Looks at how U.S. presidents from Wilson to George W. Bush have suspended or revoked guaranteed freedoms in the country during times of war, and includes first-person stories and illustrations.

"Presents the Bill of Rights in both its original version and in a translated version using everyday language. Describes the events that led to the creation of the document and its significance through history"--Provided by publisher.

A prize-winning historian chronicles the long-running clash between white people and federal authority by focusing on Barbour County, Alabama and its history of fighting Reconstruction, integration, and the New Deal. Cowie focuses on Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. White Americans seized Native lands, championed secession, overthrew Reconstruction, questioned the New Deal, and fought against the...

"In 1931, nine teenagers were arrested as they traveled on a train through Scottsboro, Alabama. The youngest was thirteen, and all had been hoping to find something better at the end of their journey. But they never arrived. Instead, two white women falsely accused them of rape. The effects were catastrophic for the young men, who came to be known as the Scottsboro Boys. Being accused of raping a white woman in the Jim Crow south almost certainly...

In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the course of American history. Based on Richard Gergel's book...

It's hardly a secret that mobility has always been limited, if not impossible, for African Americans. Before the Civil War, masters confined their slaves to their property, while free Black people found themselves regularly stopped, questioned, and even kidnapped. Restrictions on movement before emancipation carried over, in different forms, into Reconstruction and beyond; for most of the twentieth century, many white Americans felt blithely comfortable...

"Hubert Humphrey, a fallen hero and a dying man, rose on rickety legs to approach the podium of the Philadelphia Convention Hall, his pulpit for the commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania. He clutched a sheaf of paper with his speech for the occasion, typed and double-spaced by an assistant from his extemporaneous dictation, and then marked up in pencil by Humphrey himself. A note on the first page, circled to draw particular attention,...

"In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian ... Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore's groundbreaking investigation places truth itself--a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence--at the center of the nation's history. The American experiment rests...