Rapid Readers' Advisory: History

Documents the efforts of the first American ambassador to Hitler's Germany, William E. Dodd, to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapo-chief Rudolf Diels. #Diplomats #Historians #Germany #UnitedStates

On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end. #WorldWarII #WW2 #WWII #War #English #Biographical #Government #eBook

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes--they were mutineers. #GreatBritain #Mutiny #Shipwreck

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery. It's now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It's also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with--and often profited from--slavery's perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought. #Banking #Economics #SouthernHistory #Slavery #USHistory #eBook

The author dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns. #Civilization #Ethnology #Humanity #SocialEvolution

"Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston's hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an ethnography that explores how the interaction between artists, audiences, music, and place create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian hip hop artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area's hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is an incisive portrait of dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space. A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers an insider's look at a unique musical culture." #AfricanAmericans #BlackHistory #ChoppedandScrewed #HipHop #Music #Rap #Texas #eBook

"On April 27, 1997, Richard Lance McLaren and his followers in the so-called "Republic of Texas (ROT)" militia held Joe and Margaret Ann Rowe hostage inside their own home at the Davis Mountain Resort, near Fort Davis, Texas, and demanded the release of two jailed ROT members Jo Ann Turner and Robert Jonathan Scheidt. McLaren's demand initiated a seven-day standoff with local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers that came to be called the "Republic of Texas War." #GovernmentResistance #MilitiaMovements #Secessionists

Presents a true account of the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. #Osage #Indians #NativeAmericans #Indigenous #Murder #Homicide #PoliceInvestigation #FBI #eBook

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