American Education

In the 1970s, Frank Lucas was the king of the Harlem drug trade, bringing in over a million dollars a day. He lived a glamorous life, hobnobbing with athletes, musicians, and politicians, but Lucas was a ruthless gangster. He was notorious for using the coffins of dead GIs to smuggle heroin into the United States, and, before being sentenced to 70 years in prison, he played a major role in the near death of New York City.

Drawn from the work of StoryCorps, the largest and most ambitious private oral history project in American history, comes this tapestry of the stories Americans have been sharing from their lives to leave behind to their loved ones.

How do Americans know that government papers are real? If you see an eagle holding a shield, and a pyramid with an eye above it, the papers are no fakes. Listen to Benjamin Franklin as he talks about the birth of the Great Seal in 1782 and why it's still so important to our country today.

If you are a young person, and you work hard enough, you can get a college degree and set yourself on the path to a good life, right? Not necessarily, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, and with Paying the Price, she shows in damning detail exactly why. Drawing on an unprecedented study of 3,000 young adults who entered public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008 with the support of federal aid and Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls.

How does the U.S. House of Representatives work? Discover who can be a representative, what they do, where they work, and more.

An explosive new look at the pressures on today's teachers and the pitfalls of school reform, Confessions of a Bad Teacher presents a passionate appeal to save public schools, before it's too late. When John Owens left a lucrative job to teach English at a public school in New York City's South Bronx, he thought he could do some good. Faced with a flood of struggling students, Owens devised ingenious ways to engage every last one. But as his students began to thrive under his tutelage, Owens found himself increasingly mired in a broken educational system.

In Enemy of the People, Marvin Kalb, an award-winning American journalist with more than six decades of experience both as a journalist and media observer, writes with passion about why we should fear for the future of American democracy because of the unrelenting attacks by the Trump administration on the press.

Rodgers vividly recreates Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken.

In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools.

In Hope and Healing, former Morehouse College president John Silvanus Wilson, Jr. looks to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to examine what it takes not only to survive as a relevant institution of higher education, but to thrive. Wilson draws on pivotal moments in the timelines of HBCUs and the work of past visionaries to yield important perspectives on the future of higher education and the role of HBCUs within it.

At 15, Victor Rios found himself a human target - flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life - putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD.

This insightful history explores the stereotype of Dallas Theological Seminary as an anti-intellectual stronghold of fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism. The tenures of the schools five presidents reveal the tensions that DTS, a blend of differing heritages and of opposing traditions, has experienced amid changes in American religious and cultural life.

Do you love traveling? During your travels, did you wish you could understand or communicate in the local language even a little bit? This audiobook will help you during your travels to any of the Spanish-speaking countries. Learn Spanish for American Tourists was written with an American in mind, the things they would look for, find important, and the general things most travelers need to know to communicate in the local language. Impress fellow travelers or the locals on your next trip!

In his thought-provoking and deeply moving book, Matthew Desmond tackles the issue of poverty in America through the lens of eviction. Desmond's Pulitzer Prize winning book follows the personal lives of several families and individuals struggling to survive in Milwaukee during the Great Recession. (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)

On April 4, 1968, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked the nation. Later that month, the Reverend John Brooks, a professor of theology at the College of the Holy Cross who shared Dr. King’s dream of an integrated society, drove up and down the East Coast searching for African American high school students to recruit to the school, young men he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas and Theodore Wells....

Learn 365 American English idioms in a fun and engaging way! Sound like a native speaker with these common idioms that are used in the USA and around the world. Find out how people speak English in real life. That’s where 365 American English Idioms comes in. You’ll see what the idiom means, the history behind it and then see how it’s used in some example sentences. It’s everything you need to "bone up" on your English vocabulary!

Have more confidence when speaking English at a meeting with clients, during a presentation or business lunch, or when making small talk with co-workers. And that's just to name a few of the situations that this business English book covers! Get your copy of Business English Vocabulary Builder 2 to improve your English quickly and easily.

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

Useful tips to help achieve a more professional level of speech. Our speech and voice can say as much about us as the clothes we wear, the car we drive, or even the newspapers and magazines we read.

Expresiva, enérgica y divertida, Sonia Sotomayor ha logrado convertir cada lucha de su vida en un triunfo. Nacida en el Bronx de padres inmigrantes de Puerto Rico, Sonia descubrió a los nueve años que tenía diabetes, una enfermedad grave ahora, pero aún más peligrosa hace cincuenta años. ¿Cómo afrontó la joven Sonia la devastadora noticia? Aprendió a administrarse sus inyecciones diarias de insulina y se empeñó en aprovechar al máximo su vida. Fue la popular serie de televisión de los años sesenta Perry Mason la que hizo que Sonia quisiera convertirse en abogada.