American Century

Biff Temperance, a gentle and withdrawn yet brilliant commodity futures trader, experiences a devastating emotional attack triggered by childhood memories. His breakdown is bad enough, but the timing is even worse. It occurs on a chaotic trading floor and leads to a catastrophic financial loss for his firm. His future in shambles, Biff abandons the meticulously structured life disengaged from the world, which he built for himself in New York City. He embarks on a trip to find his estranged father, who he hasn’t seen since he was five. His only clue about him is a recent letter containing ...

From Cover to Cover and Sea to Shining Sea: The Authors who gave America its Voice Instant American Literature delves into our rich literary heritage. Filled with quirky facts and lively illustrations, this spirited survey visits the war-torn trenches with Stephen Crane, creeps through the nightmarish realm of Edgar Allan Poe, and ponders Walden Pond with henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you don’t know who (or what!) Natty Bumppo is or which legendary torne made famous the words “Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity! Then this book is for you. In this vastly informative ...

Nineteenth-century America was rife with Protestant-fueled anti-Catholicism. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez reveals how Protestants nevertheless became surprisingly and deeply fascinated with the Virgin Mary, even as her role as a devotional figure who united Catholics grew. Documenting the vivid Marian imagery that suffused popular visual and literary culture, Alvarez argues that Mary became a potent shared exemplar of Christian womanhood around which Christians of all stripes rallied.

David Brainerd's diary is a poignant testament to the relentless pursuit of faith amidst the challenges of missionary life in colonial America. As a Puritan of Puritans, Brainerd's unwavering commitment to Calvinist theology shaped every facet of his existence, from his thoughts to his actions, all dedicated to the glorification of God. Sent as a missionary to the Native Americans in Pennsylvania during the 18th century, Brainerd's diary chronicles his struggles, triumphs, and deep spiritual introspection throughout his brief yet impactful life. Within the pages of Brainerd's diary, readers...

The American frontier in the 1700s produced some men of utter ruthlessness, and Jim Girty was one of the worst. Living among the Delaware Indians in the Ohio Valley, Girty and his brothers incited acts of savagery and war against the white settlers. One of Jim Girty's targets was the Village of Peace, a settlement of Christian Indians who had been converted by Moravian missionaries.

Raised by a pious single mother, William Lloyd Garrison embraced the general teachings of the Christian faith as a young man, and in his 20s, he became convicted that slavery was the greatest moral evil in the nation. Thereafter, he devoted most of his life to seeing it ended, and he refused to give an inch in the name of compromise on the things he felt strongly about. Few Americans in any era could tout the civil rights record William Lloyd Garrison could boast of.

Across four centuries, Apache (Nde) peoples in the North American West confronted enslavement and forced migration schemes intended to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate them. While many Indigenous groups in the Americas lived through similar histories, Apaches were especially affected owing to their mobility, resistance, and proximity to multiple imperial powers. The Apache Diaspora brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated.

What do you get when you mix divine visions, secret wives, homemade money, and a printing press smashed by order of God’s self-declared mouthpiece? A body on the jailhouse floor and a story too wild for Sunday School. In this blisteringly funny, historically ruthless follow-up to Before the Revelation, Argor Barpha drags you through the final years of Joseph Smith—the American mystic who wasn’t content just starting a church. He wanted a kingdom. Maybe even a crown. From the ruins of Kirtland to the blood-soaked cornfields of Missouri, from the swamp city of Nauvoo to the Carthage ...

French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood is an insightful memoir of a young life both at the margins and at the center of the 1950s American experience. Born in 1947, Denis Ledoux had a mid-twentieth-century youth that almost seems to have been lived in another country and another century, but it is typical of what many Franco-Americans born in his generation experienced. French Boy explores much: the developmental stages of childhood; family dynamics, bilingualism, acculturation and assimilation, alienation and shame. Told by a third-generation Franco, this life story is set in the ...

In Becoming King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Making of a National Leader, author Troy Jackson chronicles King's emergence and effectiveness as a civil rights leader by examining his relationship with the people of Montgomery, Alabama. Using the sharp lens of Montgomery's struggle for racial equality to investigate King's burgeoning leadership, Jackson explores King's ability to connect with the educated and the unlettered, professionals and the working class.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulating immigration. Offering an original interpretation of nineteenth-century America, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic argues that the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery were central to the emergence of a national immigration policy.

Barbara Kreiger's intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the second coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.

The history of the United States is, to a large extent, a history of armed conflict. The nation was first forged in war, a tough fight for independence against one of the world’s largest empires, and that fight would resume less than a generation later with the War of 1812. Then, there were constant low-level conflicts with Native Americans as the nation expanded westwards, and occasionally the country engaged in full-scale war against the Sioux, Comanche, and Apache.

A spoiled English Lady rebels against the half-Native American half-English sea smuggler forced to be her husband and they discover the thrill of impetuous passion. Smuggled aboard a ship bound for the colonies, the English lady Keely Bartholomew is ill-prepared for life in America, much less the devilish half-breed captain Brock Forrester. This man, the illegitimate son of a Lenni-Lenape man and an English woman, is used to having his own way. When the tall, brawny, mixed-race man caresses her and holds her in his massive arms, looking at her with eyes as black as night, the heiress is ...

A soldier at war. A lonely girl back home. After his dishonesty, will he get a second chance at romance? Maggie’s faith is important to her. She is confident and needs no reassurance, but is a lonely only child. As her patriotic contribution to America’s involvement in the Korean War, she writes to a soldier stationed there whom she doesn’t know. Tom is a soldier serving in Korea. The atrocities of war have rocked his faith in God until he feels uncomfortable even going inside a church. In letters he writes to Maggie, Tom doesn’t admit his lack of faith but disguises the truth.Tom ...

Within the annals of history lie stories of courage, sacrifice, and resilience—tales that illuminate the path of humanity's journey through the ages. Among these narratives, few are as compelling as that of the Culper Spy Ring, whose clandestine efforts played a pivotal role in shaping the destiny of a nation. In the pages that follow, we embark on a journey through time, traversing the landscapes of the Revolutionary War and the 20th century revelation that brought the once-hidden heroes of the Culper Spy Ring into the light of recognition. Through meticulous research and evocative ...

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

From one of America’s greatest nonfiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage.

The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another. Its naval supremacy linked the Commonwealth of Canada with the colonies in South Africa and India, and through them trade flowed east and west. An integral but underutilized part of this vast trade network included China, a reclusive Asian kingdom closed off from the Western world that desired none of its goods.

A storm. A rip in time. A mishap. Erika Becquerel finds herself in an impossible world. A Harvest Moon Ball in her beloved grandfather's home? As she struggles to make sense of claims that she fell into the year 1837, her grandfather's life hangs in the balance. Resigned to a life of misery, colonial man Charles Becquerel faces a life already mapped out for him. But when Erika suddenly and inexplicably appears in his life, he senses an unexpected change. Though from two different centuries, Erika and Charles find themselves in a romance that defies time itself. But will their love for each ...