Awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award (2007).Described by New York Times critic John Rockwell as ''one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer,'' Ben Johnston reconceives familiar idioms--ranging from neoclassicism and serialism to jazz and southern hymnody--using just intonation. Johnston studied with Darius Milhaud, Harry ......
In this close study of a key figure in the history of technology, Leonard K. Eaton examines Hardy Cross's training, his work, his teaching, and his ideas, demonstrating how his achievements represent a pivotal moment in the history of structural engineering. During Cross's tenure at the University of Illinois (1921-37), he developed the ''moment ......
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) is an American icon. Most famous for his military marches, the composer bandmaster led a disciplined group of devoted musicians on numerous American tours and around the world, shaping a new cultural landscape. Paul Bierley has spent forty years documenting every aspect of the ''March King's'' band: its history, its ......
H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a literary lion throughout his career, publishing more than one hundred books, including classics such as War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine. Though best remembered for his science fiction, Wells was also a prolific sketcher who frequently enlivened his correspondence and marginalia with ......
Music's inclusivity--its potential to unite cultures, disciplines, and individuals--defined the life and career of Lou Harrison (1917-2003). Beyond studying with leading composers of the avant-garde such as Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, conducting Charles Ives's Pulitzer Prize-winning Third Symphony, and staging high-profile percussion ......
This volume gathers the best previously unpublished and uncollected writings on Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln scholarship by one of his great biographers, Benjamin P. Thomas. A skilled historian and a masterful storyteller himself, Thomas was widely regarded as the greatest Lincoln historian of his generation. With these essays, he combines ......
In 1901, the young Winnifred Eaton arrived in New York City with literary ambitions, journalistic experience, and the manuscript for A Japanese Nightingale, the novel that would sell many thousands of copies and make her famous. Hers is a real Horatio Alger story, with fascinating added dimensions of race and gender. While commercially successful ......
Born the tenth child of a poor Southern sharecropper and barely able to read or write, Jesse Owens would nevertheless go on to win an unprecedented four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, becoming an international superstar overnight and exploding Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy in the process. William J. Baker's Jesse Owens is the most ......
Eddie Rickenbacker epitomized the American spirit in the twentieth century. Daring, skilled, and ruggedmoving fast and defying deathhe drove race cars in the early days of the automobile, then flew canvas-over-wooden-frame aeroplanes over France in the Great War, downing twenty-six enemy flyers and emerging at war's end as the nation's ace of ......
