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Memphis, Tennessee. The early 1950s. The Mississippi rolls by, and there's a train in the night. Down on Beale Street there's hard-edged blues, on the outskirts of town they're pickin' hillbilly boogie.
At Sam Phillips' Sun Records studio on Union Avenue, there's something different going on. "Shake it, baby, shake it!" "Go, cat, go!" "We're gonna rock..."
This is where rock 'n' roll was born-the record company that launched Elvis Presley, Jerry...
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"One of San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Best Books for 2009" "Winner of the 2009 Best International Nonfiction Book, Week" "Winner of the 2009 Gold Medal Book of the Year Award in Business and Economics, ForeWord Reviews" Peter T. Leeson is the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism in the Department of Economics at George Mason University.
Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the...
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Few know the story of the Japanese invasion of Alaska during World War II--until now.
GHOSTS IN THE FOG is the first narrative nonfiction book for young adults to tell the riveting story of how the Japanese invaded and occupied the Aleutian Islands in Alaska during World War II. This fascinating little-known piece of American history is told from the point of view of the American civilians who were captured and taken prisoner, along with the American...
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In 1637, Anne Hutchinson, a forty-six-year-old midwife who was pregnant with her sixteenth child, stood before forty male judges of the Massachusetts General Court, charged with heresy and sedition. In a time when women could not vote, hold public office, or teach outside the home, the charismatic Hutchinson wielded remarkable political power. Her unconventional ideas had attracted a following of prominent citizens eager for social reform. Hutchinson...
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"In the tradition of The World Without Us, a beautifully written and ultimately hopeful history of our relationship with the natural world Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically...
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At the time of Jesus' birth, the world was full of gods. Thousands of them jostled, competed and merged with one another. In Syria ecstatic devotees castrated themselves in the streets to become priests of Atargatis In Galilee, holy men turned oil into wine, healed the sick, drove out devils, and claimed to be the Messiah. Every day thousands of people were leaving their family and tribes behind them and flocking into brand new multi-ethnic cities....
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"An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English -- and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers. Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer's Middle English, Old English -- the language of Beowulf -- defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much...
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"In A History of America in Thirty-six Postage Stamps, Chris West (author of A History of Britain in Thirty-six Postage Stamps) makes the leap across the Atlantic to take on America's own rich philatelic history. From George Washington's dour gaze to thecharging buffalo of the western frontier, to Lindbergh's soaring biplane, American stamps are a vivid window into our country's extraordinary and distinctive past. With the always accessible and spirited...
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"A Place Called America takes the long view of the land's history from its earliest formation and inhabitants up through today. Meet those indigenous to the deserts, prairies, forests, and shores of the land called Turtle Island and their relatives who contributed to World War II and whose ideas founded the basis of the Constitution. Meet immigrant communities, who came to the land from all around the world-at different times and against all odds,...
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This long out-of-print and hard-to-find classic tells the story of the Texas invasion of New Mexico during the American Civil War. In early 1862, Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley marched thirty-four hundred coarse Texas farmboys, cowhands, and frontiersmen into New Mexico and up the Rio Grande Valley. Although seriously bloodied, they repulsed Union troops at the Battle of Valverde. As the poorly supplied Texans pushed northward, New Mexicans...
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Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. She is an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her books Autobiography of Red and Nox were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library
Anne...
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In 1587, a group of 116 men, women, and children sailed from England to North America. They landed in Roanoke, an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. Life was hard for the settlers, who struggled to build a new life. Within a few months, the governor of the colony, John White, sailed back to England to get more supplies. Three years passed before he could return to the colony. When White finally arrived back in Roanoke, he was shocked...
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"Anexotic and instructive tale, told with life, learning and just the right measure of laughter on every page. O'Donnell combines a historian's mastery of substance with a born storyteller's sense of style to create a magnificent work of art." - Madeleine K. Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State
The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi-terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and...
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Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was one of the most important twentieth-century historians of the French Revolution. His books include The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (Princeton). R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Timothy Tackett is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Irvine.
The...
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London, 1788: a group of British gentlemen---geographers, scholars, politicians, humanitarians, and traders---decide it is time to solve the mysteries of Africa's unknown interior regions. Inspired by the Enlightenment quest for knowledge, they consider it a slur on the age that the interior of Africa still remains a mystery, that maps of the "dark continent" are populated with mythical beasts, imaginary landmarks, and fabled empires. As well, they...
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"Following his international bestsellers Roma and Empire, Steven Saylor continues his saga of the greatest, most storied empire in history from the eternal city at the very center of it all. A.D. 165: The empire of Rome has reached its pinnacle. Universalpeace-the Pax Roma-reigns from Britannia to Egypt, from Gaul to Greece. Marcus Aurelius, as much a philosopher as he is an emperor, oversees a golden age in the city of Rome. The ancient Pinarius...
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During the spring and summer of 2021, global news reports were filled with the impending US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. At best, it would be viewed as a stalemate, with an orderly transition to a stable, US-backed Afghan government. At worse, it would be looked upon as two decades of futile war, ending with a shameful retreat that left the county at the mercy of a ruthless Taliban regime. What went wrong? This close look at the history of foreign...
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"A fascinating exploration of the uncrackable codes and secret cyphers that helped win wars, spark revolutions and change the faces of nations.
There have been secret codes since before the Old Testament, and there were secret codes in the Old Testament, too. Almost as soon as writing was invented, so too were the devious means to hide messages and keep them under the wraps of secrecy.
In The Hidden History of Code Breaking, Sinclair McKay explores...
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"Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia... In this...book, Martin Goodman takes readers from Judaism's origins in the polytheistic world of the second and first millennia BCE to the temple cult at the time of Jesus. He tells the stories of the rabbis, mystics, and messiahs of...
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