Download or read book A Country of Vast Designs written by Robert W. Merry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the one-term presidency of James K. Polk, during which the United States extended its territory across the continent by threatening England and manufacturing a controversial war with Mexico that Abraham Lincoln opposed.
Download or read book What Hath God Wrought written by Daniel Walker Howe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent. A panoramic narrative, What Hath God Wrought portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In his story, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. Howe examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs--advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans--were the true prophets of America's future. In addition, Howe reveals the power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States. Winner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize Finalist, 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction The Oxford History of the United States The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party written by Michael F. Holt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written. He offers a panoramic account of the tumultuous antebellum period, a time when a flurry of parties and larger-than-life politicians--Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay--struggled for control as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events--like the Annexation of Texas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act--rocked the country. Amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, emerging as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession.
Download or read book President McKinley written by Robert W. Merry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lively, definitive, eye-opening, [this book] by acclaimed historian Robert W. Merry brilliantly evokes the life and presidency of William McKinley, cut short by an assassin. Most often lost in the shadow of his brilliant and flamboyant successor, TR, the twenty-fifth president is presented by Merry as a transformative figure, the first modern Republican. It was President McKinley who established the United States as an imperial power. In the Spanish-American War he kicked Spain out of the Caribbean; in the Pacific he acquired Hawaii and the Philippines through war and diplomacy; he took the country to a strict gold standard; he developed the doctrine of 'fair trade'; he forced the 'Open Door' to China; and he forged the 'special relationship' with Great Britain. McKinley established the noncolonial imperialism that took America global. He set the stage for the bold leadership of Theodore Roosevelt, who built on his accomplishments. [This book] brings to life a sympathetic man and an often overlooked president. Merry raises his rank to a chief executive of consequence who paved the way for the American Century."--Dust jacket flap.
Download or read book Travel by Design written by Peter Sallick and published by Assouline Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 6 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showcasing travel photographs by more than 150 of America’s top architects and designers, Travel by Design is an inspiring guide to the power of travel to shape and expand our world. Travel by Design reminds us of the beauty and importance of travel, with images of more than 100 locations in 60 countries, from exotic destinations and global cities to adventure travels and all-American escapes. More than 350 photographs take readers on a global journey through cityscapes, ancient civilizations, luxurious resorts, and stunning natural wonders, all seen through the discerning and artistic eyes of today’s leading creative talents. The images are sure to inspire dreams of escape, and the 40 pages of insider resources—from favorite hotels and restaurants to secret shopping sources and must-see monuments—will make planning future trips reassuring and easy.
Download or read book The Dead March written by Peter Guardino and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize Winner of the Utley Prize Winner of the Distinguished Book Award, Society for Military History “The Dead March incorporates the work of Mexican historians...in a story that involves far more than military strategy, diplomatic maneuvering, and American political intrigue...Studded with arresting insights and convincing observations.” —James Oakes, New York Review of Books “Superb...A remarkable achievement, by far the best general account of the war now available. It is critical, insightful, and rooted in a wealth of archival sources; it brings far more of the Mexican experience than any other work...and it clearly demonstrates the social and cultural dynamics that shaped Mexican and American politics and military force.” —Journal of American History It has long been held that the United States emerged victorious from the Mexican–American War because its democratic system was more stable and its citizens more loyal. But this award-winning history shows that Americans dramatically underestimated the strength of Mexican patriotism and failed to see how bitterly Mexicans resented their claims to national and racial superiority. Their fierce resistance surprised US leaders, who had expected a quick victory with few casualties. By focusing on how ordinary soldiers and civilians in both countries understood and experienced the conflict, The Dead March offers a clearer picture of the brief, bloody war that redrew the map of North America.
Download or read book Genius of Place written by Justin Martin and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.
Download or read book Hacienda Style written by Karen Witynski and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2008-02-25 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invite the rich colors, natural textures, and romantic beauty of Mexico into your home. With a vast architectural legacy spanning four centuries, Mexican haciendas express a rugged romantic beauty and compelling sense of history. Today, the hacienda's graceful arcaded silhouette, grand-scale proportions, carved-stone ornament, rich colors and natural textures have become an ever-increasing influence for architects and designers worldwide. Hacienda Style invites you into Mexico's artful, hacienda havens resplendent with private collections of colonial and contemporary art, antiques and found relics. Witynski and Carr's antiques and accents have appeared in national magazines, television programs and feature films, including Architectural Digest, Western Interiors, HGTV's Takeover My Makeover, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and The Alamo. Other books by the same authors: Mexican Country Style, The New Hacienda, Casa Adobe, Adobe Details, Casa Yucatan, and Mexican Details.
Download or read book My Passion for Design written by Barbra Streisand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly five decades Barbra Streisand has been one of the singular figures in American entertainment. From the cabaret to the Broadway stage, from television and film stardom to her acclaimed work as a director, from the recording studio to the concert hall, she has demonstrated that the extraordinary voice that launched her career was only one of her remarkable gifts. Now, in her first book, Barbra Streisand reveals another aspect of her talent: the taste and style that have inspired her beautiful homes and collections. My Passion for Design focuses on the architecture and construction of her newest homes, the dream refuge that she has longed for since the days when she shared a small Brooklyn apartment with her mother, brother, and grandparents. A culmination and reflection of Streisand's love of American architecture and design between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the book contains many of her own photographs of the rooms she has decorated, the furniture and art she has collected, and the ravishing gardens she has planted on her land on the California coast. In addition to glimpses of her homes, Barbra shares memories of her childhood, the development of her sense of style, and what collecting has come to mean to her. My Passion for Design is a rare and intimate private tour into the world of one of our most beloved stars. It will be welcomed by her many fans and all lovers of the great achievements of American design.
Download or read book The Authority of Everyday Objects written by Paul Betts and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-06-09 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.
Download or read book Where They Stand written by Robert W. Merry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the acclaimed biography of President James Polk, A Country of Vast Designs, offers a fresh, playful, and challenging way of playing “Rating the Presidents,” by pitching historians’ views and subsequent experts’ polls against the judgment and votes of the presidents’ own contemporaries. Merry posits that presidents rise and fall based on performance, as judged by the electorate. Thus, he explores the presidency by comparing the judgments of historians with how the voters saw things. Was the president reelected? If so, did his party hold office in the next election? Where They Stand examines the chief executives Merry calls “Men of Destiny,’’ those who set the country toward new directions. There are six of them, including the three nearly always at the top of all academic polls—Lincoln, Washington, and FDR. He describes the “Split-Decision Presidents’’ (including Wilson and Nixon)—successful in their first terms and reelected; less successful in their second terms and succeeded by the opposition party. He describes the “Near Greats’’ (Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, TR, Truman), the “War Presidents’’ (Madison, McKinley, Lyndon Johnson), the flat-out failures (Buchanan, Pierce), and those whose standing has fluctuated (Grant, Cleveland, Eisenhower). This voyage through our history provides a probing and provocative analysis of how presidential politics works and how the country sets its course. Where They Stand invites readers to pitch their opinions against the voters of old, the historians, the pollsters—and against the author himself. In this year of raucous presidential politics, Where They Stand will provide a context for the unfolding campaign drama.
Download or read book Traditional American Rooms written by Brent Hull and published by Fox Chapel Publishing Company Incorporated. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ideal sourcebook for architects, woodworkers, and homeowners, this beautiful reference showcases the stunning architectural details of the Winterthur Museum. This guided tour explores 33 rooms from the Georgian and Federal periods with stunning photography, architectural terms, detailed drawings, and fascinating commentary.
Download or read book What Is the What written by Dave Eggers and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s travels bring him in contact with enemy soldiers, with liberation rebels, with hyenas and lions, with disease and starvation, and with deadly murahaleen (militias on horseback)–the same sort who currently terrorize Darfur. Eventually Deng is resettled in the United States with almost 4000 other young Sudanese men, and a very different struggle begins. Based closely on true experiences, What Is the What is heartbreaking and arresting, filled with adventure, suspense, tragedy, and, finally, triumph.
Download or read book The Things That Matter written by Nate Berkus and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does your home tell the story of who you are? In The Things That Matter, Nate Berkus shares intimate stories from his life, introduces us to people who influenced him and helped him forge his sense of style, and opens up about the remarkable experiences that have left him forever changed, all of which find expression in how he lives today. From his most cherished flea market finds, to his beloved books and photos, to the many extraordinary mementos he’s collected in his travels, every piece defines who he’s become and what endures in his world. Berkus invites readers into his own home as well as into twelve others, including a sleek steel-and-glass high-rise that soars above Chicago, a rustic cottage in the Hudson Valley, an ultra-chic atelier that maximizes every inch of space, a Greenwich Village townhouse that holds multiple art collections, and a study in meaningful minimalism in Marfa, Texas. The distinctive interiors beautifully displayed in this book offer revealing portraits of their owners’ lives and the inspiring choices that have made them who they are today. The Things That Matter convincingly lays out Nate Berkus’s philosophy that things do matter. Our homes tell our stories, they reflect the places we’ve been and the people we’ve loved along the way—and there can be no more beautiful design for living than that. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES
Download or read book A Wicked War written by Amy S. Greenberg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the often forgotten U.S.-Mexican War paints an intimate portrait of the major players and their world—from Indian fights and Manifest Destiny, to secret military maneuvers, gunshot wounds, and political spin. “If one can read only a single book about the Mexican-American War, this is the one to read.” —The New York Review of Books Often overlooked, the U.S.-Mexican War featured false starts, atrocities, and daring back-channel negotiations as it divided the nation, paved the way for the Civil War a generation later, and launched the career of Abraham Lincoln. Amy S. Greenberg’s skilled storytelling and rigorous scholarship bring this American war for empire to life with memorable characters, plotlines, and legacies. Along the way it captures a young Lincoln mismatching his clothes, the lasting influence of the Founding Fathers, the birth of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and America’s first national antiwar movement. A key chapter in the creation of the United States, it is the story of a burgeoning nation and an unforgettable conflict that has shaped American history.
Download or read book Traders and Raiders written by Natale A. Zappia and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colorado River region looms large in the history of the American West, vitally important in the designs and dreams of Euro-Americans since the first Spanish journey up the river in the sixteenth century. But as Natale A. Zappia argues in this expansive study, the Colorado River basin must be understood first as home to a complex Indigenous world. Through 300 years of western colonial settlement, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans all encountered vast Indigenous borderlands peopled by Mojaves, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, Utes, Yokuts, and others, bound together by political, economic, and social networks. Examining a vast cultural geography including southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Sonora, Baja California, and New Mexico, Zappia shows how this interior world pulsated throughout the centuries before and after Spanish contact, solidifying to create an autonomous, interethnic Indigenous space that expanded and adapted to an ever-encroaching global market economy. Situating the Colorado River basin firmly within our understanding of Indian country, Traders and Raiders investigates the borders and borderlands created during this period, connecting the coastlines of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds with a vast Indigenous continent.
Download or read book Sands of Empire written by Robert W. Merry and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-06-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sands of Empire, veteran political journalist and award-winning author Robert W. Merry examines the misguided concepts that have fueled American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The emergence in the George W. Bush administration of America as Crusader State, bent on remaking the world in its preferred image, is dangerous and self-defeating, he points out. Moreover, these grand-scale flights of interventionism, regime change, and the use of pre-emptive armed force are without precedent in American history. Merry offers a spirited description of a powerful political core whose ideas have replaced conservative reservations about utopian visions -- these neocons who "embrace a brave new world in which American exceptionalism holds sway," imagining that others around the globe can be made to abandon their cultures in favor of our ideals. He traces the strains of Wilsonism that have now merged into an adventurous and hazardous foreign policy, particularly as described by William Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, Max Boot, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. He examines the challenge of Samuel Huntington's supposition that the clash of civilizations defines present and future world conflict. And he rejects the notion of The New York Times's Thomas L. Friedman that America is not only the world's role model for globally integrated free-market capitalism, but that it has a responsibility to foster, support, and sustain globalization worldwide. From the first president Bush to Clinton to the second Bush presidency, the United States has compromised its global leadership, endangered its security, and failed to meet the standard of justified intervention, Merry suggests. The country must reset its global strategies to protect its interests and the West's, to maintain stability in strategic areas, and to fight radical threats, with arms if necessary. For anything less than these necessities, American blood should remain in American veins.
