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This volume gathers the best previously unpublished and uncollected writings on Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln scholarship by one of his great biographers, Benjamin P. Thomas.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 ......
During the height of racist anti-Chinese U.S. immigration laws, illegal aliens were able to come into the States under false papers identifying them as the sons of those who had returned to China to marry and have children. American Paper Son is the story of one such Chinese immigrant who came to Wichita, Kansas, in 1935 as a thirteen-year-old ......
The first accurate and thorough biography of the man behind the myths of the Old West.Zane Grey was a disappointed aspirant to major league baseball and an unhappy dentist when he belatedly decided to take up writing at the age of thirty. He went on to become the most successful American author of the 1920s, a significant figure in the early ......
The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant
First published by Penn State Press in 1992, The Infortunate has become a staple for teachers and students of American history. William Moraley’s firsthand account of bound servitude provides a rare glimpse of life among the lower classes in England and the American colonies during the eighteenth century. In the decade since its ......
The Life of a Pennsylvania Railroad Engineman, 1904-1949
Set Up Running tells the story of a Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive engineer, Oscar P. Orr, who operated steam-powered freight and passenger trains throughout central Pennsylvania and south-central New York. From 1904 to 1949, Orr sat at the controls of many famous steam locomotives; moved trains loaded with coal, perishables, and ......
