American Epic

American Epic PDF Author: Bernard MacMahon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501135600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In the 1920s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles and markets. The recordings they made of the ethnic groups of America helped democratize the nation and gave a voice to all its people: a woman picking cotton in Mississippi, a coal miner in Virginia, or a tobacco farmer in Tennessee could have his or her thoughts and feelings heard on records played in living rooms across the country. These records blended the intertwining strands of Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas and formed the bedrock for modern music as we know it. Today, virtually no documentation of these extraordinary events survives, and nearly 90 percent of the music masters have been destroyed. Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty spent years traveling around the U.S. on a mission to rescue this history, interviewing hundreds of families and scouring attics and basements, collecting vintage film footage and hundreds of photographs that haven't been seen in nearly a century. This written account continues the journey of the PBS television series and features additional stories, photographs, and artwork. It also contains contributions from many of the musicians who participated, including Taj Mahal, Nas, Willie Nelson, and Steve Martin, plus a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible adventure across America in search of these recordings and eyewitness accounts.

American Epic

American Epic PDF Author: Bernard MacMahon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501135600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1920s, as radio took over the pop music business, record companies were forced to leave their studios in major cities in search of new styles and markets. The recordings they made of the ethnic groups of America helped democratize the nation and gave a voice to all its people: a woman picking cotton in Mississippi, a coal miner in Virginia, or a tobacco farmer in Tennessee could have his or her thoughts and feelings heard on records played in living rooms across the country. These records blended the intertwining strands of Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas and formed the bedrock for modern music as we know it. Today, virtually no documentation of these extraordinary events survives, and nearly 90 percent of the music masters have been destroyed. Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty spent years traveling around the U.S. on a mission to rescue this history, interviewing hundreds of families and scouring attics and basements, collecting vintage film footage and hundreds of photographs that haven't been seen in nearly a century. This written account continues the journey of the PBS television series and features additional stories, photographs, and artwork. It also contains contributions from many of the musicians who participated, including Taj Mahal, Nas, Willie Nelson, and Steve Martin, plus a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible adventure across America in search of these recordings and eyewitness accounts.

American Epic

American Epic PDF Author: Garrett Epps
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199974764
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In 1987, E.L. Doctorow celebrated the Constitution's bicentennial by reading it. "It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand," he said. Distinguished legal scholar Garrett Epps--himself an award-winning novelist--disagrees. It's about 7,500 words. And Doctorow "missed a good deal of high rhetoric, many literary tropes, and even a trace of, if not wit, at least irony," he writes. Americans may venerate the Constitution, "but all too seldom is it read." In American Epic, Epps takes us through a complete reading of the Constitution--even the "boring" parts--to achieve an appreciation of its power and a holistic understanding of what it says. In this book he seeks not to provide a definitive interpretation, but to listen to the language and ponder its meaning. He draws on four modes of reading: scriptural, legal, lyric, and epic. The Constitution's first three words, for example, sound spiritual--but Epps finds them to be more aspirational than prayer-like. "Prayers are addressed to someone . . . either an earthly king or a divine lord, and great care is taken to name the addressee. . . . This does the reverse. The speaker is 'the people,' the words addressed to the world at large." He turns the Second Amendment into a poem to illuminate its ambiguity. He notices oddities and omissions. The Constitution lays out rules for presidential appointment of officers, for example, but not removal. Should the Senate approve each firing? Can it withdraw its "advice and consent" and force a resignation? And he challenges himself, as seen in his surprising discussion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in light of Article 4, which orders states to give "full faith and credit" to the acts of other states. Wry, original, and surprising, American Epic is a scholarly and literary tour de force.

The Bonus Army

The Bonus Army PDF Author: Paul Dickson
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486837246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Based on extensive research, this highly praised history recounts the 1932 march on Washington by 15,000 World War I veterans and the protest's role in the transformation of American society. "Recommended." — Library Journal.

The Bridge

The Bridge PDF Author: Hart Crane
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Like Whitman, Hart Crane strove in his poetry to embrace America, to distill an image of America.

Epic in American Culture

Epic in American Culture PDF Author: Christopher N. Phillips
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404893
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This book investigates the concept of what it means to be 'epic' and its form in American life, literature, and art from the country's early days.

The Fords

The Fords PDF Author: Peter Collier
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1893554325
Category : Automobile industry and trade
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
The Fords: An American Epic is the dramatic story of three generations of Fords and of the dramatic conflict between fathers and sons played out against the backdrop of America's greatest industrial empire. The story begins with Henry I, the mechanical wizard, tinkerer, and mad genius who drove the automobile into the heart of American life and conquered the world with it. But in the end he became an embittered crank who so possessively loved the company he built that when his son, Edsel, tried to change it to suit the times, Henry destroyed him. It was left to Edsel's son, Henry II, to avenge him and save the Ford Motor Company. From the details of Henry I's illicit affair, which produced an illegitimate son, to the life and loves of Hank the Deuce and his celebrated feud with Lee Iacocca, this is an engrossing account of a vital chapter in American history. The authors have added a new preface to this now classic work, showing how Henry II's line lost out to the line of his brother William Clay Ford in the quest to control the company in the twentieth century.

Orozco's American Epic

Orozco's American Epic PDF Author: Mary K. Coffey
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478002987
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

Blood Moon

Blood Moon PDF Author: John Sedgwick
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501128698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal. In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is “a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country” (Ian Frazier). Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.

The Epic of America

The Epic of America PDF Author: James Truslow Adams
Publisher: Simon Publications
ISBN: 9781931541336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
A beautifully written story of America's historical heritage, by one of the country's greatest historians.

My Life as a Native American

My Life as a Native American PDF Author: Ann H. Matzke
Publisher: Britannica Digital Learning
ISBN: 1615359591
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
Native Americans are always a big topic with students. What they hunted, the clothes they wore, tribal dances, and maps that show where the different tribes settled are all included in this book. Fact-filled text boxes give additional information on these unique peoples.