Ten Movies at a Time: A 350-Film Journey Through Hollywood and America 1930-1970

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North America: Journey Through Time

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No Time to Quit: Pioneer America Seen Through the Life of Rocky Mountain Man Uncle Dick Wootton

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Letter from America Penguin

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When Alistair Cooke retired in March 2004 and then died a few weeks later, he was acclaimed by many as one of the greatest broadcasters of all time. His Letters from America, which began in 1946 and continued uninterrupted every week until early 2004, kept the world in touch with what was happening in Cooke's wry, liberal and humane style. This selection, made largely by Cooke himself and supplemented by his literary executor, gives us the very best of these legendary broadcasts. Over half have never appeared in print before. It is a remarkable portrait of a continent - and a man. Fred Astaire 26 June 1987 Movie stars don't make it. Nor statesmen. Not Prime Ministers, or dictators unless they die in office. Not even a world-famous rock star, unless he's assassinated. But last Monday, none of the three national television networks hesitated about the story that would lead the evening news. On millions of little screens in this country and I don't doubt in many other countries around the world, the first shots were of an imp, a graceful wraith, a firefly in impeccable white tie and tails. And for much longer than the lead story usually runs, for a full five minutes on NBC, we were given a loving retrospective of the dead man, ending with the firm declaration by Nureyev that 'He was not just the best ballroom dancer, or tap dancer, he was simply the greatest, most imaginative, dancer of our time.' And the newsmen were right to remind us of the immortal comment of the Hollywood mogul, who, with the no-nonsense directness of an expert, reported on Fred Astaire's first film test: 'Has enormous ears, can't act, can't sing, dances a little.' That Hollywood mogul, long gone, spent his life ducking round corners, to avoid being identified as the oaf who looked in the sky and never saw the brightest star. However, that expert opinion was, as the lawyers say, controlling at the time and in Astaire's first movies, there was no thought of allowing him to act or sing. But not for long. And thanks to the invention of television, and the need to fill vast stretches of the afternoon and night with old movies, it has been possible for my daughter, for instance, to claim Fred Astaire as her favourite film star from the evidence of all the movies he made fifteen, ten, five, three years before she was born. When I got the news on Monday evening here, and realized with immediate professional satisfaction that the BBC had smartly on hand a musical obituary tribute to him I put together eight years ago, I couldn't help recalling the casual, comic way this and similar radio obituaries came about. I was in London at the end of 1979, and Richard Rodgers - one of the two or three greatest of American songwriters - had just died, I believe on New Year's Eve or the night before. Britons, by then, were getting accustomed, without pain, to making what used to be a two-day Christmas holiday into a ten-day much-needed rest. For all laborious research purposes, the BBC was shut up. And there was no retrospective programme on the life and music of Richard Rodgers in the BBC's archives. Of course, in a gramophone library that looks like an annex to the Pentagon, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of recordings of his songs. The SOS went out to a writer, a producer, and - I presume - a man who had the key to the gramophone library. The silent place was unlocked, and the three of them laboured through the day to put together an hour's tribute to Richard Rodgers. It was done. It was competent enough, but rushed to an impossible deadline. This hasty improvisation happened just when my own music producer and I, who had enjoyed working together for six years or so on American popular music, were wondering what we could offer next. We'd done a sketch history of jazz, through individuals. We'd gone through all the popular music of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and were stumped for a new series, at which point I asked if we mightn't go and talk to the head of the channel, network or whatever. We went in, and the genial boss asked me what we had in mind. 'A morgue,' I said. A what? 'Where', I asked, 'is your morgue?' He was not familiar with the word, a newspaper term. 'Well,' I said, 'all newspapers have them.' 'How d'you mean?' 'If, I explained, 'Mrs Thatcher died tonight and you woke up and read a two-sentence obituary, you'd be rightly outraged. But if you saw a two-page obituary, you'd take it for granted. When d'you suppose it was written?' 'That's right,' he said thoughtfully. What I was proposing was a morgue of the Americans eminent in popular music and jazz, so they'd not get caught short again. A splendid idea, the man said; pick your stars. We made a list and were commissioned to return to America and finish all of them. Naturally, we looked at a calendar, and birthdates of Hoagy Carmichael, Earl Hines, Harold Arlen, Ethel Merman, Stephane Grappelli, Ella Fitzgerald. But then, in a spasm of panic, we thought of two giants - if the word can be used about two comparative midgets: Irving Berlin and Fred Astaire. Berlin was then 91. And Fred Astaire was just crowding 80. The boss man, to whom the idea of a morgue had been, only a few minutes before, quaint if not morbid, wondered what we were waiting for. Better get busy, at once, on Berlin and then on Astaire. I remember doing the Astaire obit, then and there, while I was still in London. Meanwhile, we'd simply pray every night that the Lord would keep Irving Berlin breathing till I could get home and get busy. I remember being picked up in a car by a charming young girl to get to the BBC and record my Astaire narration - there wasn't a moment to lose. She asked me, in the car, what the script was that I was clutching. 'It's an obituary', I said, 'of Fred Astaire.' 'Fred Astaire,' she shrieked, 'dead?' and almost swerved into a bus. 'Of course, he's not dead,' I said, 'but he's going to be one day.' She, too, was new to the institution of a morgue. I recalled that when I was a correspondent for a British paper in the United States, and when for example. Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State, the first cable I had from my editor said, 'Welcome Acheson obituary soonest.' How ghoulish, she said. I imagine that to two generations at least, it's assumed that Fred Astaire, this slim, pop-eyed newcomer to Hollywood who couldn't act, couldn't sing, danced a little, only made a fool of the mogul through the movies he made, with Ginger Rogers, in the mid- and late 1930s. But long before then, from the mid-1920s on, he was already an incomparable star - as a dancer - to theatre audiences both in New York and in London. Perhaps more in London than anywhere, certainly in the 1920s, with the early Gershwin hits, Funny Face and Lady Be Good, and lastly, in 1933, in Cole Porter's Gay Divorce (which was the title of the theatre show; Hollywood would not then allow so shocking a title and called the movie version, The Gay Divorcee). Of all the thousands of words that have been written this week, and will be written, there is a passage I went back to on Tuesday night which, I think, as well as anything I know, sums up Astaire's overall appeal - the appeal that takes in but transcends one's admiration for his dancing and for his inimitably intimate singing style. This was written in November 1933, by a theatre critic who had so little feel for dancing that he marvelled why London should go on about 'Mr Astaire's doing well enough what the Tiller Girls at Blackpool do superbly'. The critic, the writer, was James Agate, the irascible, dogmatic, opinionated but brilliant journalist, and I believe the best critic of acting we have had this century. He is writing his review of Gay Divorce, after declaring yet again his contempt for musical comedy as an entertainment for idiots, deploring the play's plot and the acting and hoping 'Micawberishly, for something to turn up'. 'Presently,' he wrote, 'Mr Fred Astaire obliged, and there is really no more to be said.' Except

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The Women of Now: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX

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The history of NOW-its organization, trials, and revolutionary mission-told through the work of three members.In the summer of 1966, crammed into a DC hotel suite and passing paper cups of liquor, twenty-eight women hatched a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique, and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had quietly pulled away attendees from the State Womens' Commissions annual conference. Frustrated with government inertia, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite and advocate for all women. Inspired, challenged, skeptical, they debated the idea late into the night and the next day. By the end of the conference, the National Organization of Women was born.In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles the growth and influence of this foundational group through three relatively unknown core members: Aileen Hernandez, a federal official of Jamaican-American heritage; Mary Jean Collins, a working-class union organizer and Chicago Catholic; and Patricia Hill Burnett, a Michigan Republican and former beauty queen. From its inception in 1966 through the tumultuous training ground of the 1970s, NOW's feminism flooded the nation, shifted American culture and politics, and clashed with conservative forces, presaging our fractured national landscape. These women built an organization that was radical in its time, and built it to last. This is the first time anyone has told their story.Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images

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The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America's Greatest Sleight-Of-Hand Artist Smithsonian Inst Pr

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A famous magician's journey to find the greatest cardsharp ever evokes the forgotten world of magic where Americans found escape during the Great Depression It has the nostalgic quality of an old-fashioned fable, but Karl Johnson's "The Magician and the Cardsharp is a true story that lovingly re-creates the sparkle of a vanished world. Here, set against the backdrop of America struggling through the Depression, is the world of magic, a realm of stars, sleight of hand, and sin where dreams could be realized-or stolen away. Following the Crash of '29, Dai Vernon, known by magicians as "the man who fooled Houdini," is tramping down Midwestern backroads, barely making ends meet. While swapping secrets with a Mexican gambler, he hears of a guy he doesn't quite believe is real-a legendary mystery man who deals perfectly from the center of the deck and who locals call the greatest cardsharp of all time. Determined to find the reclusive genius, Vernon sets out on a journey through America's shady, slick, and sinful side-from mob-run Kansas City through railroad towns that looked sleepy only in the daytime. Does he find the sharp? Well, Karl Johnson did-after years of research into Vernon's colorful quest, research that led him to places he never knew existed. Johnson takes us to the cardsharp's doorstep and shows us how he bestowed on Vernon the greatest secret in magic. "The Magician and the Cardsharp is a unique and endlessly entertaining piece of history that reveals the artistry and obsession of a special breed of American showmen.

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Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois) Oxford University Press Inc

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W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works.Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

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Pearson English Readers: Level 3 Marvel Captain America Civil War + Code PEARSON Education Limited

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Pearson English Readers bring language learning to life through the joy of reading. Well-written stories entertain us, make us think, and keep our interest page after page. Pearson English Readers offer teenage and adult learners a huge range of titles, all featuring carefully graded language to make them accessible to learners of all abilities. Through the imagination of some of the world

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South to America Harper Collins Publishers

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South-and thus of America-by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." -Isabel WilkersonAn essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South-and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand AmericaWe all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A Recommended Read from: The New York Times - TIME - Oprah Daily - USA Today - Vulture - Essence - Esquire - W Magazine - Atlanta Journal-Constitution - PopSugar - Book Riot - Chicago Review of Books - Electric Literature - Lit Hub

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Geronimo Stilton 1: Discovery of America, The Papercutz

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In this series of graphic novels, Geronimo travels through time to defend history from his arch nemesis, the Pirate Cats. These calculating cats travel back in time to make themselves supreme rulers of Mouse Island. Geronimo and co. join Christopher Columbus on his voyage from Italy to the New World in 1492 to stop the Pirate Cats.

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South to America HarperCollins

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South-and thus of America-by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration." -Isabel WilkersonAn essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South-and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand AmericaWe all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole.This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A Recommended Read from: The New York Times - TIME - Oprah Daily - USA Today - Vulture - Essence - Esquire - W Magazine - Atlanta Journal-Constitution - PopSugar - Book Riot - Chicago Review of Books - Electric Literature - Lit Hub

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Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710-1840 University of California Press

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The Europeans who first settled North America were endlessly intrigued by the indigenous people they found there; even before the colonials began to record the landscape, they drew and painted Indians. This study offers a new visual perspective on westward expansion through a survey of the major Indian images painted by Euro-American artists before and after the American Revolution. William H. Truettner's accessible readings of paintings by artists such as Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bird King, and George Catlin relate these images to social and political events of the time and tell us much about how North American tribes would fare as they fought to survive during the second half of the nineteenth century.

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Open Veins of Latin America Monthly Review Press,U.S.

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The classic survey of Latin America's social and cultural history, with a new introduction by Isabel AllendeSince its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende

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Ancient Landscapes of Western North America Springer International Publishing AG

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Allow yourself to be taken back into deep geologic time when strange creatures roamed the Earth and Western North America looked completely unlike the modern landscape. Volcanic islands stretched from Mexico to Alaska, most of the Pacific Rim didn't exist yet, at least not as widespread dry land; terranes drifted from across the Pacific to dock on Western Americas' shores creating mountains and more volcanic activity. Landscapes were transposed north or south by thousands of kilometers along huge fault systems. Follow these events through paleogeographic maps that look like satellite views of ancient Earth. Accompanying text takes the reader into the science behind these maps and the geologic history that they portray. The maps and text unfold the complex geologic history of the region as never seen before.

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Soul of America Random House USA Inc

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear.Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women's rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson's crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear-a struggle that continues even now.While the American story has not always-or even often-been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, "The good news is that we have come through such darkness before"-as, time and again, Lincoln's better angels have found a way to prevail.Praise for The Soul of America"Appalled by the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump, and shaken by the deadly white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville in 2017, Meacham returns to other moments in our history when fear and division seemed rampant. He wants to remind us that the current political turmoil is not unprecedented, that as a nation we have survived times worse than this. . . . Meacham tries to summon the better angels by looking back at when America truly has been great. He is effective as ever at writing history for a broad readership."-The New York Times Book Review"This is a brilliant, fascinating, timely, and above all profoundly important book."-Walter Isaacson

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