Abstraction and Utopia

Hilton Kramer's exploration of abstract art's early ties to utopian ...


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United States History Titles

Browse our United States History titles listed below.

At Los Alamos

Learning to Love the Bomb

by Jeremy Bernstein

United States History, Military History, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government

The atomic bomb was developed at government laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a team of outstanding physicists under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Upon seeing the results of the first detonation of an atomic device, the test director Kenneth Bainbridge is said to have remarked to Oppenheimer, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Yet the physicists could scarcely contain their fascination with what they had wrought, as Jeremy Bernstein finds in this report from ground zero.

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Courting Racial Justice

Harry Truman Outflanks the Southern Barons of Capitol Hill

by Robert Shogan

United States History, Political Science, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government

President Harry Truman skirted Congress and boldly used the Justice Department to support the rights of black Americans. How he did it, and his effort’s lasting consequences, are told in this sharply observed account.

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Henry Adams Grows Up

The Early Years of a Conspicuous American / Selections from The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

United States History, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government, Biography

Henry Adams, whose distinguished family had a tradition of service to the nation, thought himself a comparative failure because his instincts ran toward literature and spiritual adventure. In his autobiographical Education he tried to make sense of his own path in a changing America.

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The Siege of Blair Mountain

Class Warfare and High Treason in West Virginia's Coalfields

by Robert Shogan

United States History, Political Science, American History, U.S. History

The so-called Roaring Twenties were not only about loose morality and a devil-may-care display of opulence. In the byways of America, working men and women were seeking labor justice and struggling against the entrenched powers of capitalism. Nowhere was this struggle more poignant and important than in the coalfields of West Virginia. There in the 1920s the United Mine Workers confronted the coal operators who sought to bust their union. The ensuing conflict, violent and bloody, had much to say about the future of relations between working people and their bosses in America.  

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The Apprenticeship of Alger Hiss

by R. Bruce Craig

United States History, Political Science, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government

Alger Hiss’s turn toward the political left, leading to his association with Whittaker Chambers, is portrayed in Bruce Craig’s incisive account of Hiss’s early years, drawing upon previously untapped sources.

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The Color Line

Four Selections from The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

American History, United States History

Four essays, provocative and often poetic, about the black experience in America and the quest for equality at the turn of the twentieth century. The most celebrated essay is Du Bois’s attack on Booker T. Washington’s approach to the improvement of American Negroes, a powerful objection to Washington’s leadership. The other three selections concern the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War and its failed promise; the relations between whites and blacks in the South, then and for the future; and the influence of black religion, especially the church as a social center. 

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The Solitude of Self

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Appeals for Women's Rights

by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

United States History

The major women’s suffrage organizations used a variety of tactics in seeking the vote but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Elizabeth Cady Stanton served these organizations for more than twenty years as president. In that time she became a leading champion of women’s rights and the intellectual powerhouse of the woman’s movement in the United States. Late in life, in “The Solitude of Self,” she distilled her most compelling arguments.

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Emblems of Woe

How the South Reacted to Lincoln's Murder

by David Hardin

United States History

Lee’s surrender at Appomattox signaled an end to the Civil War and brought joy and relief to the North and its soldiers, and to the slaves in Confederate states. But the sudden shock of Lincoln’s assassination just five days later, on Good Friday, sullied the victory. As gloom and anger descended across the North, how was Lincoln’s death viewed in the war-ravaged South? Southerners might have been expected to cheer the death of their archenemy, but their reaction was more complex and far from predictable, as David Hardin shows.

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