In American History What Was The

What's the best book on American history?

** Download or read the book in the format you want on this page **New York Times BestsellerIn the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself―a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas―"these truths," Jefferson called them―political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truthsobserves. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."127 illustrations

Who is the most hated person in American history?

I think that former Senator Joseph McCarthy inspires almost instantaneous exhibits of hatred (real or imagined) from the greatest number of Americans today.More than Nixon, John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, or James Earl Ray; and more than Obama. Someone earlier mentioned Obama, but for me Obama doesn’t inspire hatred or anything like it, instead consternation or a sense of perturbation.

What is the most unbiased book on American history?

Of course “bias” has various meanings; professional historians have legitimate biases that cause them to think some thinks are less important than others and thus, since space is at a premium, they leave things out. In recent years efforts to include women’s history, the history of various rights’ movements, environmental and labor history, technological change, etc. have been made so there are many volumes that are fair and balanced now.One alternative is to read more than one so you can read from the right, read "A Patriot's history of the United States."From the left, read "A People's history of the United States."Samuel Elliot Morison's "Oxford History of the American People" works if you don’t want to take the time to read multiple authors.There really is too much American history to cover in one book so follow up with your interests, the American Revolution, the Civil War, industrialization, WWII, Native Amerindians, the civil rights movements, etc.

What are some great books on Native American history?

The definitive work I would recommend that shows the spirit of Native Americans, as well as the defeat they suffered, is the classic, "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee". From Amazon, (I will leave the URL to connect t it,) it tells the story of the plight of Native Americans, and their struggles more eloquently than any text on the issue I have read. It is all fact, not fiction, and of course, opinions will be beckoned by any reader. It is not apologist, it is a story, and if there was one book to read to summarize the destruction of Native American Tribes and their territories, this is the seminal creed. IMO. AMAZON: "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, is Dee Brown's classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian culture during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold over four million copies in multiple editions and has been translated into seventeen languages.Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won, and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten, and so must be retold from time to time." To purchase, follow this link, to those that dare to read it, it is heartbreaking: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West: Dee Brown, Hampton Sides: http://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-He...