In 1492, Christopher Columbus led an expedition sponsored by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to find the passage to the west to the riches of India. Instead, he discovered the islands of present-day Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Columbus' voyage inspired others to venture west to the Americas in search of wealth and exploration. Other expeditions, undertaken by such explorers as Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, Hernando de Soto, and George Vancouver, changed life in both hemispheres. "Discovery of the Americas, 1492-1800, Revised Edition" tells the stories of explorers whose travels made major contributions to world history. Coverage of this title includes: Vasco Nunez de Balboa's sighting of the Pacific Ocean in 1513; Hernan Cortes's conquest of present-day Mexico and how his letters to Charles V taught; European people about Aztec civilization; Francisco Pizarro's claim of the area that is now Peru for Spain in the early 16th century; and, the establishment of missions in present-day California by Father Junipero Serra during the late 18th century.

About the Author
Tom Smith holds a B.A. in English literature from Drew University and an M.A. in American literature from Southern Connecticut State University. His graduate work and research assistantship dealt extensively with immigrant literature and history. He has worked for over 25 years as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor. He has also written numerous chapters and entries about topics such as law, society, trials, the environment, and the American West.

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Tom Smith, Maurice Isserman, John S. Bowman - Disc overy of the Americas, 1492-1800 (2009).pdf

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Maurice Isserman, John S. Bowman - Exploring North America, 1800-1900 (2009).jpg

The establishment of a new nation following the American Revolutionary War meant there were many ripe chances for explorers to investigate the new world that comprised the United States. "Exploring North America 1800-1900, Revised Edition" traces the history of the exploration of western North America and the impact it had on the histories of both the United States and Canada. These stories present an exciting and inspiring narrative, full of moments of great courage, insight, and individual and collective achievement. Coverage of this title includes: John Wesley Powell's summer expedition that traversed the length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon; the other explorers, aside from Lewis and Clark, who joined Thomas Jefferson's ambitious program of exploration, such as the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition and the Freeman-Custis Expedition; and, a look at the societies that resulted from the new Western territories, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans.

About the Author
Maurice Isserman holds a B.A. in history from Reed College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester. He is a professor of history at Hamilton College, specializing in 20th-century U.S. history and labor history. Isserman was a Fulbright distinguished lecturer at Moscow State University in 1997 and has received numerous other grants, awards, and fellowships. He has written dozens of articles, reviews, reference book entries, and book chapters, and is the author of 10 books, including four Facts On File titles.

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Maurice Isserman, John S. Bowman - Exploring North America, 1800-1900 (2009).pdf

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Joel Waldfogel - The Tyranny of the Market, Why Yo u Can't Always Get What You Want (2007).jpg

Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a "tyranny of the majority." Markets, by contrast, are believed to make products available to suit any individual, regardless of what others want. But the argument is not generally correct. In markets, you can't always get what you want. This book explores why this is so and its consequences for consumers with atypical preferences.

When fixed costs are substantial, markets provide only products desired by large concentrations of people. As a result, people are better off in their capacity as consumers when more fellow consumers share their product preferences. Small groups of consumers with less prevalent tastes, such as blacks, Hispanics, people with rare diseases, and people living in remote areas, find less satisfaction in markets. In some cases, an actual tyranny of the majority occurs in product markets. A single product can suit one group or another. If one group is larger, the product is targeted to the larger group, making them better off and others worse off.

The book illustrates these phenomena with evidence from a variety of industries such as restaurants, air travel, pharmaceuticals, and the media, including radio broadcasting, newspapers, television, bookstores, libraries, and the Internet.

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Joel Waldfogel - The Tyranny of the Market, Why Yo u Can't Always Get What You Want (2007).pdf

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William Hinton - Through a Glass Darkly, American Views of the Chinese Revolution (2006).jpg

Through a Glass Darkly was William Hinton's last book. It draws on a lifetime of immersion in Chinese politics and society, beginning with the seven years he spent in China, working mainly in agriculture and land reform, until 1953. On his return to the United States in that year, Hinton first encountered the distortions and misrepresentations of the Chinese Revolution that he examines in this book.

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William Hinton - Through a Glass Darkly, American Views of the Chinese Revolution (2006).pdf

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Michael Goldman - Imperial Nature, The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Glo balization (2005).jpg

USA Books - Michael Goldman - Imperial Nature, The World Bank and ...es for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization 2005.jpg

This probing study of the World Bank examines not its brute financial muscle but its "hegemony"-the rhetorical strategies, training programs and patronage networks that let the Bank frame debate and cajole even critics into endorsing its agenda. Sociologist Goldman focuses on what he calls the Bank's "green neoliberalism," a fashionable development ideology that packages poor nations' public services, natural resources and environmental diversity as undervalued economic assets to be profitably managed and conserved through the market. He explores this creed through interviews with Bank employees and onsite studies of Bank-financed projects, looking at the Bank's Policy Research Department, a project in Laos that links construction of hydroelectric dams with the set-aside of nature preserves, and an ambitious initiative to privatize water utilities.

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Michael Goldman - Imperial Nature, The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Glo balization (2005).pdf

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Alexandra Natapoff - Snitching, Criminal Informant s and the Erosion of American Justice (2009).jpg

Albert Burrell spent thirteen years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Atlanta police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during a misguided raid on her home. After being released by Chicago prosecutors, Darryl Moore—drug dealer, hit man, and rapist—returned home to rape an eleven-year-old girl.

Such tragedies are consequences of snitching—police and prosecutors offering deals to criminal offenders in exchange for information. Although it is nearly invisible to the public, criminal snitching has invaded the American legal system in risky and sometimes shocking ways. Snitching is the first comprehensive analysis of this powerful and problematic practice, in which informant deals generate unreliable evidence, allow criminals to escape punishment, endanger the innocent, compromise the integrity of police work, and exacerbate tension between police and poor urban residents. Driven by dozens of real-life stories and debacles, the book exposes the social destruction that snitching can cause in high-crime African American neighborhoods, and how using criminal informants renders our entire penal process more secretive and less fair. Natapoff also uncovers the farreaching legal, political, and cultural significance of snitching: from the war on drugs to hip hop music, from the FBI’s mishandling of its murderous mafia informants to the new surge in white collar and terrorism informing. She explains how existing law functions and proposes new reforms. By delving into the secretive world of criminal informants, Snitching reveals deep and often disturbing truths about the way American justice really works.

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Alexandra Natapoff - Snitching, Criminal Informant s and the Erosion of American Justice (2009).pdf

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Grant C. Butler - Kings and Camels, An American in Saudi Arabia (2008).jpg

First published in 1960, "Kings and Camels" is a straightforward account of how an American went to work in Saudi Arabia and came home to America to realize how little the average American appreciated the strategic importance of the area and, more crucially still, how little he understood the people in the area. Butler presents his material in the form of an informal account of his personal experiences in the Middle East, both while he lived there, working for the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), and as a successful lecturer and writer who has returned to the area often.The book goes behind the scenes in the Arab world, and into private audience with the legendary Ibn Saud. It explains Islam, the religion of the Arabs. It introduces the reader to the desert Bedouin, and the Arab of the cities. It focuses on human interest, on the Americans who lived and worked in Saudi Arabia. Above all, the book's emphasis is on the cultivation of understanding between the American and Arab peoples. It points out how vital such understanding is to Saudi Arabia, to the Arabs themselves, and to Americans.

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Grant C. Butler - Kings and Camels, An American in Saudi Arabia (2008).pdf

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Charles F. Ritter, Jon L. Wakelyn - American Legis lative Leaders in the South, 1911-1994 (1999).jpg

The third of four volumes comprising a biographical dictionary of state house speakers from 1911 to 1994, this book covers speakers from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Following an insightful analytical introduction, the entries provide biographical and career information on all of the Southern speakers. The volume concludes with valuable statistical appendixes based on an exhaustive database.

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Charles F. Ritter, Jon L. Wakelyn - American Legis lative Leaders in the South, 1911-1994 (1999).pdf

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Roxanne Mountford - The Gendered Pulpit, Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (2003).jpg

n this feminist investigation into the art of preaching—one of the oldest and least studied rhetorical traditions—Roxanne Mountford explores the relationship between bodies, space, race, and gender in rhetorical performance and American Protestant culture. Refiguring delivery and physicality as significant components of the rhetorical situation, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces examines the strategies of three contemporary women preachers who have transgressed traditions, rearranged rhetorical space, and conquered gender bias to establish greater intimacy with their congregations. Mountford’s examinations of the rhetoric inherent in preaching manuals from 1850 to the present provide insight into how "manliness" has remained a central concept in American preaching since the mid-nineteenth century. The manuals illustrate that the character, style, method of delivery, and theological purpose of preachers focused on white men and their cultural standing. Mountford uses the concept of rhetorical space to illustrate how even church architecture bears the mark of a masculine history, which has left contemporary women preachers searching for ways to accommodate themselves to the physicality of preaching.

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Roxanne Mountford - The Gendered Pulpit, Preaching in American Protestant Spaces (2003).pdf

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Colin Burgess, Kate Doolan, Bert Vis - Fallen Astr onauts, Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon (200 3).jpg

In Fallen Astronauts we learn of men who may not have shared in the ultimate triumph but who were nevertheless an indelible part of these unparalleled exertions. By recognizing the prodigious debt we owe them, and their loved ones, in this fine history, Burgess and Doolan have made an important contribution to the history of space flight.

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Colin Burgess, Kate Doolan, Bert Vis - Fallen Astr onauts, Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon (200 3).pdf

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Stephen P. Randolph - Powerful and Brutal Weapons, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive (2007).jpg

As America confronts an unpredictable war in Iraq, Stephen Randolph returns to an earlier conflict that severely tested our civilian and military leaders. In 1972, America sought to withdraw from Vietnam with its credibility intact. As diplomatic negotiations were pursued in Paris, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger hoped that gains on the battlefield would strengthen their position at the negotiating table--working against the relentless deadline of a presidential election year.
In retaliation for a major North Vietnamese offensive breaking over the Easter holidays, the President launched the all-out air campaign known as Linebacker--overriding his Secretary of Defense and clashing with the theater commander in whom he had lost all confidence. He intended to destroy the enemy with the full force of America's "powerful and brutal weapons" and thus shape the endgame of the war. Randolph's narrative, based not only on the Nixon White House tapes and newly declassified materials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the White House but also on never before used North Vietnamese sources, re-creates how North Vietnam planned and fought this battle from Hanoi and how the U.S. planned and fought it from Washington.
Randolph's intimate chronicle of Nixon's performance as commander-in-chief gains us unprecedented access to how strategic assessments were made, transmitted through the field of command, and played out in combat and at the negotiating table. It is a compelling story about America's military decision-making in conflicts with nontraditional belligerents that speaks provocatively to our own time.

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Stephen P. Randolph - Powerful and Brutal Weapons, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive (2007).pdf

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Cecil Brown - Stagolee Shot Billy (2003).jpg

This book sings like the sound beneath the song within the song about the song. Telling it like it 't - i - is! Like a literary griot (gree-oh !), Cecil Brown transfers this longenduring African-American song from oral tradition to the printed page. Along the way, lie places the song in the context of the times from which it sprang. The amount of artistry the book documents--touching all Americans but focusing on the African-American contribution, or wellspring-is formidable and awe-inspiring.
--Taj Mahal

This entertaining book is the first to rigorously explore [the song's] origins in the St. Louis gang underworld. Brown paints a rich picture of the incident, traces the song's virus-like spread from blues to ragtime to pop, and figuring that it still moves people because, like most potent ancient black ballads, it is stark reportage with no moralising. Stagger Lee is not condemned, so he is free to live on in every badass to follow.
--Paul McGrath (MOJO )

You don't have to know the ballad about Stagolee, the black anti-hero who shot and killed his old friend Billy over a hat in a bar one Christmas night in 1895 in Deep Morgan, the vice district of St. Louis, to enjoy Cecil Brown's telling of the story behind the song...Brown, who grew up on the myth in the 1950s and 60s on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, reconstructs the very night when Lee Shelton dressed like a pimp in St. Louis flats and a "high-roller, milk-white Stetson"...wandered into the Bill Curtis Saloon in the Bloody Third District. Brown's reconstruction of the bordello culture in St. Louis is reminiscent of fin de siècle Vienna, portraying a kind of hysteria that played out on the stage and in the streets.
--Susan Salter Reynolds (Los Angeles Times Book Review 20030829)

[A] probing and prescient and staggeringly well researched study...The historical revelations here are consistently--and insistently--fascinating; the voices brought in as chorus to help Brown vamp into theoretical detour range from Walter Benjamin and Bob Dylan to James Baldwin and Schooly D.
--Ian Penman (The Wire )

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Cecil Brown - Stagolee Shot Billy (2003).pdf

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William C. Harris - Lincoln's Last Months (2004).jpg

Harris, professor of history at North Carolina State University, does a generally workmanlike job of narrating Abraham Lincoln's final months, from the election campaign of 1864 through his assassination in the spring of 1865. But Harris fails to explain (or demonstrate) exactly why this particular slice of time is uniquely suitable for special study outside the broader context of Lincoln's overall presidency. The book also includes some small errors that will annoy the better-versed Lincoln buffs. For example, in Harris's discussion of Lincoln's second inauguration, he sounds needlessly speculative when he writes: "Reportedly in the crowd that day was... the actor John Wilkes Booth, who was biding his time to strike the president." On the same spread of pages, the author reproduces the famous panoramic photograph of Lincoln making his second inaugural speech, surrounded by hundreds of listeners. This image has been mapped and analyzed by a host of scholars of Lincoln and the assassination, which has shown conclusively that the image includes not only the face of Booth (uncomfortably only a few yards behind and above the president) but also the faces of at least four other assassination conspirators (Lewis Paine, George Atzerodt, Edman Spangler and David Herold) standing immediately below Lincoln. Such established details are not commented on by Harris. Small gaffes like this aside, Harris is astute at describing and analyzing Lincoln's shrewd politicking for the 13th Amendment and his subtle consolidation of peace terms designed to end the war while at the same time dealing out a minimum of humiliation for Confederate soldiers.

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William C. Harris - Lincoln's Last Months (2004).pdf

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Anne M. Todd - Venus and Serena Williams, Athletes (2009).jpg

Venus and Serena Williams have dominated the tennis scene for years - winning numerous Grand Slam singles titles to become the first- and second-ranked tennis players in the world. Venus is known for her 127-mile-per-hour serve and her graceful agility on the court. Serena is known for her aggressive court style and fashion flair. By focusing on their dreams and steering clear of the drugs and gang violence that permeated their youth, the Williams sisters have shown the world that two inner-city African Americans can not only make a name for themselves in the predominantly white, upper-class sport of tennis, but they can also raise the level of the game. As millions have watched their success on court, Venus and Serena Williams have ensured that tennis will never be the same.

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Anne M. Todd - Venus and Serena Williams, Athletes (2009) [PDF].rar

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Famous Flyers - Heather Lehr Wagner - Amelia Earha rt (2003).jpg

In the morning of June 17, 1928, an orange Fokker F7 airplane Otook off from Trepassey in Newfoundland. Its crew had arrived from Boston more than 12 days earlier and had been waiting for the right weather conditions to permit them to set off on the second stage of their trip. The airplane, named the Friendship, had been designed to fly over land, but more recently its wheels had been exchanged for pontoons to enable it to take off and land on water.
Day after day of fog and rain had stranded the crew at Trepassey, and they had spent the time making adjustments to their plane, playing cards, and trying to enjoy sightseeing in the cold and damp weather. The crew had only one map to study, and they carefully examined the passage of storms and weather systems across their charted journey until finally conditions made it seem possible that they could complete their trip—a trip that would take them across the Atlantic Ocean.

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