From one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time comes an unforgettable true story about the redeeming potential of mercy. Bryan Stevenson was a gifted young attorney when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man sentenced...

"One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades worth of Helen Vendler s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture in a single volume. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted,...

Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren't problems for us--not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid....

A dual history of American movies and movie reviews evaluates how the nation's films have both fostered new ways of seeing the world and spawned an extraordinary body of critical writing, in a collection of essays that includes contributions by such figures as James Agee, Ralph Ellison, and Roger Ebert.

An overview of jazz with nearly 140 pictures of the people who made the Swing Era what it was.

"Grounded in extensive historical research, this eye-opening survey reveals the long-undervalued role secret societies have played in American history." --Amazon.com.

Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning...

Annotation

Presents a historical perspective on the relationship between economic, technological, and political change by analyzing the economic growth of the United States over the course of two centuries.

This volume collects, for the first time, 28 biographies of the greatest songwriters and lyricists of Broadway musicals, delving below the surface to see what made them tick and to uncover the secrets of their success as well as the personal foibles that sometimes led to their downfall.