Hearst’s journalistic ethics were probably never more clearly exposed than during the national election campaign of 1936. It is true that eighty per cent of the newspapers in the United States spread slanders and calumnies against the President. But the Hearst organs pulled all the stops and thundered vilification with all the resources at their command. The President was portrayed as a lunatic, a wastrel arid a cartoonist’s version of a frothing Communist. Picture and text described him and his advisers as dangerously radical, malicious and altogether feeble-minded. The Hearst press did not hesitate to attribute the source of Roosevelt’s social legislation to Moscow. Nor did consistency deter Hearst from charging plagiarism from Hitler and Mussolini. His newspapers shouted denunciation and abuse. Sound familiar? This work is the only complete exposition of the financial, political and social results of the career of William Randolph Hearst.

""Imperial San Francisco" provides a myth-shattering interpretation of the hidden costs that the growth of San Francisco has exacted on its surrounding regions, presenting along the way a revolutionary new theory of urban development".--"Palo Alto Daily News". 86 photos.

First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families—the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others—who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. Brechin arrives at a new way of understanding urban history as he traces the connections between environment, economy, and technology and discovers links that led, ultimately, to the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race. In a new preface, Brechin considers the vulnerability of cities in the post-9/11 twenty-first century.

At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year 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. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

On February 15, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met by some not with alarm but great enthusiasm. A powerful group of war lovers agitated that the United States exert its muscle across the seas. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were influential politicians dismayed by the "closing" of the Western frontier. William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal falsely heralded that Spain's "secret infernal machine" had destroyed the battleship as Hearst himself saw great potential in whipping Americans into a frenzy. The Maine would provide the excuse they'd been waiting for. On the other side were Roosevelt's former teacher, philosopher William James, and his friend and political ally, Thomas Reed, the powerful Speaker of the House. Both foresaw a disaster. At stake was not only sending troops to Cuba and the Philippines, Spain's sprawling colony on the other side of the world-but the friendships between these men. Now, bestselling historian Evan Thomas brings us the full story of this monumental turning point in American history. Epic in scope and revelatory in detail, The War Lovers takes us from Boston mansions to the halls of Congress to the beaches of Cuba and the jungles of the Philippines. It is landmark work with an unforgettable cast of characters-and provocative relevance to today.