American Notes

Download or read book These Truths: A History of the United States written by Jill Lepore and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

Download or read book American Notes written by Rudyard Kipling and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Notes on a Foreign Country written by Suzy Hansen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

Download or read book Nobody's Son written by Luis Alberto Urrea and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother, Urrea moved to San Diego at age three. In this memoir of his childhood, Urrea describes his experiences growing up in the barrio and his search for cultural identity.

Download or read book Class Notes written by Adolph Reed Jr. and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic and deeply prescient collection that explores the multifaceted nature of race, class, and identity in America, from one of our most insightful and iconoclastic intellectuals Hailed by Publishers Weekly for its “forceful” and “bracing opinions on race and politics,” Class Notes is a collection of critic Adolph Reed Jr.’s clearest thinking on matters of race, class, and other American dilemmas. With barbed wit, Reed takes aim against the solipsistic, individualistic approaches of identity politics, and in favor of class-based political interpretation and action. Reed leaves no topic untouched, from the myth that there exists a particular kind of “Black Anti-Semitism,” to the grift perpetuated by commentators who claim to speak for groups solely based on their identity categories. Adolph Reed Jr. remains one of our most controversial and necessary interpreters of American politics. These essays illustrate why Reed is “the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender” (Katha Pollitt). Class Notes is a classic text that signposts a path for the Left—out of essentialist gridlock and into meaningful, goal-oriented mass politics.

Download or read book American Notes, and Reprinted Pieces written by Charles Dickens and published by . This book was released on 1868 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Notes from No Man's Land written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man’s Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man’s Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time.