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Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the wr...
The 1960s was not just an era of civil rights, anti-war protest, women's liberation, hippies, marijuana, and rock festivals. The untold story of the 1960s is in fact about the New Right. For young conservatives the decade was about Barry Goldwater, Ayn Rand, an important war in the fight against communism, and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). In A Generation Divided, Rebecca Klatch examines the generation that came into political consciousness during the 1960s, telling the story of both the New Right and the New Left, and including the voices of women as well as men. The result is a riveting narrative of an extraordinary decade, of how politics became central to the identities of a generation of people, and how changes in the political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s affected this identity.
The fighting on the first day at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, was unexpected, heavy, confusing, and in many ways, decisive. Much of it consisted of short and often separate simultaneous engagements or “firefights,” a term soldiers often use to describe close, vicious, and bloody combat. Several books have studied this important inaugural day of Gettysburg, but none have done so from the perspective of the rank and file of both armies. John Michael Priest’s “Strong Men of the Regiment Sobbed Like Children”: John Reynolds’ I Corps at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863 rectifies this oversight in splendid style. When dawn broke on July 1, no one on either side could have conceived what was a...
On the eve of the Civil War, the Irish were one of America's largest ethnic groups, and approximately 150,000 fought for the Union. Analyzing letters and diaries written by soldiers and civilians; military, church, and diplomatic records; and community newspapers, Susannah Ural Bruce significantly expands the story of Irish-American Catholics in the Civil War, and reveals a complex picture of those who fought for the Union. While the population was diverse, many Irish Americans had dual loyalties to the U.S. and Ireland, which influenced their decisions to volunteer, fight, or end their military service. When the Union cause supported their interests in Ireland and America, large numbers of ...
The Battle of Gettysburg lasted only three days but involved more than 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. Seven thousand died outright on the battlefield; hundreds more later succumbed to their wounds. For each of these soldiers, family members somewhere waited anxiously. Some went to Gettysburg themselves in search of their wounded loved ones. Some were already present as soldiers themselves. In this book are extraordinary--and sometimes heartbreaking--stories of the strength of family ties during the Battle of Gettysburg. Excerpts from diaries, letters and other correspondence provide a firsthand account of the human drama of Gettsyburg on the battlefield and the home front.
July the third 1863 it seems, will forever be associated with an event known by almost everyone as “Pickett’s Charge” . . . the day more than 12,000 officers and men in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia charged forward at the Union defenses at Gettysburg. Almost since that day onward, the label given to that assault has focused on the commander of less than half of the troops who made the attack—Major General George Pickett. Pickett whose Division constituted only three of the nine brigades in the afternoon assault has become the namesake of the entire effort. Now, the story is told of the men from North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama who made that charge.
Lieutenant William H. Peel was 23 years old when Mississippi seceded from the Union, prompting him to join the 11th Mississippi Infantry, along with his younger brother Eli. Captured at the culmination of the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble Charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, Peel spent the remainder of his service at the officers' prison on Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay. By turns elegiac, tragic and often comic Peel's record of those months, along with his detailed account of the famous battle that led to his incarceration, is one of the gems of personal literature created during that most terrible of conflicts. The diary, now in the care of the Mississippi Archives, was transcribed by a Peel descendent who brings to this work an understanding of both the history and the family that shaped him, giving the modern reader a view inside Peel's world.
Today, when we hear or read of the Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862, attention is focused on the countless infantry charges up Marye's Height's into the artillery and rifles of the Confederate Army. Scenes of The Irish Brigade storming the rebel wall and of Richard Kirkland giving water to wounded men in blue dominate the Fredericksburg story. Yet as Francis O'Reilly, Fredericksburg Historian and author has stated for many years, the key to the entire Battle on December 13,1862 was the action downstream where Meade's Pennsylvania Reserves broke, for a short time, the Confederate lines attempting to carry out what many feel to have been Major General Ambrose E. Burnside's intended plan that day. Inspired by this fact and mindful that a book focusing solely on the "Meade Assault" had yet to be researched and written, Don Ernsberger has written the story of Meade's Breakthrough and the Confederate Response.
Why do social movements take the forms they do? How do activists' efforts and beliefs interact with the cultural and political contexts in which they work? This book considers the intersections of opportunities and identities, structures and cultures, in social movements.
Philadelphia, the birthplace of America, is the final resting place of some of the nation's greatest citizens. The burial grounds of Christ Church hold the remains of Benjamin Franklin and six other signers of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia pioneered the development of the rural cemetery with the establishment of Laurel Hill, eternal home to Gettysburg hero George Gordon Meade and thirty-nine other Civil War-era generals. In Philadelphia's Jewish, Catholic, and African American burial grounds rest such notable figures as Rebecca Gratz, model for the Jewish heroine of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe; John Barry, Catholic father of the U.S. Navy; and Octavius Catto, an African American civil-rights leader of the nineteenth century. Finally, there are the vanished cemeteries, such as Monument, Lafayette, and Franklin. Transformed into playgrounds and parking lots, these cemeteries were obliterated with sometimes horrific callousness. Philadelphia Graveyards and Cemeteries tells the intriguing history of these burial grounds, whether revered or long forgotten.