Americas

From the founding of the United States to the aftermath of the Civil War, sex scandals made headlines and influenced politics across the country. In the six lectures of Early American Sex Scandals, Dr. Cassandra Good of Marymount University will take you on a revealing journey through some of the most influential and notorious scandals of America’s first century.

In 1996, professional wrestling was one of the most watched sports on cable television, with more than 5 million people tuning in every week. And in the late 1990s, pro-wrestling was the hottest thing in American pop culture, with companies making millions in action figures, video games, and simple black t-shirts emblazoned with three little letters: NWO. The NWO, or New World Order, became a business like no other, and was responsible for the explosive ratings and rabid fanbase.

Sunset, 8 June 1982, East Falkland. Eight specially trained Royal Marines infiltrate Goat Ridge, a long rocky hilltop between Mount Harriet and Two Sisters which are occupied by a battalion of 600 Argentine infantry. Their daring mission was to hide out in hostile territory, reconnoiter the Argentine position and then report back. From their hiding place just metres away from the enemy, they note and sketch the Argentine positions, then withdraw as stealthily as they had come.

Inside the greatest diplomatic negotiations of the past 50 years. In one readable volume, diplomat and negotiator Stuart E. Eizenstat covers every major contemporary international agreement, from the treaty to end the Vietnam War to the Kyoto Protocols and the Iranian Nuclear Accord. Written from the perspective that only a participant in top level negotiations can bring, Eizenstat recounts the events that led up to the negotiation, the drama that took place around the table, and draws lessons from successful and unsuccessful strategies and tactics.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Newt Gingrich takes listeners inside the most significant political comeback in American history and explains where the Trump movement goes from here.

This monumental biography by David Levering Lewis—eight years in the research and writing—treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how W.E.B. Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era.

Mexico arrives in its eighth edition with a new look and the most recent discoveries. This is the story of the pre-Spanish people of Mexico, who, with their neighbors the Maya, formed some of the most complex societies north of the Andes. Revised and expanded, the book is updated with the latest developments and findings in the field and current terminology.

On November 29, 1943, as the Allies’ primary leaders met in Tehran, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin his idea for the organization that would become the United Nations. The American president suggested that the active arm of the organization be “the Four Policemen”: the U.S., USSR, UK, and China. Stalin agreed with much of the framework in principle, but asserted that China likely would not possess the strength after the war to assist.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms.

In 1869, the Atlantic Monthly magazine published a new novella in serial form. This bizarre tale, The Brick Moon, was written by a historian (and Unitarian minister) named Edward Everett Hale, who had already written several well-received novels and articles. However, this was something completely different today, as it was in the genre of what is today considered science fiction. Many people compared the new work to the previous novels of French writer Jules Verne, including From the Earth to the Moon, but Hale’s work was presented as a genuine account of a previous experiment.

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt's deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family’s land in Hawai‘i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui’s east side—given by King Kamehameha III in 1848—extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple with a mysterious past. When a property tax bill arrives with a 500 percent increase, Sara and her family members are forced to make a decision about the property: fight to keep the land or sell to the next offshore millionaire.

The Citicorp Center, a fifty-nine-story skyscraper built in 1977, immediately became one of the most recognizable features on the New York City skyline with its distinctive inclined roof and oddly placed support columns. Designed by one of the top structural engineers in the field, William LeMessurier, the tower would become the crown jewel of his professional career; In essence, he created a skyscraper on stilts. The building was a modern marvel—until it was revealed that it had a one in sixteen chance of collapse.

Author Sharon Kitchens identifies the locations that serve as the basis for King's fictional towns of Castle Rock, Jerusalem's Lot, Derry, and Haven. Drawing on historical materials and conversations with locals and people who know King, the author sheds light on daily life in places that would become the settings for Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, Cujo, IT, and 11/22/63.

Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious—and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to "make your own job" keeps hope alive.

35 Wives opens with 37-year-old Mormon prophet Joseph Smith marrying 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Was it a sacred ceremony? Or was it the rape of a vulnerable girl by a predatory prophet under cover of religious sponsorship? For 120 years, Mormon apologists have argued it was holy matrimony. Telling Helen and her sisters’ stories, 35 Wives is the counter thrust to the Church’s sacred mendacity. Was Joseph a saint or a sinner? Written from an energetic outsider’s POV, 35 Wives is a naturalistic dissection of Joseph and the Church’s truth claims for a skeptical general audience.

In Spellbound, historian Molly Worthen argues that we will understand our present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma, Worthen argues, stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama where hopes are fulfilled and grievances are put right—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

A study of the spiritual practices developed by the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist movement and a case for their necessity today.

The North American prairie is an ecological marvel, a lush carpet of grass that stretches to the horizon, and home to some of the nation’s most iconic creatures—bison, elk, wolves, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and bald eagles. Plants, microbes, and animals together made the grasslands one of the richest ecosystems on Earth and a massive carbon sink, but the constant expansion of agriculture threatens what remains.

In Nazis in the New World, Aaron Gillette presents vivid narratives and personal accounts to reveal the unknown history of Nazi German exchange students sent to America in the 1930s. After receiving the Gestapo's stamp of approval, they were instructed to use their charm and charisma to promote the Third Reich. Some also served Hitler as covert operatives against the United States.

The spring of 1903 proved disastrous for the Murphy family. On April 22, the infant Ruth Murphy died in her crib. Within an hour, her mother, Gertrude, experienced a violent spasm before she, too, died. Ten days later, John Murphy followed his wife and child to the grave after suffering from a crippling convulsion. While neighbors whispered about a curse and physicians feared a contagious disease, Kalkaska County sheriff John W. Creighton and prosecuting attorney Ernest C. Smith searched for answers. As they probed deeper into the suspicious deaths, they uncovered a wicked web of intrigue.

New Mexico's Spanish legacy has informed the cultural traditions of one of the last states to join the union for more than four hundred years, or before the alluring capital of Santa Fe was founded in 1610. The fame the region gained from artist Georgia O'Keefe, writers Lew Wallace and D. H. Lawrence, and pistolero Billy the Kid has made New Mexico an international tourist destination.

Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States’ population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion and an explosion of wealth. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries.

California's 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the "instant city" of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state's vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional "city."