My Discovery of America


Book Description

In 1985, when Mowat tried to enter the United States for a book promotion tour, he was barred by the McCarran Act, a 1952 law enacted during the McCarthy era. This book, told with outraged but good humour, describes Mowat's fight against the ban.




My Discovery of America


Book Description

"Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s - creativity and advancement, a primitive futurism. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs." "Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms an inspired series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times."--BOOK JACKET.




The Discovery of the Americas


Book Description

"The Maestros do a real service here in presenting the more familiar explorers in the context of all the migrations that have populated the Western Hemisphere....An outstanding introduction."--Kirkus Reviews. "The dazzlingly clean and accurate prose and the exhilarating beauty of the pictures combine for an extraordinary achievement in both history and art."--School Library Journal.




Brown


Book Description

In this dazzling memoir, Richard Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America today. Rodriguez argues that America has been brown since its inception-since the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. But more than simply a book about race, Brown is about America in the broadest sense—a look at what our country is, full of surprising observations by a writer who is a marvelous stylist as well as a trenchant observer and thinker.




The Discovery of America by the Turks


Book Description

A Penguin Classic Published here for the first time in English in a brilliant translation by the peerless Gregory Rabassa, The Discovery of America by the Turks is a whimsical Brazilian take on The Taming of the Shrew that will remind readers why Jorge Amado is to Portuguese-American literature what Jorge Luis Borges is to Spanish-American literature. It follows the adventures of two Arab immigrants—“Turks,” as Brazilians call them—who arrive in the rough Brazilian frontier in 1903 and become involved in a merchant's farcical attempt to marry off his shrew of a daughter. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




Tocqueville's Discovery of America


Book Description

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America. Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war. Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville's Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.




Discovery of Ancient America


Book Description

Errata slip inserted. Bibliography: p. 135-136.




Lies My Teacher Told Me


Book Description

Criticizes the way history is presented in current textbooks, and suggests a more accurate approach to teaching American history.




Catch


Book Description

A couple of summers ago, armed with three baseball mitts (one lefty) and a tape recorder, Hartshorn traveled throughout every region of the country, looking for people who'd like to play a game of catch and talk about their lives. He traveled seven highways and spoke with scores of people, including a grandmother, a junk collector, even Spike Lee and Bob Costas. Woven together, the twenty-nine featured conversations reveal the many voices and values that make up the nation. In Catch we discover who we really are.




Eyewitness to America


Book Description

Thomas Jefferson complains about haggling over the Declaration of Independence ... Jack London guides us through the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake ... Langston Hughes visits the Scottsboro Boys on death row ... Andy Warhol paints the scene at Studio 54 ... John Seabrook receives e-mail from Bill Gates. Three hundred eyewitnesses -- some famous, some anonymous -- give their personal accounts of the great moments that make up our past, from Columbus to cyberspace, and infuse them with a freshness and urgency no historian can duplicate. David Colbert has brought together a multitude of voices to create a singularly rich American narrative. Here are the vivid impressions of men and women who were witnesses to and participants in these and other dramatic moments: the first colony in Virginia, the Salem witch trials, the Boston Tea Party, the Oklahoma land rush, the Scopes Trial, the bombing of Nagasaki, the lunch-counter sit-ins at the outset of the civil rights movement, New York City's Stonewall Riot, the fall of Saigon, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. With unparalleled and thrilling immediacy, these excerpts from diaries, private letters, memoirs, and newspapers paint a fascinating picture of the evolving drama of American life.