Spanish Peaks Library District

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

The popular historian shares his views of his own life and on the history of America, in a series of reflections on the Founding Fathers, Native Americans, Theodore Roosevelt, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, and the writing of history.

Innocent beginnings, 1917-1950.

John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools,...

The insightful and heartwarming memoir of one of twentieth-century America's most celebrated frontier writers Dee Brown's fascinating memoir describes a writer's evolution-and a time when catching rides on trains or seeing the landing of a Curtiss Jenny airplane were simple and profound pleasures. Brown traces his upbringing in Arkansas in the early 1900s, and the oil boom that hit his tiny town. He writes of how he fell under the spell of books and...

"In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy-and explores why some of this country's oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who...

Where is our historian to give us our side? Arturo asked. Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro-Puerto Rican named Arturo Schomburg. This law clerk's life's passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora and bring to light the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. When Schomburg's collection became so big it began to overflow his house...

Documents the life and times of the historian, activist and author of the best selling classic "A People's History of the United States." Features archival materials, interviews with Zinn as well as colleagues and friends including Noam Chomsky, Marian Wright Edelman, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden and Alice Walker.

"William Henry Jackson: A Intimate Portrait is an engaging personal look at a man whose life and work spanned the development and transformation of the West, from the 1860s to World War II."