Red states versus blue states. Metro versus retro. North or South, East or West. Pundits, politicians, and social scientists love to carve out categories in an attempt to make sense of political and social divisions that run through the American landscape. As the home of nearly 300 million people spread over approximately 3.7 million square miles of earth, the United States poses a monumental challenge to all who try to grapple with its rich and immensely complex physical and social geography. Acclaimed British historian Jeremy Black tackles this challenge through a literal and metaphorical road trip across America’s physical and historical landscapes, analyzing the ways that events in American history and culture since 1960 have remade the geography and demographics of America. Black works from the startling premise that the United States is a continent pretending to be a country. He examines the cultural clashes—and the tense harmony—between the numerous regional cultures uneasily contained within the United States’ wide bounds. Suburban sprawl, the triumph of consumerism, the war over health care, immigration, and Christian evangelicalism all play a part in these pages, as Black unravels the tangled web of American life during the past forty-five years. He locates such tensions in the tug-of-war between the unitary and divisive pressures that have always defined the character of American government, and in the alternating rise and fall of individualism and conformity in American society as well. Black also has some telling new reflections on America’s role abroad, from Nixon’s Vietnam to George W. Bush's Iraq. Drawing on travels from Virginia to California to Alaska, Black deftly reveals in Altered States the less-examined aspects of American culture as they are manifested in its diverse peoples and landscapes from coast to coast.

In this remarkable book, Tony Hilfer provides a major survey of the wealth of post-war American fiction. He analyses the major modes and genres of writing, from realist to postmodernist metafiction and black humour, the fiction of social protest, women's writing, and the traditions of African-American, Southern and Jewish-American fiction. Key writers discussed include William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. The book concludes by exploring contemporary trends through detailed case-studies of Donald Barthelme and Toni Morrison.

Annotation 'In his study of the telephone in American society, Fishcer confronts the most significant, but also the most difficult, question we can ask about a new technology--what differences did it make in the lives of its users?'Roland Marchand

2021 Silver Medal IPPY Awards Winner for Best Regional Fiction!Nurse Abby never dreamed of becoming a spy behind the SS frontlines nor did she expect to fall in love. Follow her journey from Montana to Germany and back again, igniting a chain of events that will change history and the future forever.Rusty barbed wire and distant AM radio-Montana hid my secrets for fifty years.Then a young reporter arrived in a beat-up Impala. Her assignment, WWII Homecoming Memories, had uncovered a puzzling lead about several dead men last seen with a red-headed nurse. I could have lied, but she reminded me of myself at that age so I rolled a cigarette and told her all of it. She spilled coffee on my table.Her research started in New York. In choosing soldiers to profile, she included her hometown and discovered her great uncle, reported MIA in 1944, bought a train ticket to Browning, Montana, three months after they buried his empty casket. Impossible, yet on two consecutive pages, she counted 14 tickets to Browning-a village on the Blackfeet Reservation. The National Archives showed that 13 of those men shared the same distinct status: Missing in Action.I know where those passengers are.Southwest of Browning, where the plains run into the Rockies, stands a church. Once it represented everything good in our country, a tiny church built in 1913 by a young man for his wedding. Only four people attended the bride's funeral in 1918. Her twin babies slept through the service. Eight months earlier her husband marched into World War I and he never returned.My story starts and ends at that little church, but in between, the darkest hours of mankind churned through Europe. Some of that darkness found its way to Montana. As bad as it ended, I wondered if the Lord forgives murder. As it turns out, sometimes yes, sometimes definitely no.

This inspiring anthology it the first to convey the noteworthy experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words-from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Inga Fredriksen Ferris's describes how it felt to be a woman marine during World War II. Heidi Squier Kraft recounts her experiences as a lieutenant commander in the navy, deployed to Iraq as a psychologist to provide mental health care in a combat zone. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, military depositions and testimonies, as well as from published and unpublished memoirs-generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms and at great personal peril.

“Individual women’s stories enliven almost every page” of this comprehensive illustrated reference, now updated, from the National Air and Space Museum (Technology and Culture). Women run wind tunnel experiments, direct air traffic, and fabricate airplanes. American women have been involved with flight from the beginning. But until 1940, most people believed women could not fly, that Amelia Earhart was an exception to the rule. World War II changed everything. “It is on the record that women can fly as well as men,” stated General Henry H. Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces. Then the question became “Should women fly?” Deborah G. Douglas tells the story of this ongoing debate and its impact on American history. From Jackie Cochran, whose perseverance led to the formation of the Women’s Army Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II to the more recent achievements of Jeannie Flynn, the Air Force’s first woman fighter pilot and Eileen Collins, NASA’s first woman shuttle commander, Douglas introduces a host of determined women who overcame prejudice and became military fliers, airline pilots, and air and space engineers. Not forgotten are stories of flight attendants, air traffic controllers, and mechanics. American Women and Flight since 1940 is a revised and expanded edition of a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum reference work. Long considered the single best reference work in the field, this new edition contains extensive new illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography.