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Could you identify a sausage gun if you had to? How about a plate warmer or a well-sweep? Any idea how the term log-rolling really originated? Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), a prolific popular historian and the first American to chronicle everyday life and customs of the colonial era, describes what these and many other obscure utensils were and how they were used. She also conveys a vivid picture of home production of textiles, colonial dress, transportation,...
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The classic collection of five deeply resonant and disturbing interconnected stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.
Innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery are at the core of these five interconnected, sequential tales—each deeply rooted in the 1960s, and each scarred by the Vietnam War, which continues to cast its shadow over American lives, politics and culture.
In Part One,...
Innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery are at the core of these five interconnected, sequential tales—each deeply rooted in the 1960s, and each scarred by the Vietnam War, which continues to cast its shadow over American lives, politics and culture.
In Part One,...
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In 1832, three years before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the English novelist Frances Trollope released Domestic Manners of the Americans, an eye-opening record of her travels in the young republic. Expecting a utopia of "justice and liberty for all," she is shocked to discover the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Funny and fearless, Trollope's biting critique became an international sensation. Yet, as...
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From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South, “the best historical novelist of our time” (Patricia Cornwell).
In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island-with its giant marble mansions, lavish dinner parties, and vicious social climbing- is a summer playground of the very rich. Into this rarefied world comes infamous railroad mogul and robber baron Sam Driver. He wants his...
In the late nineteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island-with its giant marble mansions, lavish dinner parties, and vicious social climbing- is a summer playground of the very rich. Into this rarefied world comes infamous railroad mogul and robber baron Sam Driver. He wants his...
7) After this
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Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live.
While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution,...
10) The gift
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On a June day, a young woman in a summer dress steps off a Chicago-bound bus into a small midwestern town. She doesn't intend to stay. She is just passing through. Yet her stopping here has a reason and it is part of a story that you will never forget. The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, very nearly, everything. The place is a small midwestern town with a high school and a downtown, a skating...
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On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...
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"The riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York, from the New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America's great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York's old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and...
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Author Bill Bryson tells the comical story of his return to America after living in England for two decades. When he returned stateside with his English wife and their four children, he was greeted by a whole new landscape which included microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental floss hotlines-- and the thought that 3 million Americans believe they had been abducted by aliens at some point.
14) The gold coast
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John Sutter ; 1
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John Sutter, an upper-class Wall Street lawyer, agrees to defend his new neighbor, a Mafia don, in a sensational murder trial.
16) Birds of America
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The celebrated collection of twelve stories from one of the finest authors at work today From the opening story, "Willing"-about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being-Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled...
17) My mortal enemy
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The story of Myra Henshawe, a worldly woman who gives up a fortune to marry as she chooses, and then finds her romantic gesture has not brought her happiness.
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Ever since October 1967, when he set off in a battered motor home to explore America and talk to its people, Charles Kuralt has been one of our premier chroniclers -- a man who has helped us see and celebrate our country in a way we never had before. After retiring from CBS News in 1994, he set out to spend a perfect year in America -- traveling to his twelve favorite American places, in just the right month for a visit to each. With his well-known...
19) American notes
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"This is not the republic of my imagination," Charles Dickens noted ruefully of his 1842 visit to the United States. His American Notes forms a stinging reproof of the country's embrace of slavery, its corrupt press and woeful sanitary conditions, and its citizens' offensive manners. Written with the author's customary observational powers and incisive wit, this volume offers a fascinating glimpse of 19th-century America. Dickens was not entirely...
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Though best known as a novelist, James also wrote non-fiction, including this controversial 1907 account of his 1905-06 American tour. By 1905 he had lived in England for twenty-five years, and it is as a returning expatriate that James views the country of his birth-and finds much to criticize in its embrace of crass materialism.
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