Frank Kearns and the ""Impossible Assignment"" for CBS News
Frank Kearns was the go-to guy at CBS News for dangerous stories in Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. By his own account, he was nearly killed 114 times. He took stories that nobody else wanted to cover and was challenged to get them on the air when nobody cared about this part of the world. But his stories were ......
Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, Michael Blumenthal discovers that she was not his biological mother, and that his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents. As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and ......
Original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as ways to resist hopelessness in response to the climate crisis. Almanac for the Anthropocene collects original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as beacons of resistance to ......
How Bobby Bowden's Ten Years at West Virginia University Helped Him Become One of the Winningest Coaches in College Football History
Bobby Bowden is considered one of the greatest football coaches in NCAA history with 377 wins, the second among Division I coaches. In his 44 seasons as a head coach, Bowden engineered 40 winning seasons, with an astonishing 33 consecutive winning seasons as head coach of the Florida State Seminoles (1976-2009). However, before his time in ......
American Bridge Patents: The First Century (1790-1890), thoroughly illustrated with dozens of photographs and reproductions, presents the findings of a two-decade long study of several thousand pages of patent documents collected from the U.S. Patent Office. The essays in this volume offer readers tremendous insight into the creativity that ......
Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy. American Energy Cinema explores how Hollywood movies have portrayed energy from the early film era to the present. Looking at classics like Giant, Silkwood, There Will Be Blood, and Matewan, and at quirkier fare like A Is for Atom and Convoy, it argues that films have ......
American Grief in Four Stages is a collection of stories that imagines trauma as a space in which language fails us and narrative escapes us. These stories play with form and explore the impossibility of elegy and the inability of our culture to communicate grief, or sympathy, outside of cliche. One narrator, for example, tries to understand her ......
A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular culture-and with old, weird America. At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywhere-then, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most ......
A History of Storer College from Slavery to Desegregation 1865-1955
In the first book-length study of Storer College, Dawne Raines Burke tells the story of the historically black institution from its Reconstruction origins to its demise in 1955. Established by Northern Baptists in the abolitionist flashpoint of Harpers Ferry, Storer was the first college open to African Americans in West Virginia, and it played a ......
