influence

Presents a collection of facts and myths about sixteenth-century English playwright William Shakespeare, and also includes little-known stories about his plays and poems.

"Discusses the iconic photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda"--.

"As his second term as president drew to an end in 1796, George Washington bid the country farewell and offered his advice for its future. He did so in an address that was published in a Philadelphia newspaper. This volume introduces young readers to the key themes in the open letter and liberally cites the words of that primary document."--Amazon.com.

"This is the story of JFK-from his childhood to the events that led to his game-changing speech and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Corey and Christie offer a deeply human look at our country's thirty-fifth president, underscoring how each one of us, no matter who we are, have the power to make a difference."--Amazon.

Barack Obama was once a most unlikely candidate, but his successful campaign for the White House made him a worldwide sensation and a transformative figure even before he was inaugurated. Elected as the Iraq War and the Great Recession had discouraged millions of Americans, Obama made a promise of hope that revived the national spirit. Soon after he occupied the White House, Congress approved his economic-recovery act and his program to save the U.S. auto industry. Both worked better than any observer predicted, and together they powered a recovery that has seen growth return and unemployment reduced to below five percent. Today the American economy is again the most vibrant in the world and its recovery has far outpaced Western Europe's.

From very early on in his career, John F. Kennedy?s allure was more akin to a movie star than a presidential candidate. Why were Americans so attracted to Kennedy in the late 1950s and early 1960s?his glamorous image, good looks, cool style, tough-minded rhetoric, and sex appeal? As Steve Watts argues, JFK was tailor made for the cultural atmosphere of his time. He benefited from a crisis of manhood that had welled up in postwar America when men had become ensnared by bureaucracy, softened by suburban comfort, and emasculated by a generation of newly-aggressive women. Kennedy appeared to revive the modern American man as youthful and vigorous, masculine and athletic, and a sexual conquistador. His cultural crusade involved other prominent figures, including Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Ian Fleming, Hugh Hefner, Ben Bradlee, Kirk Douglas, and Tony Curtis, who collectively symbolized masculine regeneration.

Shakespeare professor and prison volunteer Laura Bates discusses her time teaching Shakespeare to prisoners, how she became friends with Larry Newton, and how they bonded over the playwright.

"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation, mass executions, and genocide. As direct targets of and witnesses to violence, rather than far-off bystanders, civilians were forced to face the war head on. Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, fiction, and other first-person accounts, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche redefines our understanding of the civilian experience of war across the vast territory occupied and threatened by Nazi Germany. Amid accumulating horrors, ordinary people across Europe grappled with questions of faith and meaning, often reaching troubling conclusions. World War II exceeded the human capacity for understanding, and those men and women who lived through it suspected that language could not adequately register the horrors they saw and experienced. But it nevertheless prompted an outpouring of writing, as people labored to comprehend and piece thoughts into philosophy. Their broken words are all we have to reconstruct how contemporaries saw the war around them, how they failed to see its terrible violence in full, and how they attempted to translate the destruction into narratives. Carefully reading these testimonies as no historian has done before, Fritzsche's groundbreaking work sheds new light on the most violent conflict in human history, when war made words inadequate, and the inadequacy of words heightened the devastation of war"--.

In I Heart Obama, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan offers an unapologetic appreciation of our first African-American president and what he means to black Americans. Obama's is a noble and singular story that will be told for generations. I Heart Obama takes a compelling look at the story so far.