Download or read book Book of Ages written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR • Time Magazine • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Boston Globe A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians—a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one extraordinary woman but an entire world.
Download or read book Book of Ages written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Making use of an amazing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
Download or read book Book of Ages written by Jill Lepore and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and a wholly different account of the founding of the United States.
Download or read book Review of Book of Ages The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Jill Lepore 2013 written by Dee Andrews and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Story of America written by Jill Lepore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Yorker staff writer examines the origins of dozens of writings, speeches and other printed pieces from American history--from paper ballots and I.O.U.s to the Constitution and Thomas Paine's Common Sense to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address.
Download or read book The Name of War written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-09-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war—and because of it—that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indigenous peoples and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.
Download or read book Escaping Salem written by Richard Godbeer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning an eye to a relatively unknown witchcraft trial in Stamford, Connecticut, Godbeer pens a gripping narrative that captures the mindset of colonial New England.
Download or read book The Mansion of Happiness written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.
Download or read book The Secret History of Wonder Woman written by Jill Lepore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the origin of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes hides a fascinating family story—and a crucial history of feminism in the twentieth-century. “Everything you might want in a page-turner … skeletons in the closet, a believe-it-or-not weirdness in its biographical details, and something else that secretly powers even the most “serious” feminist history—fun.” —Entertainment Weekly The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony. In the 1920s, Marston and his wife brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most influential feminists of the twentieth century. Even while celebrating conventional family life in a regular column that Marston and Byrne wrote for Family Circle, they themselves pursued lives of extraordinary nonconformity. Marston, internationally known as an expert on truth—he invented the lie detector test—lived a life of secrets, only to spill them on the pages of Wonder Woman. Includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers, and 161 illustrations and 16 pages in full color.
Download or read book Jane Actually or Jane Austen s Book Tour written by Jennifer Petkus and published by Jennifer Petkus. This book was released on 2013 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With the invention of the AfterNet, death isn't quite the end to a literary career it once was, and Jane Austen, the grande dame of English literature, is poised for a comback with the publication of Sandition, the book she was writing upon her death in 1817. But how does a disembodied author sign autographs and appear on talk shows? With the aid of Mary Crawford, a struggling acting student who plays the role of the Regency author who wrote Pride and prejudice, and Emma, and Sense and sensibility. But Austen discovers her second chance at a literary career also gives her a second chance at happiness and possibly even ... love"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Brill s Companion to Seneca written by Andreas Heil and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 895 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new and important introduction to Seneca provides a systematic and concise presentation of this author’s philosophical works and his tragedies. It provides handbook style surveys of each genuine or attributed work, giving dates and brief descriptions, and taking into account the most important philosophical and philological issues. In addition, they provide accounts of the major steps in the history of their later influence. The cultural background of the texts and the most important problem areas within the philosophic and tragic corpus of Seneca are dealt with in separate essays.
Download or read book These Truths A History of the United States written by Jill Lepore and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Download or read book Blindspot written by Jane Kamensky and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter fleeing his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on the British Empire's far shores—in the city of Boston, lately seized with the spirit of liberty. Eager to begin anew, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at all. Fanny Easton is a fallen woman from Boston's most prominent family who has disguised herself as a boy to become Jameson's defiant and seductive apprentice. Written with wit and exuberance by accomplished historians, Blindspot is an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century fiction. It celebrates the art of the Enlightenment and the passion of the American Revolution by telling stories of ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary time.
Download or read book Bad Austen written by Peter Archer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine Mansfield Park set on the Jersey Shore. Or Mr. Darcy heading up the Starship Enterprise. Or Emma Woodhouse traveling through time to indulge her matchmaking. If you think that sounds like bad Austen, you couldn't be more right. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author as popular as Jane Austen should be imitated, expanded upon, and parodied. Now, in the tradition of the Bad Hemingway and Bad Faulkner contests, comes a new collection of hilarious efforts to write the worst excerpt from the novel Jane Austen never wrote. Bad Austen: Because the only thing better than good Austen is bad Austen!
Download or read book The Autobiography and Other Writings written by Benjamin Franklin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and insightful compilation of Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography and other essays which offers an in-depth look into the life of America’s most fascinating Founding Father. Benjamin Franklin was a true Renaissance man: writer, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat, and politician. During his long life, he offered advice on attaining wealth, organized public institutions, contributed to the birth of a nation, and negotiated with foreign powers to ensure his country’s survival. Through the words of the elder statesman himself, The Autobiography and Other Writings presents a remarkable insight into the man and his accomplishments. Additional writings from Benjamin Franklin’s wife and son provide a more intimate portrait of the husband and father who became a legend in his own time. Edited by L. Jesse Lemich With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson and an Afterword by Carla Mulford
Download or read book This America The Case for the Nation written by Jill Lepore and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.
Download or read book The Whites of Their Eyes written by Jill Lepore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed bestselling historian Jill Lepore, the story of the American historical mythology embraced by the far right Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution—so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty—so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America." Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, offers a careful and concerned look at American history according to the far right, from the "rant heard round the world," which launched the Tea Party, to the Texas School Board's adoption of a social-studies curriculum that teaches that the United States was established as a Christian nation. Along the way, she provides rare insight into the eighteenth-century struggle for independencea history of the Revolution, from the archives. Lepore traces the roots of the far right's reactionary history to the bicentennial in the 1970s, when no one could agree on what story a divided nation should tell about its unruly beginnings. Behind the Tea Party's Revolution, she argues, lies a nostalgic and even heartbreaking yearning for an imagined past—a time less troubled by ambiguity, strife, and uncertainty—a yearning for an America that never was. The Whites of Their Eyes reveals that the far right has embraced a narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism—anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist. In a new afterword, Lepore addresses both the recent shift in Tea Party rhetoric from the Revolution to the Constitution and the diminished role of scholars as political commentators over the last half century of public debate.
