Books on U.S. History

They Called Us Enemy is a 2019 graphic memoir written by author, actor, and activist George Takei and illustrated by Harmony Becker. The story chronicles Takei’s childhood experience in the Japanese concentration camps created by the United States during World War II. Takei frames the narrative with a modern-day talk delivered at the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who presided over the country during the war and issued Executive Order 9066, which empowered the US... Read They Called Us Enemy Summary

The Yellow House is a nonfiction memoir published in 2019 by the American author Sarah M. Broom. In a narrative centered around her childhood home, “The Yellow House,” Broom chronicles the history of New Orleans through three generations of her family. The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best debut book.Plot SummaryIn 1961, Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, becomes a widow at the... Read The Yellow House Summary

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Thirteen Days is Robert Kennedy’s personal account of the Cuban missile crisis.As the Attorney General of the United States and President’s Kennedy’s brother and most trusted confidant, Robert Kennedy played a significant role in that critical period. The first-person narrative is organized into titled sections, rather than chapters, and proceeds chronologically, describing the meetings, conversations, developments, and decisions that shaped the American response to the crisis.The chronicle begins on the morning of Tuesday, October 16... Read Thirteen Days Summary

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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is a nonfiction book published in 2008 by Drew Gilpin Faust, an American historian and the first woman to serve as president of Harvard University. A finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, This Republic of Suffering details how mass death affected the lives of survivors during and after the Civil War. Other works by Drew Gilpin Faust include Mothers of... Read This Republic of Suffering Summary

Through My Eyes is the autobiography of Ruby Bridges. In 1960, Bridges became the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana following a court mandate for the state to desegregate its public school system. Louisiana trailed segregation effort in neighboring states, such as the nine Black high school students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.Bridges’s autobiography, published in... Read Through My Eyes Summary

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To Be a Slave is a nonfiction children’s book written by Julius Lester and published in 1968. In 1969, the book was named a John Newbery Honor Book in recognition of its important contribution to children’s literature.The book focuses on the history of enslavement in the United States. Julius Lester compiled slave narratives and wrote his own historical commentary to accompany them. Lester was writing in the context of the civil rights movement of the... Read To Be a Slave Summary

Ernest Hemingway’s best-selling yet poorly reviewed 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not, reflects his growing disillusionment with the world following his experiences in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Written in piecemeal format during his travels, the novel was originally published as two separate short stories and a novella, and this disjointed formation is apparent in the continuity of the plot. Featuring Hemingway’s classic minimalism, the novel offers both the story of Harry Morgan... Read To Have And Have Not Summary

Published in 1997, Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War is a history of working-class African-American women’s lives in Atlanta, Georgia, from Emancipation to World War I. The text examines the interplay between the racial repression African-American women faced during this time and the resistance they enacted as they sought to exercise their freedom as laborers. The book is winner of several awards, including: the... Read To 'Joy My Freedom Summary

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