February New North and South American History books

• The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others 50 years
  
  The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others 50 years: E169.12.C4819 R47 2019
  Author(s): Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Neil Smith, Noam Chomsky
  London : UCL Press 2019.
  
  With the publication of ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century ago, Noam Chomsky burst onto the US political scene as a leading critic of the war in Vietnam. Privilege, he argues, brings with it the responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies, but our intellectual culture only pays lip-service to this ideal. The essay has been described as ‘the single most influential piece of anti-war literature’ of the Vietnam War period. Since then, Chomsky has continued to equip a growing international audience with the facts and arguments needed to understand – and change – our world. According to The New York Times, Chomsky ‘may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today’. This book revisits ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ half a century on. It includes six new essays written to celebrate Chomsky’s famous intervention and explore its relevance in today’s world. Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight, Milan Rai and Neil Smith have studied and written about Chomsky’s thought for many years, while Craig Murray and Jackie Walker describe the personal price they have paid for speaking out. The book finishes with Chomsky’s recollections of the background to the original publication of his essay, followed by extensive commentary from him on its 50th anniversary.
  
  
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
  
  Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion: E169.12 .T63 2019
  Author(s): Jia Tolentino
  New York : Random House [2019]
  
  NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time.”—Vulture FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HARVARD CRIMSON AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Chicago Tribune • The Washington Post • NPR • Variety • Esquire • Vox • Elle • Glamour • GQ • Good Housekeeping • The Paris Review • Paste • Town & Country • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews • BookRiot • Shelf Awareness Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
  
  
• Trump and Iran: From Containment to Confrontation
  
  Trump and Iran: From Containment to Confrontation: E183.8.I55 E58 2020
  Author(s): Nader Entessar, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi
  Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books [2020]
  
  The authors contend that a US-Iran war is probable but not inevitable because of the role of several intervening variables, such as the prohibitively high costs of such a war and its cascading effects. They also discuss how both sides can take important but difficult steps to avert a war.
  
  
• The Boundless Sea: Self and History
  
  The Boundless Sea: Self and History: E184.A75 O379 2019
  Author(s): Gary Y. Okihiro
  Oakland, California : University of California Press [2019]
  
  The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y. Okihiro’s most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro’s previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time, memoir and history, and the historian and the writing of history. Okihiro uses himself—from Okinawan roots, growing up on a sugar plantation in Hawai'i, researching in Botswana, and teaching in California—to reveal the historian’s craft involving diverse methodologies and subject matters. Okihiro’s imaginative narrative weaves back and forth through decades and across vast spatial and societal differences, theorized as historical formations, to critique history’s conventions. Taking its title from a translation of the author’s surname, The Boundless Sea is a deeply personal and reflective volume that challenges how we think about time and space, notions of history.
  
  
• Race Man: The Collected Works of Julian Bond, 1960-2015
  
  Race Man: The Collected Works of Julian Bond, 1960-2015: E185.615 .B586 2020
  Author(s): Julian Bond
  San Francisco : City Lights Books 2020.
  
  An inspiring, historic collection of writings from one of America's most important civil rights leaders.
  
  
• The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics
  
  The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics: E185.615 .P473 2019
  Author(s): Davin L. Phoenix
  Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2019.
  
  Anger is a powerful mobilizing force in American politics on both sides of the political aisle, but does it motivate all groups equally? This book offers a new conceptualization of anger as a political resource that mobilizes black and white Americans differentially to exacerbate political inequality. Drawing on survey data from the last forty years, experiments, and rhetoric analysis, Phoenix finds that - from Reagan to Trump - black Americans register significantly less anger than their white counterparts and that anger (in contrast to pride) has a weaker mobilizing effect on their political participation. The book examines both the causes of this and the consequences. Pointing to black Americans' tempered expectations of politics and the stigmas associated with black anger, it shows how race and lived experience moderate the emergence of emotions and their impact on behavior. The book makes multiple theoretical contributions and offers important practical insights for political strategy.
  
  
• A Black Women's History of the United States
  
  A Black Women's History of the United States: E185.86 .B475 2020
  Author(s): Daina Ramey Berry, Kali Nicole Gross
  Boston : Beacon Press [2020]
  
  A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
  
  
• The American Revolution: A World War
  
  The American Revolution: A World War: E269.F67 A48 2018
  Author(s): David Allison, Larrie D. Ferreiro
  Washington, DC : Smithsonian Books [2018]
  
  An illustrated collection of essays that explores the international dimensions of the American Revolution and its legacies in both America and around the world The American Revolution: A World War argues that contrary to popular opinion, the American Revolution was not just a simple battle for independence in which the American colonists waged a "David versus Goliath" fight to overthrow their British rulers. Instead, the essays in the book illustrate how the American Revolution was a much more complicated and interesting conflict. It was an extension of larger skirmishes among the global superpowers in Europe, chiefly Britain, Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic. Amid these ongoing conflicts, Britain's focus was often pulled away from the war in America as it fought to preserve its more lucrative colonial interests in the Caribbean and India. The book, the illustrated companion volume to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibition of the same name, touches on this and other topics including overseas empires, economic rivalries, supremacy of the seas, European diplomacy, and more. Together the book's incisive text, full-color images, and topical sidebars underscore that America's fight for independence is most clearly comprehended as one of the first global struggles for power.
  
  
• Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War
  
  Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War: E415.9.F79 I67 2020
  Author(s): Steve Inskeep
  New York : Penguin Press 2020.
  
  Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
  
  
• Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition
  
  Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality: Clergy, African Americans, and Women United for Abolition: E415.9.L89 M66 2020
  Author(s): Jane Moore, William Moore
  Chicago : University of Illinois Press [2020]
  
  Antislavery white clergy and their congregations. Radicalized abolitionist women. African Americans committed to ending slavery through constitutional political action. These diverse groups attributed their common vision of a nation free from slavery to strong political and religious values. Owen Lovejoy's gregarious personality, formidable oratorical talent, probing political analysis, and profound religious convictions made him the powerful leader the coalition needed. Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging commitment to end slavery in Congress. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.
  
  
• Backcountry Slave Trader: William James Smith's Enterprise, 1844–1854
  
  Backcountry Slave Trader: William James Smith's Enterprise, 1844–1854: E442 .R28 2020
  Author(s): Philip Noel Racine, Frances Melton Racine
  Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books [2020]
  
  Backcountry Slave Trader explores the life of William James Smith, a South Carolina backcountry slave trader, whose entries in his business ledger and his correspondence were of unusual specificity. The authors’ analyze these entries and his correspondence, which they argue provide details about the institutional features of the domestic slave trade not found in earlier published works. The authors examine the attitude of Smith and how he conducted his business, and reveal that the interior slave trade and the characterization of the slave trader are more nuanced than previously thought.
  
  
• Harriet Tubman (L2) (National Geographic Readers)
  
  Harriet Tubman (L2) (National Geographic Readers): E444.T82 K725 2020
  Author(s): National Geographic Kids, Barbara Kramer
  Washington, DC : National Geographic Kids 2020.
  
  Find out about the life of Harriet Tubman and how her brave actions working to "conduct" the Underground Railroad helped the Union Army in the Civil War lead more than 700 slaves to freedom. Learn about Harriet Tubman's life, achievements, and the challenges she faced along the way. The Level 2 text provides accessible, yet wide-ranging information for independent readers. National Geographic Kids Readers have been a hit in the competitive beginning reader category, and this book builds on that success with the same careful text, brilliant photographs, and fun approach to high-interest biographies of fascinating people such as Harriet Tubman, that has proved to be a winning formula with kids.
  
  
• Gettysburg's Most Hellish Battleground: The Devil's Den, July 2, 1863
  
  Gettysburg's Most Hellish Battleground: The Devil's Den, July 2, 1863: E475.53 .T828 2019
  Author(s): Phillip Thomas Tucker
  [Charleston, South Carolina] : America Through Time 2019
  
  During the crucial three days of combat at Gettysburg, the most nightmarish place on the entire battlefield was appropriately named the Devil's Den. This jumble of huge boulders situated at the southern end of Houck's Ridge was truly a hell on earth during the decisive afternoon of July 2, 1863. The tenacious struggle that raged beyond control at the battle-line's southern end was all-important, because the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge anchored the left flank of the over-extended Union battle-line, before Federal troops occupied Little Round Top to the east. The battle-hardened veterans of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's First Corps captured this vital sector-- the first Union left flank--in one of the few Southern successes of the second day, after some of the war's most bitter fighting. Nevertheless, the dramatic story of the successful turning of the first Union left flank has been long overlooked and ignored largely because of the giant historical shadow cast by the more famous struggle at Little Round Top, which was only the second and last fight for the southern flank of both armies on July 2. Therefore, the important contest for possession of the first Union left flank at the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge was crucial on the bloody afternoon that decided the fate of America.
  
  
• Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons
  
  Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons: E615 .K88 2019
  Author(s): Evan A. Kutzler
  Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press [2019]
  
  From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. Living by Inches is the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic building blocks of human experience--their five senses. From the first whiffs of a prison warehouse to the taste of cornbread and the feeling of lice, captivity assaulted prisoners' perceptions of their environments and themselves. Evan A. Kutzler demonstrates that the sensory experience of imprisonment produced an inner struggle for men who sought to preserve their bodies, their minds, and their sense of self as distinct from the fundamentally uncivilized and filthy environments surrounding them. From the mundane to the horrific, these men survived the daily experiences of captivity by adjusting to their circumstances, even if these transformations worried prisoners about what type of men they were becoming.
  
  
• The Emotional Life of the Great Depression
  
  The Emotional Life of the Great Depression: E801 .M37 2019
  Author(s): John Marsh
  Oxford, United Kingdom ; Oxford University Press 2019.
  
  The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, this volume explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens's record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII's abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright's Native Son. The result is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling.
  
  
• The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
  
  The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties: E839.5 .C333 2020
  Author(s): Christopher Caldwell
  New York : Simon & Schuster 2020.
  
  A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and Internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
  
  
• Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office
  
  Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office: E912 .H46 2020
  Author(s): Susan Hennessey, Benjamin Wittes
  New York : Farrar Straus and Giroux 2020.
  
  The definitive account of how Donald Trump has wielded the powers of the American presidency The extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies. From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the “invaluable” (The New York Times) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors’ misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own? By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.
  
  
• American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency
  
  American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency: E912 .M38 2020
  Author(s): Gerardo Marti
  Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield [2020]
  
  American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency is a careful exploration of the forces that led to the election of the 45th president of the United States.
  
  
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
  
  A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America: E912 .R83 2020
  Author(s): Philip Rucker, Carol Leonnig
  New York : Penguin Press 2020.
  
  Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners, provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump's unique presidency with shocking new reporting and insight into its implications. "I alone can fix it." So went Donald J. Trump's march to the presidency on July 21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet over the subsequent years, as he has undertaken the actual work of the commander in chief, it has been hard to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal, investigation, and constant bluster. It would be all too easy to mistake Trump's first term for one of pure and uninhibited chaos, but there were patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the Trump administration is loyalty - not to the country, but to the president himself - and Trump's North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy. Leonnig and Rucker, with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., tell of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. Relying on scores of exclusive new interviews with some of the most senior members of the Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses, the authors reveal the forty-fifth president up close, taking readers inside Robert Mueller's Russia investigation as well as the president's own hap-hazard but ultimately successful legal defense. Here for the first time certain officials who have felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president or to divulge what they witnessed in a position of trust tell the truth for the benefit of history. This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement - but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America's democracy and its common heart as a nation.
  
  
• Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse
  
  Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse: F104.O36 W35 2019
  Author(s): Carolyn Wakeman
  Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press [2019]
  
  The history inscribed in New England's meetinghouses waits to be told. There, colonists gathered for required worship on the Sabbath, for town meetings, and for court hearings. There, ministers and local officials, many of them slave owners, spoke about salvation, liberty, and justice. There, women before the Civil War found a role and a purpose outside their households. This innovative exploration of a coastal Connecticut town, birthplace of two governors and a Supreme Court Chief Justice, retrieves the voices preserved in record books and sermons and the intimate views conveyed in women's letters. Told through the words of those whose lives the meetinghouse shaped, Forgotten Voices uncovers a hidden past. It begins with the displacement of Indigenous people in the area before Europeans arrived, continues with disputes over worship and witchcraft in the early colonial settlement, and looks ahead to the use of Connecticut's most iconic white church as a refuge and sanctuary. Relying on the resources of local archives, the contents of family attics, and the extensive records of the Congregational Church, this community portrait details the long ignored genocide and enslaved people and reshapes prevailing ideas about history's makers. Meticulously researched and including 75 color illustrations, Forgotten Voices will be of interest to anyone exploring the roots of community life in New England. The book is the joint project of the Old Lyme meetinghouse and the Florence Griswold Museum. The museum will host a major exhibit in 20192020, exploring the role of the meetinghouse.
  
  
• Open House: 35 Historic Upstate New York Homes
  
  Open House: 35 Historic Upstate New York Homes: F126.8 .D55 2020
  Author(s): Chuck D'imperio
  Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press 2020.
  
  Celebrated Upstate New York author Chuck D’Imperio takes readers on a unique tour of some of the most fascinating and little-known historic homes across the state. From the stunning neoclassical mansion of the Clarke family tucked away on a hill in Cooperstown to the ramshackle Catskill Mountains cottage of famed naturalist John Burroughs, this book offers the architectural and historic background of New York’s more famous residences. Each one has an intriguing story, and D’Imperio invites you to learn not only about the homes but also about the influential people who lived in them. With detailed information on visiting hours, directions, and the author’s own notes, this guidebook is essential reading for all New York State history buffs and the ideal companion for your next Upstate road trip.
  
  
• Smithville
  
  Smithville: F144.S6 M33 2019
  Author(s): Dennis McDonald
  Charleston, South Carolina : Arcadia Publishing [2019]
  
  In 1865, industrialist/inventor Hezekiah Bradley Smith purchased Shreveville, an abandoned textile mill and town located along the Rancocas Creek in Burlington County, for $20,000. He renamed the town Smithville and moved many workers from his Lowell, Massachusetts, plant to the new location, rebuilt the factory, and prepared it for the manufacture of his patented iron woodworking machinery. H.B. Smith began to improve the aging housing in the surrounding village. He opened a school and, later, constructed a new school building. Smith erected a boardinghouse for factory workers that contained shops and a concert hall. Through farming on land adjacent to his mansion, he made fresh produce and milk available to his workers. Smith's company also expanded into new industries by working with outside inventors, like George Washington Pressey, who needed a manufacturer for his American Star Bicycle. Later, Arthur Hotchkiss contacted the company to build the world's first bicycle railroad to transport workers from Mount Holly to the Smithville factory. This book captures life in the village and factory, memorializing the intertwining lives of the Smithville workers and H.B. Smith through photographs.
  
  
• Hidden History of Northwestern Pennsylvania
  
  Hidden History of Northwestern Pennsylvania: F149 .H55 2019
  Author(s): Jessica Hilburn
  Charleston, SC : The History Press 2019.
  
  From unsolved murders and ghastly disasters to medicinal water and sports legends, Northwestern Pennsylvania has a rich and diverse history. Titusville native John Heisman shaped football into the recognizable sport that it is today, and his namesake is honored on the Heisman Trophy. Girard's Charlotte and Libbie Battles broke glass ceilings by becoming early female titans of business and banking in the region. Marx Toys in Erie County found success in crafting affordable popular toys for the masses and became the largest toy company in the world. The horrific Ashtabula train disaster of 1876 was the worst train incident in history to that point, with more than ninety lives lost. Join author Jessica Hilburn as she reveals the shrouded history of Northwestern Pennsylvania.
  
  
• Lost Mount Penn: Wineries, Railroads and Resorts of Reading
  
  Lost Mount Penn: Wineries, Railroads and Resorts of Reading: F158 .B3 M33 2019
  Author(s): Mike Madaio
  Charleston, SC : The History Press [2019].
  
  German immigrants of the nineteenth century brought their traditions of winemaking and mouthwatering cuisine to the slopes of Mount Penn high above Reading. With a Santa Claus beard and a long-stemmed pipe, the hermit of Mount Penn, Louis Kuechler, founded Kuechler's Roost, where travelers flocked for feasts, literary soirees and free-flowing local wine. The opening of the Mount Penn Gravity Railroad brought a flurry of tourists from around the nation and fueled the creation of resorts throughout the countryside. Spuhler's Hotel hosted renowned pig roasts from noon until midnight. The fresh waters of Lauterbach Springs attracted wine and outdoor enthusiasts alike. Author Mike Madaio explores the vibrant society and culinary culture that made Mount Penn one of the best-known resort regions in the country until financial difficulties and the passage of Prohibition spelled its end.
  
  
• Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South
  
  Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South: F206.5 .S68 2018
  Author(s): Mark Sloan, Mark Long
  Charleston, S.C. : Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art College of Charleston [2018]
  
  
  
  
• Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems: A Theoretical Approach
  
  Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems: A Theoretical Approach: F1219.3.W94 I54 2019
  Author(s): Jerome A. Offner, Katarzyna Mikulksa
  Louisville : University Press of Colorado [2019]
  
  Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems reports new results and insights into the meaning of the rich and varied content of indigenous American graphic expression and culture.
  
  
• The Aztecs
  
  The Aztecs: F1219.73 .A96313 2019
  Author(s): Inés de Castro, Doris Kurella, Martin Berger
  Stuttgart : Hirmer; Museum Volkenkunde; Weltmuseum; Linden-Museum [2019]
  
  Five hundred years ago, the landing of Hernán Cortés in Mexico marked the end of the Aztec Empire. This volume presents the wealth of this culture with spectacular, sometimes unpublished finds: rare feathered shields, impressive stone sculptures, precious mosaic masks and goldwork as well as brilliantly coloured illustrated manuscripts bring the world of the Aztecs to life. The publication provides comprehensive insight into the fascinating history of the Aztec Empire and takes into account the latest results of research and archaeology. Renowned experts tell of the political, societal and economic structures, of cultural achievements such as the complex calendar system and the Aztec language, and of religious rites. Precious objects from the magnificent furnishings of the palace of Emperor Moctezuma and the main temple Templo Mayor, including recently discovered sacrificial offerings that have never previously been exhibited, bear witness to the high standards of Aztec art and craftsmanship. Exhibition: Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Germany (12.10.2019 - 03.05.2020) / Weltmuseum Wien, Austria (24.06.2020 - 10.01.2021).
  
  
• Approaches to Monumental Landscapes of the Ancient Maya
  
  Approaches to Monumental Landscapes of the Ancient Maya: F1435 .A674 2020
  Author(s): Diane Z. Chase
  Gainesville : University Press of Florida [2020]
  
  This volume brings together a wide spectrum of new approaches to ancient Maya studies in an innovative exploration of how the Preclassic and Classic Maya shaped their world. Moving beyond the towering temples and palaces typically associated with the Maya civilization, contributors present unconventional examples of monumental Maya landscapes. Featuring studies from across the central Maya lowlands, Belize, and the northern and central Maya highlands and spanning over 10,000 years of human occupation in the region, these chapters show how the word "monumental" can be used to describe natural and constructed landscapes, political and economic landscapes, and ritual and sacred landscapes. Examples include a massive system of aqueducts and canals at the Kaminaljuyu site, a vast arena designed for public spectacle at Chan Chich, and even the complex realms of Maya cosmology as represented by the ritual cave at Las Cuevas. By including physical, conceptual, and symbolic ways monumentality pervaded ancient Maya culture, this volume broadens traditional understandings of how the Maya interacted with their environment and provides exciting analytical perspectives to guide future study. A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase
  
  
• Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary
  
  Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary: F1788.22.S26 S57 2020
  Author(s): Tiffany A. Sippial
  Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press [2020]
  
  Celia Sanchez Manduley (1920–1980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution. Clad in her military fatigues, this "first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra" is seen in many photographs alongside Fidel Castro. Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties, initially as an arms runner and later as a combatant. She was one of Castro's closest confidants, perhaps lover, and went on to serve as a high-ranking government official and international ambassador. Since her death, Sanchez has been revered as a national icon, cultivated and guarded by the Cuban government. With almost unprecedented access to Sanchez's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany A. Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals. Sippial reveals the scope and depth of Sanchez's power and influence within the Cuban revolution, as well as her struggles with violence, her political development, and the sacrifices required by her status as a leader and "New Woman." Using the tools of feminist biography, cultural history, and the politics of memory, Sippial reveals how Sanchez strategically crafted her own legacy within a history still dominated by bearded men in fatigues.
  
  

Other new North and South American History books

• What you gonna do when the world's on fire? / : E185.615 .W264 2020
• Precious places, : F158.6 .P743 2008 v.6
• Precious places, : F158.6 .P743 2008 v.7
• Precious places, : F158.6 .P743 2008 v.8
• Con ojos de mujer : relatos en medio de la guerra / Millán Cruz, José Fernando author.: F2279 .M55 2019
• ¡Aplaca, Señor, tu ira! : lo maravilloso y lo imaginario en Lima colonial / Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando, 1961- author.: F3601.3 .I93 2018