Ruby Sisson Library

Examines presidential power within the context of U.S. history and the ongoing relationships presidents and ex-presidents formed with one another.

"Edward Curtis was dashing, charismatic, a passionate mountaineer, a famous photographer--the Annie Liebowitz of his time. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his great idea: He would try to capture on film the Native American nation before it disappeared. At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, Egan's book tells the remarkable untold story behind Curtis's iconic photographs,...

"The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you're not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as "majestic" and "noble," yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation's founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples...

The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next...

"A firsthand exploration of the cost of boarding the bus of change to move America forward-written by one of the Civil Rights Movement's pioneers. At 18, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who left Washington, D.C. by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female activists-including future Congressman John Lewis, Congress of Racial...

"A leading voice for social justice reveals how he stopped arguing with white people who deny the ongoing legacy of racism-and offers a proven path forward for Black people and people of color based on the history of nonviolent struggle. When the rallying cry "Black Lives Matter" was heard across the world in 2013, Andre Henry was one of the millions for whom the movement caused a political awakening and a rupture in some of his closest relationships...

"An exciting new voice makes the case for a colorblind approach to politics and culture, warning that the so-called 'anti-racist' movement is driving us-ironically-toward a new kind of racism. As one of the few black students in his philosophy program at Columbia University years ago, Coleman Hughes wondered why his peers seemed more pessimistic about the state of American race relations than his own grandparents-who lived through segregation. The...

"By the New York Times bestselling author of Viper Pilot, former USAF F-16 legend Dan Hampton tells the thrilling story of how fighter pilots have ruled the skies for 100 years, from the Red Baron to today's supersonic jets"-- "By the USAF F-16 legend behind the bestselling memoir Viper Pilot, this is the first comprehensive history of fighter pilots and air combat--a unique, riveting look at the aces of the sky, their machines, their most daring...

"As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage,' historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she writes, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.' Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time...

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...