American High

Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's war-fighting decisions since the inception of an all-volunteer force? In this volume, Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser examine the question of whether and how American soldiers have been exploited in this way. Robillard and Strawser offer an original theory of "moral exploitation".

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization - a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.

No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776 King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and other patriot leaders shared the king's fixation with the Hudson.

Historian Sean Wilentz presents two key insights that together reveal a clearer, much-needed vision of American political history. First, partisanship has almost always been a feature of American history and in fact has made possible the nation's greatest social reforms. There is little to be gained from a "postpartisan" political world. Second, the recent attention to economic inequality has a long history. From the founders' generation to the present, America's egalitarian tradition has appeared and reappeared like an underground river.

Before Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King was identified with Moses, African Americans identified those who challenged racial oppression in America with Samson. In Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper tell the story of how this biblical character became an icon of African American literature.

High Drama explores rock climbing's transformation from a pursuit of select anti-establishment vagabonds to a sport embraced by competitors of all ages, social classes, and backgrounds. Climbing magazine's John Burgman weaves a multi-layered story of traditionalists and opportunists, grassroots organizers and business-minded developers, free-spirited rebels and rigorously coached athletes. Deeply reported and compellingly told, this is a celebration of climbing and the pivotal figures who made its growth possible....

Think you know Elizabeth Pipko? Guess again. She's been described by many as a rising star in the conservative movement, but how did she get here? And more importantly, did she ever plan to? In Finding My Place, Elizabeth takes us back to the beginning. As the daughter of immigrants and a proud religious Jew, Elizabeth dives into the core of what drives her: the sacrifices of her parents and grandparents and all that they had to endure to make sure that she had the opportunity to live the American dream.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

In 1765, as the Stamp Act riled eastern seaports, frontiersmen clashed with the British Empire over another issue: Indian relations. When British officials launched a diplomatic expedition into the American interior to open trade with the Indian warrior Pontiac, the Black Boys formed to stop it and led an uprising that threatened the future of Britain's empire. Clashing with traders, diplomats, Native warriors, and imperious British officials, the Black Boys evolved into an organized political movement that resisted the Crown years before the Declaration of Independence.

A satirical series of reports from a young progressive student to the DNC, outlining ways to undermine the conservative movement and create a progressive nation.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

Ben Kuroki was a twenty-four-year-old Japanese American farm boy whose heritage was never a problem in remote Nebraska—until Pearl Harbor. Among the millions of Americans who flocked to military stations to enlist, Ben wanted to avenge the attack, reclaim his family honor, and prove his patriotism. But as anti-Japanese sentiment soared, Ben had to fight to be allowed to fight for America. And fight he did.

Royal children no longer desire merely the throne of their kingdom. The prize they seek is a seat on the High Council as a God. The quake of footsteps from the divine shape the fabric of the realm. These All Beings walk among mortals and their children hold the titles of king and queen. When blessed blood is threatened, lines are drawn. Aron Barre II, a newly crowned ruler, is thrusted in the middle of a conflict between the rivaling kingdoms of the Fallows. The political journey he embarks on will change the course of Caldonia forever.

In 1932, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend's flight lesson. It changed her life. In less than a year, a girl with a wicked sense of humor, a newfound love of flying, and a tough can-do attitude earned her pilot's license and headed for China to help against invading Japanese forces. In time, Hazel would become the first Asian American to fly with the Women Airforce Service Pilots. As thrilling as it may have been, it wasn't easy.

This is not how seventeen-year-old Gil imagined beginning his senior year—on the subway dressed in a tie and khakis headed towards Manhattan instead of his old public school in Brooklyn. Augustin Prep may only be a borough away, but the exclusive private school feels like it's a different world entirely compared to Gil's predominately Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn. If it weren't for the partial scholarship, the school's robotic program and the chance for a better future, Gil wouldn't have even considered going.

New York, 1804. America's beloved Alexander Hamilton lies dead after a duel with Aaron Burr. Meanwhile, Eliza Hamilton's eighteen-year-old son, Alexander Jr., was seen fighting with a man in a tavern the night before his father's duel and quickly comes under suspicion for murder when the man turns up dead. Eliza searches for ways to clear her son's name, even as she is grieving, but as she combs through her late husband's papers, she finds evidence of a plot to steal money from the government during his tenure as secretary of state.

When we think of '70s cinema, we think of classics like The Godfather and Taxi Driver...but the riches found in the overlooked B-movies of the time, rolled out wherever they might find an audience, unexpectedly tell an eye-opening story about post-Watergate, post-Vietnam America. Revisiting the films that don't make the Academy Award montages, Charles Taylor finds a treasury many of us have forgotten, movies that in fact "unlock the secrets of the times".

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to describe the population of the colony. This response included an often-overlooked segment of the population: Native Americans, who made up one-fourth of all enslaved people in the colony. Yet it was not long before these descriptions of enslaved Native people all but disappeared from the archive. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native people were crucial to the development of South Carolina's economy and culture.

High Tension is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's battle against the "Power Trust", an elaborate Wall Street-controlled web of holding companies, to electrify all of America. Here is the tale of how FDR's efforts brought affordable electricity to all Americans, powered the industrial might that won World War II, and established a model for public-private solutions today in areas such as transportation infrastructure, broadband, and health care.

Kelly Hopkins is ready to break away, from her small apartment, loneliness, and most important, her past. Struggling to cope with her parents’ double murder five years prior, she’s finally ready to leave her reality-TV-show-addicted grandmother and the tense reality of being half-white in Koreatown. Receiving a scholarship from Columbia University, it is time to achieve her dreams of becoming a successful lawyer. Nothing can break her steadfast focus - that is, until she meets Ian.