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"At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices...
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Blends together history and nature writing to provide a new perspective on Yellowstone and what it has come to represent, explaining the park's relationship to America throughout history.
"As America's premier national park, Yellowstone today stands for wilderness, ecological science, and natural beauty. But those associations, and others, have evolved since the park's founding in 1872. Evocatively written and masterfully researched, [this book]...
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Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections...
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In this book, the author, deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the ten most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a Navy SEAL. He uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun. He revisits turning points in American history, including the single sniper shot...
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The account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad-the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and...
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Bread, cash, dough, loot, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is, in fact, the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential back story behind all history.Through Ferguson's expert...
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"From the masters of storytelling-meets-science and co-authors of Quackery, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks-how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us. Written in the authors' lively and accessible style, chapters include page-turning medical stories about a particular disease or virus-smallpox, Bubonic plague, polio, HIV-that...
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A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time-listed in accessible and succinct form-by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the "Hundred Best Books" to the "Ten Greatest Thinkers" to the "Ten Greatest Poets," here is a concise collection of the world's most significant knowledge. For the better part of a century, Will Durant dwelled upon-and wrote about-the most significant eras, individuals,...
11) The end is always near: apocalyptic moments, from the Bronze Age collapse to nuclear near misses
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"A journey back in time that explores what happened -- and what could have happened -- from creator of the wildly-popular podcast Hardcore History and 2019 winner of the iHeartRadio Best History Podcast Award"--
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A gripping narrative of the second and final war of independence that secured the nation's permanence and established its claim to the entire continent, by the author of the enormously successful and acclaimed Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution.This dramatic account of the War of 1812 fills a surprising gap in the popular literature of the nation's formative years. It is this war, followed closely on the War of Independence, that...
13) Don't know much about history: everything you need to know about American history, but never learned
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"From Columbus through to the twenty-first century, Don't Know Much About History takes readers on a tour through more than 500 years of American life. Drawing on the latest scholarship and new archaeological discoveries, Davis presents a thorough overview of American history that is exciting, interesting and fun to learn"--Publisher's description.
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A concise survey of the culture and civilization of mankind, The Lessons of History is the result of a lifetime of research from Pulitzer Prize–winning historians Will and Ariel Durant.
The authors devoted five decades to the study of world history and philosophy, culminating in the masterful eleven-volume Story of Civilization. In this compact summation of their work, Will and Ariel Durant share the vital and profound lessons of our
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Between 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried one thousand Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. The Missile Next Door tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards-and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending.
By scattering the missiles...
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"In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the twenty-six-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte fur junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success. It is now available in eighteen languages across the world." "Toward the end of his long life, Gombrich...
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"From the lost empires of the Sahara to today's frenzied global gold rush, a blazing exploration of the human love affair with gold by the award-winning author of Diamond. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the price of gold has skyrocketed--in three years more than doubling from $800 an ounce to $1900. This massive spike kicked off an unprecedented global gold-mining and exploration boom, much bigger than the Gold Rush of the 1800s. In Gold, acclaimed...
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In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight, " For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal....
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"As the Confederacy crumbled under the Union army's relentless "hammering, " Federal armies marched on the Rebels' remaining bastions in Alabama, the Carolinas, and Virginia. General William T. Sherman's battle-hardened army conducted a punitive campaign against the seat of the Rebellion, South Carolina, while General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to break the months-long siege at Petersburg, defended by Robert E. Lee's starving Army of Northern...