HISTORY (2004 LIST)

Alexander, Caroline The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antartic Expedition (1998)

Aronson, Marc Witch Hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials (2003)

An acclaimed young adult historian sifts through the facts, myths, half-truths, misinterpretations, and theories around the Salem witch trials to present readers with a vivid, nonfiction narrative of one of the most compelling mysteries in American history.

Berg, A. Scott Lindbergh (1998)

Charles Lindbergh is at once one of the century's best-known and most misunderstood figures. In Lindbergh, bestselling author and National Book Award winner A. Scott Berg lifts the veil of myth and mystery that has surrounded the aviator since his moment of triumph on May 21, 1927, when he landed in Paris, the first person to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane. It's an insightful look at a remarkable life.

Danticat, Edwidge The Farming of Bones (1998)

It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.

Ellis, Joseph E. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000)(973.409 Ell) Structured like a drama around six key episodes, Founding Brothers presents Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and Burr in the tense interplay of history.

Frank, Mitch Understanding September 11(2002)

Explains the historical and religious issues that sparked terrorists to attack America on September 11, 2001, including information on Islam, Osama bin Laden, and the Middle East.

Geras, Adele Troy (2001)

Told from the point of view of the women of Troy, portrays the last weeks of the Trojan War, when women are sick of tending the wounded, men are tired of fighting, and bored gods and goddesses find ways to stir things up.

Glancy, Diane Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003)                   In Stone Heart, Diane Glancy grippingly retells the story of American legend Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the West. Presented in Sacajawea's voice in the form of a journal, it is a work of moving and illuminating fiction cast from a famed piece of history that has long been masked by myth.

Hansen, Drew D. The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation (2003)

Harper, Kenn Give Me My Father's Body(2000)In his search for the North Pole at the turn of the twentieth century, the renowned Robert E. Peary, long celebrated as an icon of modern exploration, used the Eskimos of northwestern Greenland as the human resources for his expeditions. Sailing aboard a ship called Hope in 1897, Peary entered New York harbor with six Eskimos as his cargo. Depositing them with the American Museum of Natural History as live "specimens" to be poked, measured, and observed by the paying public, Peary abruptly abandoned any responsibility for their care. Four of the Eskimos died within a year. One managed to gain passage back to Greenland. Only the sixth, a boy of six or seven with a smile solemn beyond his years, remained, orphaned and adrift in a bewildering metropolis. His name was Minik. Here, a century after the fact, is his story.

Lanier, Shannon Jefferson's Children: the Story of One American Family (2000)Less than two years, scientists and historians verified what the Hemings family already knew: that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, his slave, had children. But the DNA tests and the biographical data didn't convince everyone. Indeed, when eighty members of the finally reunited family gathered on the steps of Monticello in May, 1999, author Shannon Lanier discovered a family as disparate and fractious as many of our own: "There were Jeffersons who embraced me, and those who wouldn't even shake my hand. There were Hemingses who looked as white as Jeffersons and some who even had the Jefferson name. There were Hemingses who were angry at having to prove our lineage, and there were Jeffersons who absolutely refused to acknowledge the scientific evidence or our oral history". Written by a twenty-six year old descendant of the now famous couple, Jefferson's Children reflects our slow progress towards unearthing who we were and discovering who we can become.

Least Heat-Moon, William Columbus in the Americas (2003)Was Christopher Columbus an inspired explorer and brilliant navigator whose daring voyages proved the naysayers wrong -- or was he a misinformed dreamer who succeeded by luck and never understood the true nature of his discovery? Was he a man of his time whose behavior should not be judged by modern standards -- or a ruthless conquistador whose brutality and greed shocked even some of his contemporaries and laid the groundwork for genocide?

Marrin, Albert Terror of the Spanish Main (1999)An account of the life and times of the English buccaneer, Henry Morgan, from his birth in Wales through his daring exploits in the Spanish Main to his later years in Jamaica.

McCullough, David John Adams (2001) (B McC)

John Adams is a sweeping epic, often cinematic in its lively sense of everyday detail, that moves at a wonderful pace from Adams's earliest days in Massachusetts as a country lawyer to the halcyon days of American Revolution; the enormous work of diplomacy in Paris, The Hague, and London; the earliest years of government in the fledgling Republic in both New York and Washington; and the establishment of the large Adams clan, whose own lives were to become so interwoven in the fabric of the young nation.

Poets of World War II (2003)This anthology brings together 120 poems about World War II by 62 American poets, chosen, as editor Harvey Shapiro writes in his introduction, "with a purpose: to demonstrate that the American poets of this war produced a body of work that has not yet been recognized for its clean and powerful eloquence." The poets are generally unsentimental, ironic, and often astonished by what they have experienced, and their insights still have the power to shake up our perceptions of that war and of war in general.

Rogasky, Barbara Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust (2002)

Sagas of Icelanders: a Selection (2001)A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures-as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured further west-to Greenland and, ultimately, the coast of North America itself.

Starkey, David Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII (2003)

No one in history had a more eventful career in matrimony than Henry VIII. His marriages were daring and tumultuous, and made instant legends of six very different women. What could make him marry six times? In this new study, David Starkey argues that the King was not a depraved philanderer, but someone seeking happiness - and a son. Knowingly or not, he empowered a group of women to extraordinary heights and changed the way a nation was governed.

Tuchman, Barbara A Distant Mirror (2002)The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

Ung, Loung First They Killed My Father (2001)

From a childhood survivor of Cambodia's brutal Pol Pot regime comes an unforgettable narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

 

Von Drehle, David Triangle: the Fire That Changed America (2003) (974.7 Von) On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building's upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren't tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people - 123 of them women. It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City History.

 

War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars (2001)(355Car) In 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project with the goal of remembering Americans who have served this nation and preserving their letters for posterity. Since then, more than 50,000 war letters discovered in basements, attics, scrapbooks, and old trunks have poured in from around the country. The best of these letters are assembled in this extraordinary collection, offering unprecedented insight into the Civil War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, Korea, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf, and even the fighting in Somalia and the Balkans.

 

Watson, Peter  The Modern Mind: an Intellectual History of the 20th Century (2001)From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre, from the Theory of Relativity and the Great Society to Counterculture and Kosovo, The Modern Mind is an extraordinary, provacative, and brilliantly reasoned examination of the ideas and individuals that have shaped the 20th-century intellectual tradition. Focusing on all the great and many lesser-known individuals, break-throughs, and events of Western culture, Peter Watson explores the role of the United States in setting the century's agenda and emphasizes the effect science has played in intellectual history.

 

Weatherford, Jack Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (1990)

In a fascinating new look at the Indians of North and South America, Indian Givers proves these people were instrumental in shaping world culture--from the monetary system to our diets to political organizations and our beliefs.

Winchester, Simon Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003)

The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcanoisland of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round the planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.

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