Learn American English

History is dramatic - and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in a compelling series aimed at young listeners. Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes, and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation.

Regardless of how wealthy or poor their parents are, all black boys must confront and surmount the "achievement gap": a divide that shows up not only in our sons' test scores, but in their social and emotional development, their physical well-being, and their outlook on life. As children, they score as high on cognitive tests as their peers, but at some point, the gap emerges. Why? This is the question Joe Brewster, M.D., and Michele Stephenson asked when their own son, Idris, began struggling in a new school.

Find out how to speak and understand English slang like a pro! These are the slang words and expressions used by native English speakers in the USA and Canada, on TV and in movies. Get American English Slang to improve your English quickly and easily. This list of English phrases and expressions will prove to be invaluable.

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.

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....

Even though he's best known for his successful PBS series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Fred Rogers never dreamed of working in television. In fact, he hated the very first program that he ever watched! Join author Diane Bailey as she takes listeners through the journey that brought Mister Rogers into our living rooms. From his childhood interest in puppet-making and music, to his courageous visit to Russia during the Cold War, this audiobook details Mister Rogers' quest for kindness and his gentle appeal to be more neighborly.

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.

Based upon a 10,000 year old oral tradition, these stories reflect three essential elements of the cumulative wisdom of Paula Underwood's Native American ancestors. "Who Speaks for Wolf" deals with the human impact on the Earth, "Winter White and Summer Gold" deals with planning for the future, "Many Circles, Many Paths" deals with living together in peace.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for 100 years.

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.

American lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman published his first book, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. Aimed at academics, it nonetheless gained a large popular audience. In it, Riesman explores the links between social character - the ways in which members of a society are similar to one another - and social structures. Riesman's work popularized sociology, helping to establish it as an academic discipline, and today it provides a fascinating window into the 1950s American psyche.

Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, became the scene of protests that pitted law enforcement against locals and Black Lives matter activists. The media firestorm has not waned, and, in fact, has grown stronger in light of all the recent violence by and against police officers nationwide. According to Ferguson's former police chief Tom Jackson, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of unrest and exploits the situation.

With My Face to the Enemy is one of the most provocative and wide-ranging anthologies on the Civil War to come along in years. Its illuminating essays examine the war from perspectives that were critical to its outcome - the larger-than-life personalities of its important players and the national strategies and key battle tactics that shaped the four-year-long crisis.

In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America’s so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university - in states from California to Maine - Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation’s founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good?

Alexander Hamilton, unlike many of the other founding fathers of the United States, was born outside of wedlock and was an orphan at the age of 13 after his mother died. He was thrown into the world, depending on the charity of friends and neighbors. That perhaps is one of the reasons why Alexander Hamilton was fiscally sensitive and always anxious about funding and finance, not only for himself but for the new nation of the United States, where he emigrated when he was in his late teens.

John Adams once wrote, “People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity.” That was very much Adams’ experience. Having been born in the English colony of Massachusetts in 1735, he not only witnessed a new nation emerging from the shell of infancy, but he also participated in its growing pains. Adams was a man who was frequently asked to assume roles in which he had little experience, like that of a diplomat to France and England. In a sense, he was a part of the vanguard that the government had thrown into the fray.

In their best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explore the culture of fragility and safetyism that has invaded American universities since 2013 and the underlying causes behind it. (Disclaimer: This is NOT the original book. If you’re looking for the original book, it is available from Amazon and Audible.)

Everyone was rather surprised when small-town farmer Jimmy Carter first announced that he’d be running for president in 1976. When Jimmy told his mother, she replied, “President of what?” But this former naval officer and governor of Georgia was ready for the role. Jimmy Carter went on to become one of America’s most beloved political figures thanks to his honesty, strong faith, and compassion. Today, Jimmy Carter is remembered for his dedication to helping Americans through his extensive work as a philanthropist.

Before Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967, it was generally believed that the Revolution was driven both by social conflict between colonial settlers and the ruling British government, and by differences between classes in American society. Bailyn had a different view. He said that it was radical ideas that fired the American Revolution, and that the Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, and political struggle.

Want to start or grow a business but not getting any traction? Worried that you chose the wrong business idea? Entrepreneurship is a hard game to play, but it doesn't have to be as hard as many people make it out to be. Matthew Paulson outlines the business growth hacking and personal development shortcuts that multimillionaires use to get ahead of the game in Business Growth Day by Day.