Books in the Discovering America series

With a new epilogue that discusses the revelations of former CIA employee Edward Snowden, this powerful accounting of intelligence abuses committed by the CIA from the Cold War through the war on terror reveals why such abuses and attempts to conceal them

Asking tough questions and connecting the dots across decades of suspicious events, from the Kennedy assassinations to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, this book raises crucial questions about the consequences of Americans' unwillingness to suspect high gove

This engrossing biography of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC founder Harland Sanders tells a uniquely American story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who launched one of the world's most successful brands - and then ended up as a mere symbol for the corporation that bought him out

Offering an intriguing new approach to American cultural history through one of its enduring icons, Larzer Ziff traces the rise and flourishing of an ideal type once represented by such figures as George Washington and Tom Sawyer-a type immensely popular before antiheroes like Holden Caulfield captured our imagination.

Surveying the range of Sun Ra's extraordinary creativity, this book explores how the father of Afrofuturism brought "space music" to a planet in need of transformation, supporting the aspirations of black people in an inhospitable white world.

From the New York Timesbestselling historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, ';[a] compact summation of our nation's monetary history' (Shepherd Express). The world runs on the US dollar. From Washington to Beijing, governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the dollar to conduct commerce and invest profitably and safely. But how did the greenback achieve this planetary dominance a mere century and a half after President Lincoln issued the first currency backed only by the creditand credibilityof the federal government? In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the powerand the enormous risksof the dollar's worldwide reign.

This biography of the singer, actor, and fearless anti-racism activist is "e;so engaging that readers will crave a sequel"e; (Kirkus Reviews).A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II-from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael-Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive study of this multitalented artist. She sets Belafonte's compelling story within a history of American race relations, black theater and film history, McCarthy-era hysteria, and the challenges of introducing multifaceted black culture in a moment of expanding media possibilities and constrained political expression. Smith traces Belafonte's roots in the radical politics of the 1940s, his careful negotiation of the complex challenges of the Cold War 1950s, and his full flowering as a civil rights advocate and internationally acclaimed performer in the 1960s. In Smith's account, Belafonte emerges as a relentless activist, a questing intellectual, and a tireless organizer-and a performer who never shied away from the dangerous crossroads where art and politics meet.