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With a new epilogue that discusses the revelations of former CIA employee Edward Snowden, this powerful accounting of intelligence abuses committed by the CIA from the Cold War through the war on terror reveals why such abuses and attempts to conceal them

Asking tough questions and connecting the dots across decades of suspicious events, from the Kennedy assassinations to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, this book raises crucial questions about the consequences of Americans' unwillingness to suspect high gove

This engrossing biography of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC founder Harland Sanders tells a uniquely American story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who launched one of the world's most successful brands - and then ended up as a mere symbol for the corporation that bought him out

Offering an intriguing new approach to American cultural history through one of its enduring icons, Larzer Ziff traces the rise and flourishing of an ideal type once represented by such figures as George Washington and Tom Sawyer-a type immensely popular before antiheroes like Holden Caulfield captured our imagination.

Sun Ra said he came from Saturn. Known on earth for his inventive music and extravagant stage shows, he pioneered free-form improvisation in an ensemble setting with the devoted band he called the "Arkestra.? Sun Ra took jazz from the inner city to outer space, infusing traditional swing with far-out harmonies, rhythms, and sounds. Described as the father of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra created "space music? as a means of building a better future for American blacks here on earth.A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism offers a spirited introduction to the life and work of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra's wide-ranging creative output?music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry?and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.

From the New York Timesbestselling historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, ';[a] compact summation of our nation's monetary history' (Shepherd Express). The world runs on the US dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the creditand credibilityof the federal government? In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the powerand the enormous risksof the dollar's worldwide reign.

The author of The Whiskey Rebellion "e;dig[s] beneath history's surface and note[s] both the populist and anti-populist dimensions of the nation's founding"e; (Library Journal).Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax "e;constitutional conservatism"e; lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America's founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissenting from both right-wing claims and certain liberal preconceptions, Founding Finance brings to life the violent conflicts over economics, class, and finance that played directly, and in many ways ironically, into the hardball politics of forming the nation and ratifying the Constitution-conflicts that still continue to affect our politics, legislation, and debate today.Mixing lively narrative with fresh views of America's founders, William Hogeland offers a new perspective on America's economic infancy: foreclosure crises that make our current one look mild; investment bubbles in land and securities that drove rich men to high-risk borrowing and mad displays of ostentation before dropping them into debtors' prisons; depressions longer and deeper than the great one of the twentieth century; crony mercantilism, war profiteering, and government corruption that undermine any nostalgia for a virtuous early republic; and predatory lending of scarce cash at exorbitant, unregulated rates, which forced people into bankruptcy, landlessness, and working in the factories and on the commercial farms of their creditors. This story exposes and corrects a perpetual historical denial-by movements across the political spectrum-of America's all-important founding economic clashes, a denial that weakens and cheapens public discourse on American finance just when we need it most.

This biography of the singer, actor, and fearless anti-racism activist is "e;so engaging that readers will crave a sequel"e; (Kirkus Reviews).A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II-from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael-Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive study of this multitalented artist. She sets Belafonte's compelling story within a history of American race relations, black theater and film history, McCarthy-era hysteria, and the challenges of introducing multifaceted black culture in a moment of expanding media possibilities and constrained political expression. Smith traces Belafonte's roots in the radical politics of the 1940s, his careful negotiation of the complex challenges of the Cold War 1950s, and his full flowering as a civil rights advocate and internationally acclaimed performer in the 1960s. In Smith's account, Belafonte emerges as a relentless activist, a questing intellectual, and a tireless organizer-and a performer who never shied away from the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet.

This wide-ranging study examines the ever-evolving forms of Christianity in the US, and why this constant reinvention is a vital part of American faith. Christianity takes an astonishing variety of forms in America: from traditional chapels to modern megachurches, from evangelical fellowships to social-action groups, and from Pentecostal faith to apocalyptic movements. Stephen Cox argues that radical and unpredictable change is one of the few dependable features of Christianity in America. It is in a necessary and ongoing state of revolution and has been throughout our history. Cox explores how both Catholic and Protestant churches have evolved in ways that would make them seem alien to their past adherents. He traces the rise of uniquely American movements, from the Mormons to the Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, and brings to life the vivid personalitiesAimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, and many otherswho have taken the gospel to the masses. Cox also sheds new light on such issues as American Christians' constantly changing political involvements, their controversial revisions in the style and substance of worship, and their chronic expectation that God is about to intervene conclusively in human life. Asserting that ';a church that doesn't promise new beginnings can never prosper in America,' Cox demonstrates that American Christianity must be seen not as a sociological phenomenon but as the ever-changing story of individual seekers.

';[Shindler] tells the story of her year wearing the crown while offering an incisive history and analysis of an always-controversial beauty contest.' Kirkus Reviews In Being Miss America, Kate Shindle interweaves an engrossing, witty memoir of her year as Miss America 1998 with a fascinating history of the pageant. She explores what it means to take on the mantle of America's ';ideal,' especially considering the evolution of the American female identity since the pageant's inception. Shindle profiles winners and organization leaders and recounts important moments in the pageant's story, with a special focus on Miss America's iconoclasts, including Bess Myerson (1945), the only Jewish Miss America; Yolande Betbeze (1951), who crusaded against the pageant's pinup image; and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (1987), a working-class woman from Michigan who wanted to merge her famous title with her work as an oncology nurse. Shindle's own account of her work as an AIDS activistand finding ways to circumvent the ';gown and crown' stereotypes of Miss America in order to talk honestly with high school students about safer sexilluminates both the challenges and the opportunities that keep young women competing to become Miss America. ';Kate Shindle's sharply observed, smart, and heartbreaking take on Miss America will be embraced by pageant super fans and should be required reading for everyone who's thought about what it takes to be America's ideal.' Jennifer Weiner, New York Times-bestselling author ';This memoir offers a captivating cultural history of the last 100 years in America through the lens of the Miss America Pageant and its white-knuckled struggle to remain relevant.' Library Journal