Description: At a time when North Carolina's population is exploding and its economy is shifting profoundly, one of the state's leading economists applies the tools of his trade to chronicle these changes and to inform North Carolinians in easy-to-understand terms what to expect in the future.

Description: Will America come to own the twenty-first century? Will its power and ideas dominate the globe? Or will the United States buckle underneath the pressure of new international challenges?

This groundbreaking book looks at changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, a time in which the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or controversial. The volume brings together eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States. From the subterranean political shifts of the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this collection explores the political, social, and cultural contours of contemporary American life.

Description: The story of an industrial giant of the Gilded Age who looms tall over the colorless tycoons of today, H. Paul Jeffers's rollicking account of the life and times of "Diamond" Jim Brady is one of the most entertaining historical business narratives in recent memory. Born in 1856 into an Irish immigrant family who ran a saloon on the Lower East Side, Jim Brady had an early hunger for just about everything and the wherewithal to get it. At age 11, he went to work as a bellhop at the St. James Hotel, where the "genial, roly-poly, blue-eyed Irish youth" quickly ingratiated himself with the hotel's visitors and promptly spent his ample tips on food.

Paperback: 360 pages
Data: July 25, 2006
Format: PDF
Description: ...willingness to probe rather than pronounce is part of the collection's strength, as is the excitement of a taking up a good fight... they provide concrete suggestions for action and fresh thinking. -- The Women's Review of Books
With refreshing authority, passion, wit, clarity and outspokenness, these articles seek to encourage dialog about...such complex and provocative issues as the call for regulation/censorship of pornography by MacKinnon and Dworkin, the effects of Bowers v. Hardwick, and the distinctions between queer theory and lesbian and gay studies. -- Library Journal
This historic compilation is an important contribution to the field of sexual politics. -- Library Journal
Duggan and Hunter have been important voices in the sex wars. Their activism, dedication, and vision are amply demonstrated in the writings collected here. These indespensible documents are scholarly, passionate, sobering, and contain many pointed lessons that still scream for assimilation by mainstream feminism and other progressive constituencies. -- Gayle Rubin, University of California, Santa Cruz

Paperback: 309 pages
Data: February 15, 2002
Format: PDF
Description: As the author of works on advertising, materialism and modern culture, University of Florida professor Twitchell should have been the most immune to acquisitive desire while doing research in posh Rodeo Drive and Madison Avenue stores. That he was momentarily struck with passion by a Ralph Lauren tie not only demonstrates his humanity, but also underlines one of his theses: no one is above a bit of luxury lust. The reason for this, he says, is, "We understand each other not by sharing religion, politics, or ideas. We share branded things. We speak the Esperanto of advertising, luxe populi." These are sentiments voiced by many who study consumer culture, but Twitchell addresses conspicuous consumption in a new way, free of the superior tone often adopted by his academic peers. He embarks on a course of fieldwork that is both absurdist and charming, as he chats up Fendi salespeople and stands slack-jawed in the lobby of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. With the research done, but the tie unbought, he comes away with insights about the American quest for luxury products and provides a history of such yearning: "The balderdash of cloistered academics aside, human beings did not suddenly become materialistic. We have always been desirous of things." Many of those things, in the recent past and definitely in the present, have been imbued with an aura of opulence and indulgence, Twitchell posits, leading to a kind of emotional satisfaction through shopping, especially for items outside one's budget. With its intelligence and wit, Twitchell's exploration of consumerism belongs in every shopping bag.

Paperback: 48 pages
Data: October 24, 2006
Format: PDF
Description: In July 1863, after having observed a forward column of Union General George G. Meade's cavalry, General Robert E. Lee sent his 75,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia to meet the 97,000 strong Union Army of the Potomac.

Of more than 2,000 land engagements of the American Civil War, Gettysburg ranks as one of the most horrific and devastating battles; more men actually fought and died on this battlefield than in any other encounter on North American soil and the battle itself marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

Paperback: 208 pages
Data: October 31, 2002
Format: PDF
Description: "The best work so far on this increasingly important holiday."--Publishers Weekly

"Performs the heroic service of taking all the stuff in stores seriously, as instruments in the creation of a new unreligious holiday of some significance, if the retailers are to be believed.... They say that the devil is in the details, and Rogers is a connoisseur of delicious tidbits of macabre."--New York Times Book Review

Paperback: 192 pages
Data: August 2003
Format: PDF
Description:

Paperback: 416 pages
Data: December 1, 2002
Format: PDF
Description: Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the late 1920s through the early years of the Cold War.

During the early 1930s, most Americans' conception of dictatorship focused on the dictator. Whether viewed as heroic or horrific, the dictator was represented as a figure of great, masculine power and effectiveness. As the Great Depression gripped the United States, a few people--including conservative members of the press and some Hollywood filmmakers--even dared to suggest that dictatorship might be the answer to America's social problems.

Publisher: ABC-Clio Inc
Language: English
ISBN: 1576072223
Paperback: 316 pages
Data: August 1, 2000
Format: CHM
Description: To orient yourself in the maze of religious groups, movements, practices, rites, conflicts, celebrations, crusades, pioneers, and martyrs, you need a practical guide. Here it is: American Religions: An Illustrated History. Generously enhanced with more than 200 illustrations—many of them rare—and written in accessible language without scholarly jargon, the encyclopedia takes you through the complexities of North American religious life from the fifteenth century to the present