Retired Secret Service agent Clint Hill brings history to life with this portrait of the American presidency. Hill delivers the perspective of an everyman who saw some of the most historic moments of the 20th century during his seventeen years protecting the most powerful office in the nation. Hill walked alongside Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, seeing them through a long, tumultuous era: the Cold War; the Cuban Missile...

"After a middle-class Republican childhood and a few years as a Communist sympathizer, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for almost fifty years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. Day went to jail challenging the draft and the war in Vietnam. She was critical of capitalism and foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern...

"Buddhism-influenced essays, stories, and reviews by National Book Award winner Charles R. Johnson. This wide and varied collection of essays, reviews, and short stories by the renowned author Charles Johnson offers incisive views on politics, race, and Buddhism. Johnson notes that in his life the two activities that have anchored him and reinforce each other are creative production and spiritual practice. This book is a crystallization of what he...

Using interviews and rare archival footage, this chronicles Lewis's 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health care reform, and immigration. Using present-day interviews with Lewis, now 80 years old, it explores his childhood experiences, his inspiring family, and his meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. It also includes interviews with political leaders, colleagues, and...

Includes 100 songs for celebrating twenty-seven different holidays.

Aretha Franklin began life as the golden daughter of a progressive and promiscuous Baptist preacher. Raised without her mother, she was a gospel prodigy who gave birth to two sons in her teens and left them and her native Detroit for New York, where she struggled to find her true voice. She found fame, fortune, and that remarkable voice in 1967 with "Respect" and a rapid-fire string of hits. Aretha turned the industry on its head by refueling pop...

"A top Washington journalist recounts the dramatic political battle to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that created modern America, on the fiftieth anniversary of its passageIt was a turbulent time in America--a time of sit-ins, freedom rides, a March on Washington and a governor standing in the schoolhouse door--when John F. Kennedy sent Congress a bill to bar racial discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations. Countless...

"The day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Jane Elliott, a third-grade schoolteacher in rural Iowa, tried out a shocking experiment to show the scorching impact of racism on children. Elliott separated her students according to the color of their eyes. Those with brown eyes would lord over those with blue eyes. The brown-eyed students were given permission to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. The...

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, Hartman reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history. The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger, one torn from family,...

Offers an insight into Alistair Cooke's character and life, with his reflections on the great, the good, and the bad, covering everything from Korea, the Civil Rights Movement, JFK, Watergate, the moon landing, right up to the war in Iraq. --