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In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these "flag wars" reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War.

The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.

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Linderman traces each soldier's path from the exhilaration of enlistment to the disillusionment of battle to postwar alienation. He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now..
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As a teenager in Atlantic City in the 1960s, John O'Neill dreamed of becoming an FBI agent. Over the next four decades, his charisma, talent, and dedication catapulted him to the top echelons of the FBI in its fight against terrorism and drew him into a world of glamour, intrigue, and power.

Driven by an all-consuming desire to protect Americans, O'Neill rose through the FBI's ranks and played important roles in every major terrorism investigation of the 1990s, including the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the USS Cole in Yemen; the twin embassy attacks in Africa; and the capture of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. O'Neill's larger-than-life personality, hard-charging style, and insistent warnings against complacency won him both fervent admirers and bitter enemies among government officials and his crime-fighting colleagues.

In 1995, O'Neill became the first agent to recognize Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network as the single greatest terrorist threat to America. He campaigned relentlessly for increased cooperation between the CIA, the FBI, and U.S. and foreign governments, and made decisions that would change the face of counterterrorism. O'Neill won the respect of many powerful figures around the world and earned a legendary reputation as a bon vivant, an innovative leader, and a bridge builder of important alliances. But O'Neill's confident, charming public persona belied several professional disappointments and the growing strain of secretly maintaining a complex web of romantic relationships. When the FBI and the U.S. government continued to disregard his calls to connect the terror trail to bin Laden and his associates, O'Neill became even more disillusioned and ultimately resigned his post at the FBI. Just days later, John O'Neill perished helping others to safety on September 11, 2001, while on his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center. Ironically, as Louis Napoli of the joint terrorist task force said, "[O'Neill] chased bin Laden all over the world and bin Laden caught up with him." In The Man Who Warned America, Murray Weiss weaves groundbreaking insider insight and hundreds of hardhitting interviews into a masterful tale of John O'Neill's quest to save America.

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The sixth volume in one of the great ongoing works of American cultural history--Kevin Starr's monumental Americans and the California Dream--Embattled Dreams is a peerless work of cultural history following California in the years surrounding World War II.
During the 1940s California ascended to a new, more powerful role in the nation. Starr describes the vast expansion of the war industry and California's role as the "arsenal of democracy" (especially the significant part women played in the aviation industry). He examines the politics of the state: Earl Warren as the dominant political figure, the anti-Communist movement and "red baiting," and the early career of Richard Nixon. He also looks at culture, ranging from Hollywood to the counterculture, to film noir and detective stories. And he illuminates the harassment of Japanese immigrants and the shameful treatment of other minorities, especially Hispanics and blacks.
In Embattled Dreams, Starr again provides a spellbinding account of the Golden State, narrating California's transformation from a regional power to a dominant economic, social, and cultural force.
"With a novelist's eye for the telling detail, and a historian's grasp of the sweep of grand events.... [Starr's] got it all down.... I read the book with absorbed admiration."--Herman Wouk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War
"The scope of Starr's scholarship is breathtaking."--Atlantic Monthly
"A magnificent accomplishment."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Brilliant and epic social and cultural history."--Business Week
"Ebullient, nuanced, interdisciplinary history of the grandest kind."--San Francisco Chronicle.
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This sweeping work, at once a panoramic overview and an ambitious critical reinterpretation of European modernism, provides a bold new perspective on a movement that defined the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Walter L. Adamson embarks on a lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the avant-garde practices through which the modernist generations after 1900 resisted the rise of commodity culture as a threat to authentic cultural expression. Taking biographical approaches to numerous avant-garde leaders, Adamson charts the rise and fall of modernist aspirations in movements and individuals as diverse as Ruskin, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Purism, and the art critic Herbert Read. In conclusion, Adamson rises to the defense of the modernists, suggesting that their ideas are relevant to current efforts to think through what it might mean to create a vibrant, aesthetically satisfying form of cultural democracy..
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Twenty-four survivors of the Holocaust discuss how they embraced, concealed, rejected, or otherwise dealt with their Jewishness under the Nazis, and explore the implications of their decisions for the nature of human identity. 15,000 first printing. National ad/promo..
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American unions are weaker now than at any time in the past hundred years, with fewer than one in ten private-sector workers currently organized In "Labor Embattled", David Brody says this is a problem not only for the unions but also a disaster for American democracy and social justice. In a series of historically informed chapters, Brody explores recent developments affecting American workers in light of labor's past. Of special concern to him is the erosion of the rights of workers under the modern labor law, which he argues is rooted in the original formulation of the Wagner Act. Brody explains how the ideals of free labor, free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of contract have been interpreted and canonized in ways that unfailingly reduce the capacity for workers' collective action while silently removing impediments to employers coercion of workers.His lucid and passionate essays combine legal and labor history to reveal how laws designed to undergird workers' rights now essentially hamstring them. David Brody is professor emeritus of history at the University of California at Davis and Berkeley. He is the author of "Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth-Century Struggle" and many other books. This is a volume in "The Working Class in American History" series, edited by James Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein..
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