Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema’s tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America’s ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies.
Schleier analyzes cinematic works in which skyscrapers are an integral component, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices in these often fictional modern buildings, especially on concepts of gender. Organized chronologically and thematically, she offers close readings of films including Safety Last, Skyscraper Souls, Wife vs. Secretary, Baby Face, The Fountainhead, and Desk Set. Opening with the humorous antics of Harold Lloyd, the premier skyscraper filmmaker of the silent era, the book moves through the disillusionment of the Depression era, in which skyscrapers are employed as players in moralistic, class-conscious stories, to post–World War II and its reimagining of American political and economic values and ends with the complicated prosperity of the 1950s and the lives of white-collar workers and their spouses.

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Merrill Schleier - Skyscraper Cinema, Architecture and Gender in American Film (2009).pdf

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Christian G. Fritz - American Sovereigns, The Peop le and America's Constitutional Tradition Before t he Civil War (2007).jpg

USA Books - Christian G. Fritz - American Sovereigns, The People a...as Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War 2007.jpg

American Sovereigns is a path-breaking interpretation of America's political history and constitutionalism that explores how Americans struggled over the idea that the people would rule as the sovereign after the American Revolution. National and state debates about government action, law, and the people's political powers reveal how Americans sought to understand how a collective sovereign-the people-could both play the role as the ruler and yet be ruled by governments of their own choosing.

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Jack Hoza - It's Not What You Sign, It's How You S ign It, Politeness in American Sign Language (2007 ).jpg

The general stereotype regarding interaction between American Sign Language and English is a model of oversimplification: ASL signers are direct and English speakers are indirect. Jack Hoza’s study It’s Not What You Sign, It’s How You Sign It: Politeness in American Sign Language upends this common impression through an in-depth comparison of the communication styles between these two language communities. Hoza investigates relevant social variables in specific contexts and explores the particular linguistic strategies ASL signers and English speakers employ when they interact in these contexts.

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Jack Hoza - It's Not What You Sign, It's How You S ign It, Politeness in American Sign Language (2007 ).pdf

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Jack P. Greene - Pursuits of happiness, the social development of early modern British colonies and the formation of American culture (1988).jpg

USA Books - Jack P. Greene - Pursuits of happiness, the social dev...h colonies and the formation of American culture 1988.jpg

Building on the literature of the new social history produced over the past two decades, this book has four complementary goals. First, and most important, it seeks to use that literature as a basis for evaluating the central assumptions that have informed the analysis of colonial British American history over the past two generations, assumptions that, to one degree or another, have emphasized the preeminence or normative character of the experience of the orthodox puritan colonies of New E n g l ~ din the process of early modern British colonial socialdevelopment and the formation of American culture. Second, through a close evaluation of the experiences of the settler societies in each of the major regions of settlement in the early modern British Empire- Ireland, theChesapeake, New England, the Atlantic island colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas, the West Indian colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South-and a comparison between those experiences and the social history of metropolitan England or, after 1707, Britain, the volume attempts in Chapters I through 7 to formulate a model of colonial social development that may be more broadly applicable than the declension model around which much British colonial history has been organized.

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Jack P. Greene - Pursuits of happiness, the social development of early modern British colonies and the formation of American culture (1988).pdf

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Mark Crawford - Encyclopedia of the Mexican-Americ an War (1999).jpeg

At first glance, it would seem that Mexico and the United States should have been good neighbors in the nineteenth century—they were both relatively young countries that had rebelled against a mother nation to establish republics. As they grew, they both had to deal with states with populations that believed that their needs were not being met by the federal government.

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Mark Crawford - Encyclopedia of the Mexican-Americ an War (1999).chm

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Patricia Riley - Growing Up Native American (2008).jpg

Stories of oppression and survival, of heritage denied and reclaimed -- twenty-two American writers recall childhood in their native land.

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Patricia Riley - Growing Up Native American (2008).pdf

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Raymond Schroth - The American Jesuits. A History (2007).jpg

With infectious energy and a genuine gift for storytelling, Raymond A. Schroth recounts the history of Jesuits in the United States. The American Jesuits isn’t simply a book for Catholics; it’s for anyone who loves a well-told historical tale. For more than 450 years, Jesuit priests have traveled the globe out of a religious commitment to serve others. Their order, the Society of Jesus, is the largest religious order of men in the Catholic Church, with more than 20,000 members around the world and almost 3,000 in the United States. It is one of the more liberal orders in the Church, taking very public stands in the U.S. on behalf of social justice causes such as the promotion of immigrants’ rights and humanitarian aid, including assistance to Africa’s poor, and against American involvement in “unjust wars.” Jesuits have played an important part in Americanizing the Catholic Church and in preparing Catholic immigrants for inclusion into American society.

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Raymond Schroth - The American Jesuits. A History (2007) [PDF[.rar

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Scott Nearing - The American Empire (2009).jpg

The genius of revolution presided at the birth of the American Republic, whose first breath was drawn amid the economic, social and political turmoil of the eighteenth century. The voyaging and discovering of the three preceding centuries had destroyed European isolation and laid the foundation for a new world order of society. The Industrial Revolution was convulsing England and threatening to destroy the Feudal State. Western civilization, in the birthpangs of social revolution, produced first the American and then the French Republic. Feudalism was dying! Divine right, monarchy, aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny--these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions.The Declaration of Independence officially proclaimed the new order,--challenging "divine right" and maintaining that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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Scott Nearing - The American Empire (2009).pdf

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Sylvia Ellis - Historical Dictionary of Anglo-Amer ican Relations (2009).jpg

The Historical Dictionary of Anglo-American Relations surveys Anglo-American relations from 1607 to the present and covers key events, individuals, and issues that have played a part in its history. With an emphasis on the political and economic relationship between Britain and the United States, but also featuring the cultural links between the two. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendices, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries.

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Sylvia Ellis - Historical Dictionary of Anglo-Amer ican Relations (2009) [PDF].rar

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Hampton Sides - Hellhound On His Trail, The Stalki ng of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Internationa l Hunt for His Assassin (2010).jpg

USA Books - Hampton Sides - Hellhound On His Trail, The Stalking o... Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin 2010.jpg

Hampton Sides has long been one of the great narrative nonfiction writers of our time, excavating essential pieces of American history--from the daring rescue of POWs during World War II to the settling of the West--and bringing them vividly to life. Now in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail, he applies his enormous gifts to one of the most important and heart-wrenching chapters in U.S. history: the stalking and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., by James Earl Ray.
The book chronicles the terrifying collision of these two figures. In 1967, King was struggling to complete his monumental Civil Rights crusade and to maintain, amid the rise of more militant factions, the movement’s nonviolent nobility. While King increasingly intuits his own death, Ray has begun to track him down. Through Sides’ prodigious research, Ray emerges as one of the eeriest characters, a prison escapee and racist who wears alligator shoes and is constantly transforming himself, changing names and physical appearances. He is determined to become somebody, to insert himself into the national consciousness, through a single unthinkable act of violence.
Sides illuminates not only the forces that culminated in King’s assassination; he also reveals the largely forgotten story of how his death led to the largest manhunt in American history. Almost unfathomably, it is J. Edgar Hoover, the person who had long hoped for King’s destruction and had even spied on him, who ultimately brings King’s killer to justice.
Hellhound on His Trail reconstructs this taut, tense narrative with the immediacy of a novel. Yet what makes the book so powerful--indeed what lifts it into the ranks of a masterpiece--is that the story unfolds against the larger backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and the struggle to remake the country. If Ray is able to undergo a final metamorphosis, it is King, through his life and ultimate sacrifice, who enacts the greatest transformation: changing the character of a nation.

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Allen C. Guelzo - Lincoln, A Very Short Introducti on (2009).jpg

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents.
If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, peace, and his legacy. The book sets these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction--"the pursuit of happiness"--remains a fundamental dilemma even today.
Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, "lived in the mind." Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history.

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Albert L. Strait - Strategic Petroleum Reserve (20 10).jpg

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was created in 1975 to help protect the U.S. economy from oil supply disruptions and it currently holds about 700 million barrels of crude oil. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 required the Department of Energy to expand the Strategic Petroleum Reserve's maximum storage capacity to 1 billion barrels of crude oil. As the Department of Energy (DOE) begins to expand the SPR, past experiences can help inform future efforts to fill the reserve in the most cost-effective manner. Thus, this book will focus on the factors that experts recommend be considered when filling and using the SPR, to what extent the SPR can protect the U.S. economy from damage during oil supply disruptions and under what circumstances would an SPR larger than its current size be warranted. As part of this book, GAO developed oil supply disruption scenarios, used models to estimate potential economic harm, and convened 13 experts in conjunction with the National Academy of Sciences. This is an edited, excerpted and augmented edition of a GAO and U.S. Department of Energy publication.

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Albert L. Strait - Strategic Petroleum Reserve (20 10).pdf

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Christopher S. Kudlac - Fair or Foul, Sports and C riminal Behavior in the United States (2010).jpg

Fair or Foul: Sports and Criminal Behavior in the United States is an examination of the intersection of these two increasingly connected worlds. The book was written to answer two questions. First, is there a relationship between athletic participation and criminal behavior? Second, what other connections—positive or negative—exist between sports and crime?

To arrive at his answers, author Christopher S. Kudlac surveys professional, college, and high school sports in relation to crime, spectator crime, and gambling. Other topics include how urban sports programs help deter kids from getting involved in crime and how the use of sports in prisons has worked to positive effect. The book also examines the issues of aggression, masculinity, commercial incentives (or disincentives), and other contributing factors that may spur illegal activity among athletes and spectators. Looking at the subject from the perspectives of criminal justice and forensic psychology, Kudlac is able to uncover just how intertwined the two worlds are—for better or for worse.

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Christopher S. Kudlac - Fair or Foul, Sports and C riminal Behavior in the United States (2010).pdf

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Kitty Kelley - Oprah, A Biography (2010).jpg

Kitty Kelley couldn't find very many people who like Oprah. Astonishingly, almost everyone she interviewed seems to have a bone to pick with the talk-show host, even Oprah's cousin and father (who might not be her father, after all). Of course, many of those people haven't seen Oprah in a long time; take the insulted woman who threw her a good-bye party when she left her first television job: “That was the last I saw of Oprah . . . she divorced herself from Nashville.” Even when Oprah does something thoughtful, like return to Baltimore to spend time with a dying former coworker, she gets bashed for not attending the retirement party of another. As in her previous biographies, Kelley follows a predictable pattern. She gathers lots of information via published articles, on-the-record interviews (often with bit players), and anonymous quotes from those who may or may not be well connected. (Moreover, even the identified quotes are difficult to track in the massive list of source material in each chapter.) She then writes, in rather clunky prose, about her subject, twisting the story to prove her thesis—in this case that, yes, Oprah is a spinmeister and a controlling one at that. Though Oprah's many achievements and her charitable work are lauded, there's usually a but following each positive statement, as Kelley attempts to show again and again that Winfrey's generosity is often self-serving. Typically, Kelley's biographies feature one juicy story that everyone seems to remember. Laura Bush sold dope in college. Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra had an affair. Unfortunately, Oprah seems sadly to lack that signature take-away anecdote. She had an affair with John Tesh? She once ate two pecan pies? No staying power there. Perhaps readers will have to be satisfied with the fact that Oprah's father called her best-friend Gayle King a “dirt hog.” And that's on the record.

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Kathi Jackson - Steven Spielberg, A Biography (200 7).jpg

"Aimed at high school students and general readers, this accessible biography describes the life and career of movie director Steven Spielberg. The chronologically organized volume covers everything from Spielberg's 1969 professional directing debut on TV's Night Gallery through his many successes with such films as Jaws (1975) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Jackson also supplies a timeline, filmography, and list of awards won by Spielberg."

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Kathi Jackson - Steven Spielberg, A Biography (200 7).epub

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Edward M. Kennedy - True Compass, A Memoir (2009).jpg

The youngest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he came of age among siblings from whom much was expected. As a young man, he played a key role in the presidential campaign of his brother John F. Kennedy, recounted here in loving detail. In 1962 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he began a fascinating political education and became a legislator.

In this historic memoir, Ted Kennedy takes us inside his family, re-creating life with his parents and brothers and explaining their profound impact on him. For the first time, he describes his heartbreak and years of struggle in the wake of their deaths. Through it all, he describes his work in the Senate on the major issues of our time--civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the quest for peace in Northern Ireland--and the cause of his life: improved health care for all Americans, a fight influenced by his own experiences in hospitals.

His life has been marked by tragedy and perseverance, a love of family, and an abiding faith. There have been controversies, too, and Kennedy addresses them with unprecedented candor. At midlife, embattled and uncertain if he would ever fall in love again, he met the woman who changed his life, Victoria Reggie Kennedy. Facing a tough reelection campaign against an aggressive challenger named Mitt Romney, Kennedy found a new voice and began one of the great third acts in American politics, sponsoring major legislation, standing up for liberal principles, and making the pivotal endorsement of Barack Obama for president.

Hundreds of books have been written about the Kennedys. TRUE COMPASS will endure as the definitive account from a member of America's most heralded family, an inspiring legacy to readers and to history, and a deeply moving story of a life like no other.

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Marc Eliot - Clint Eastwood, American Rebel (2009).jpg

Eliot, biographer of stars ranging from Walt Disney to Bruce Springsteen, tackles the life, career and artistic challenges of Clint Eastwood. In 1954, at age 24, Eastwood was married and working at an Oakland, Calif., gas station when he was brought to Universal by director Arthur Lubin and signed to a learning contract. After years of uncredited appearances and bit parts in B films, he finally got his break when he was cast as Rowdy Yates on CBS's Rawhide, seen for eight seasons (1959–1965). His role as the poncho-clad Man with No Name in Serge Leone's innovative westerns triggered a solid movie career, followed by the popular Dirty Harry series. In 1971, he made his directorial debut (Play Misty for Me) and later racked up multiple nominations and awards, including Oscar wins for directing Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. Updating previous biographies, Eliot analyzes both box-office bombs and successes while also probing the never-ending drama of Eastwood's modus vivendi, his financial empire and his personal relationships. Married twice, Eastwood has seven children by five different women. Although Eastwood did not consent to be interviewed and key sources asked not to be named, Eliot documents a wealth of details in this well-researched, comprehensive biography that will not disappoint Eastwood's fans.

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Johnny Cash - The Autobiography (1998).jpg

A humble, happy look back from the man in black. Johnny Cash answers to many names; he's JR to childhood friends and family, John to bandmates, and Johnny to fans. ``Cash'' is the name wife June Carter reserves for ``the star, the egomaniac.'' The star gets plenty of ink here, from the early days at Sun Records--with Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis--to his current status as a darling of the alternative rock set. But it's the private man who's most compelling and surprisingly complex. Cash writes candidly of his recurring addiction to amphetamines and his concomitant shortcomings as a father, addresses his spirituality without sounding maudlin, and displays genuine humility at his success and very little bitterness at his abandonment by the country music establishment. A more accurate subtitle might be ``The Second Autobiography,'' since this volume covers some of the same ground as Cash's previous work, The Man in Black (1986), but a life so chock full of oddments (he once started a forest fire with an automobile and on another occasion was nearly disemboweled by an ostrich) and renegade stands (he opposed Vietnam, heresy to the nation's blue- collar constituency) easily merits a second look. Organized around the domiciles where he divides his time--homes in Tennessee, Florida, and Jamaica, as well as his tour bus--the book stays grounded in the present, mixing reflections on his 40-year career with a running chronicle of an ongoing tour. This novel approach minimizes the as-told-to blahs that plague many a celebrity autobiography and highlights Cash's wry humor and introspection. With the help of Carr, editor of Country Music magazine, Cash keeps the pace lively until the end, when the roses he throws everyone from grandkids to music biz buddies bog things down. Mostly, though, a pungent, substantive autobiography from one the most iconoclastic talents on the American music scene.

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Michael Barrier - Animated Man. A Life of Walt Dis ney (2007).jpg

Walt Disney (1901-1966) was one of the most significant creative forces of the twentieth century, a man who made a lasting impact on the art of the animated film, the history of American business, and the evolution of twentieth-century American culture. He was both a creative visionary and a dynamic entrepreneur, roles whose demands he often could not reconcile.
In his compelling new biography, noted animation historian Michael Barrier avoids the well-traveled paths of previous biographers, who have tended to portray a blemish-free Disney or to indulge in lurid speculation. Instead, he takes the full measure of the man in his many aspects. A consummate storyteller, Barrier describes how Disney transformed himself from Midwestern farm boy to scrambling young businessman to pioneering artist and, finally, to entrepreneur on a grand scale. Barrier describes in absorbing detail how Disney synchronized sound with animation in Steamboat Willie; created in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sympathetic cartoon characters whose appeal rivaled that of the best live-action performers; grasped television's true potential as an unparalleled promotional device; and--not least--parlayed a backyard railroad into the Disneyland juggernaut.
Based on decades of painstaking research in the Disney studio's archives and dozens of public and private archives in the United States and Europe, The Animated Man offers freshly documented and illuminating accounts of Disney's childhood and young adulthood in rural Missouri and Kansas City. It sheds new light on such crucial episodes in Disney's life as the devastating 1941 strike at his studio, when his ambitions as artist and entrepreneur first came into serious conflict.
Beginning in 1969, two and a half years after Disney's death, Barrier recorded long interviews with more than 150 people who worked alongside Disney, some as early as 1922. Now almost all deceased, only a few were ever interviewed for other books. Barrier juxtaposes Disney's own recollections against the memories of those other players to great effect. What emerges is a portrait of Walt Disney as a flawed but fascinating artist, one whose imaginative leaps allowed him to vault ahead of the competition and produce work that even today commands the attention of audiences worldwide.

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