Booknotes: Stories from American History: Leading Historians on the Events That Shaped Our Country - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586480839 ISBN 13: 9781586480837

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2001

Synopsis

American history is replete with great and dramatic events, and in recent years a generation of great writers have brought these events to life. They have shared these stories with the viewers of the groundbreaking C-SPAN program, Booknotes, and here the best have been collected for readers to savor. Renowned writers and historians examine more than eighty unforgettable moments in American history, moments both celebrated and uncelebrated, from the Boston Tea Party to the Watergate break-in, from slavery to affirmative action, from Gettysburg to Iwo Jima.

Included are Annette Gordon-Reed on the different ages' reactions to the Jefferson-Hemings controversy, James M. McPherson on the rush to enlist to fight in the Civil War, Witold Rybczynski on the building of Central Park, Gina Kolata on the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, Nicholas Lemann on the "great migration" of Southern blacks to Northern cities, Tom Brokaw on the World War II generation, Norman Podhoretz on the rise of neoconservatism, Leonard Garment on Watergate, Richard Holbrooke on the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, and much more.

For Booknotes's famously devoted fans—and for anyone interested in American history—this is a wonderfully engaging compendium of information, opinion, and fascinating new perspectives.

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Lamb, the founding CEO of C-SPAN, has been the host of Booknotes since its inception in 1989. He has read each of the more than six hundred books that Booknotes has featured. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School-This book covers different facets of U.S. history from the Boston Tea Party to Dan Rostenkowski's fall from power, with the greatest emphasis on 20th-century events. Historians and participants discuss the most important aspects and the telling details of the events that they have analyzed. Based on the interviews on the C-SPAN program Booknotes, these essays are not the scholarly pieces that make history seem dry and dusty. (Students will find no footnotes here.) Andrew Young describes Martin Luther King, Jr.'s decision to go to jail in Birmingham, AL, in support of the people who were already imprisoned because "there was nothing else to do." Jack Rakove describes the Virginia Plan that was used as the basis for the Constitution as something the Virginians and Pennsylvanians cooked up while they were "sitting around Philadelphia waiting for the other delegations to appear." Each entry is no more than 8 to 10 pages in length. The colorful details will make these events, both great and small, come to life for today's readers.
Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1586480839
• ISBN 13: 9781586480837
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Lamb Brian