Don't Know Much about History: Everything You Need to Know about American History But Never Learned

Tom Gjelten

Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause

In this widely hailed book, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten fuses the story of the Bacardi family and their famous rum business with Cuba's tumultuous experience over the last 150 years to produce a deeply entertaining historical narrative. The company Facundo Bacardi launched in Cuba in 1862 brought worldwide fame to the island, and in the decades that followed his Bacardi descendants participated in every aspect of Cuban life. With his intimate account of their struggles and adventures across five generations, Gjelten brings to life the larger story of Cuba's fight for freedom, its tortured relationship with America, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the violent division of the Cuban nation.

Roy Strong (Author)

Coronation: A History of the British Monarchy

The definitive history of coronations and the Royal Family, from acclaimed writer Roy Strong. 'What is the finest sight in the world? A Coronation.What do people talk most about? A Coronation.What is delightful to have passed? A Coronation.'Horace Walpole, 1761 As a boy of sixteen, Roy Strong watched the grand procession carrying Queen Elizabeth II to her coronation. The spectacle was considered the greatest public event of the century. But now, so many years later, many people have little notion of what a coronation is and are unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual, or its deep significance in terms of the committal of monarch to people.This book is the first of its kind - a comprehensive history that sets each coronation into its political, social, religious and cultural context. The story is one of constant re-invention as the service has had to respond to all the changes in fortune of the monarchy or the country: everything from legitimising usurpers to reconciling a Catholic rite to the tenets of Protestantism. It even had to be recreated from scratch after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In this way, Strong tells the story of the British monarchy since the tenth ...

John M., III Jones, Robert C. Rowland

Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War

President Ronald Reagan's famous address to the Houses of Parliament is now considered--in its spirit if not in its actual words--to be the initial enunciation of his "Evil Empire" stance. In this important volume by two experienced rhetorical scholars, Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones offer a historical-descriptive treatment that includes both rhetorical analysis and a narrative of the drafting of the speech. They consider Reagan's focus on "ultimate definition," "dialectical engagement," and other rhetorical tools in crafting and presenting the momentous address. They also note the irony of Reagan's use of Leon Trotsky's phrase "ash-heap of history" to predict the demise of Communism.Rowland and Jones present three reasons for the importance of this speech. First, it offers new insights into President Reagan himself, through a view of his role in the drafting of the speech as well as the ideas it contains. Second, the speech is an act of rhetorical history, and its analysis helps recover a significant rhetorical artifact. Finally, the address ultimately expresses a rhetorical framework for the Cold War that systematically subverted the narrative, ideology, and values of ...