutions of freedom after the Civil War. The half century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over freedom as well as slavery: what were the arrangementsof free society, especially for African Americans? Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted black codes that discouraged the settlement and restricted the basic rights of free black people. But claiming the equal-rights promises of the Declaration andthe Constitution, a biracial movement arose to fight these racist state laws. Kate Masur's magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Its advocates battled in state legislatures, Congress, and the courts, and through petitioning, party politics and elections. They visited slave states to challenge local laws that imprisoned free blacks and sold them into slavery. Despite immovable white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, their vision became increasingly mainstream. After the Civil War, their arguments shaped the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, the pillars of our second founding"
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West of the Revolution : an uncommon history of 1776
by Claudio Saunt
Details the other revolutions during 1776, including the reaction of the native residents of San Francisco in the wake of the first European settlement there and the devastation of the Aleutian Islands by the Russians' hunt for sea otters. 13,000 first printing.
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Transgender history
by Susan Stryker
A chronological account of transgender theory documents major movements, writings, and events, offering insight into the contributions of key historical figures while discussing treatments of transgenderism in pop culture. Original.
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A Black Women's History of the United States
by Daina Ramey Berry
Centering around Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the US to African American women of today. Original.
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A queer history of the United States
by Michael Bronski
“In the age of Twitter and reductive history, we need a complex, fully realized, radical reassessment of history—and A Queer History of the United States is exactly that. Along the way, there are enough revelations and reassessments to fuel dozens of arguments about how we got to where we are today. I don't know when I have enjoyed a history so much.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
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1776
by David G. McCullough
The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian draws on personal correspondence and period diaries to present a landmark history of the American Revolution that ranges from the siege of Boston, to the American defeat at Brooklyn and retreat across New Jersey, to the stunning American victory at Trenton, capturing the people and events that transformed American history. 1,250,000 first printing.
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The patriots : Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the making of America
by Winston Groom
"When the Revolutionary War ended in victory, there remained the stupendous problem of how to establish a workable democratic government in the vast, newly independent country. Three key Founding Fathers played significant roles: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Their lives and policies could not have been more different; their relationships with each other were complex and often rife with animosity. And yet these three men led the charge-two of them creating and signing the Declaration of Independence, and the third establishing a national treasury and the earliest delineation of a Republican party. They managed to shoulder the heavy mantle of creating the United States of America, putting aside their differences to make a great country, once and always. Drawing on extensive correspondence, epic tales of war, and rich histories of their day-to-day interactions, Winston Groom shares the remarkable story of the beginnings of our great nation."
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Fears of a setting sun : the disillusionment of America's Founders by Dennis C. RasmussenAmericans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment.
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An indigenous peoples' history of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was genocidal and imperialist, designed to crush the original inhabitants. Spanning more than 300 years, a classic bottom-up history significantly reframes how we view our past. Told from the viewpoint of the indigenous, it reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the U.S. empire.
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You never forget your first : a biography of George Washington
by Alexis Coe
A whimsically irreverent portrait of America’s first President includes coverage of Washington’s entitled upbringing by a single mother, his dog “Sweetlips,” his numerous military defeats and the partisan nightmares that spun from his back-stabbing cabinet.
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