The Contours of American History
10 best books like The Contours of American History (William Appleman Williams): The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, Children of Crisis: Selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning five-volume Children of Crisis series, Selected Essays, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, In the American Grain, Samuel Johnson
| Author | William H. McNeill |
| ISBN | 0226561445 |
The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human...
| Author | Dumas Malone |
| ISBN | 0316544752 |
Volume III of Malone's exhaustive study of Thomas Jefferson. This book covers his last year as Secretary of State (1793) through his three year retirement to his home in Virginia, then his one term as Vice President (1797-1801) and concluding with his election to his first term as President in 1801 (yes,...
| Author | Dean Acheson |
| ISBN | 0393304124 |
Acheson (1893–1971) was not only present at the creation of the postwar world, he was one of its chief architects. He joined the Department of State in 1941 as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and, with brief intermissions, was continuously involved until 1953, when he left office...
| Author | Robert Coles |
| ISBN | 0316151025 |
In the 1950s Robert Coles began studying, living among, and, above all, listening to American children. The results of his efforts--revealed in five volumes published between 1967 and 1977--constitute one of the most searching and vigorous social studies ever undertaken by one person in the United...
| Author | T.S. Eliot |
| ISBN | 0151803870 |
The man's critical faculties were machete sharp and scalpel precise. Every essay in here reads like the work of somebody with a desk full of papers who throws them all on the floor in one motion and starts from scratch. The craftsmanship and attack strategy is consistently illuminating. Reading his...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0393312569 |
Patriotic Gore (1962) is the big book of Wilson’s final decade and in the dust jacket photo he looks just the toothless, growling old cuss one meets in “The Critic in Winter,” Updike’s worthwhile review of the late journals. Wilson spent his last summers in a decaying corner of Upstate New York,...
| Author | M.H. Abrams |
| ISBN | 0195014715 |
It's the first time I've had this reaction when reading an 'academic' book: awe and envy. I usually have 2 stock reactions: 1. interesting, but the author's argument was screwed in A and B manner and 2. how did this guy even get his phd?! in a cereal box!?
M.H. Abrams is too good to be anywhere near...
| Author | Lionel Trilling |
| ISBN | 0151511977 |
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays...
| Author | William Carlos Williams |
| ISBN | 0811202305 |
Prose essays ranging in theme from Erik the Red and Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln about what it means to be an American.
William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. He found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning,...
| Author | Walter Jackson Bate |
| ISBN | 1887178767 |
W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson has been hailed as a supreme example of the biographer's art and the first great modern life of Johnson. Bate's work is literary biography at its finest, delving into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output. When first...
| Author | Herbert David Croly |
| ISBN | 1555530621 |
Herbert Croly was a journalist and writer who wrote his most significant work just after the beginning of the twentieth century. He makes the case most simply: there have been two contending forces within liberalism fighting for the soul of the country from the very beginning. That is, there have been...
| Author | Lawrence Gowing |
| ISBN | 0520212762 |
I simply adore Vermeer.
Many years ago I saw The Astronomer, at the Louvre, and I have never looked back. Since then I have seen both Lady Standing at a Virginal and Lady Seated at a Virginal [National Gallery], The Allegory of Faith, Portrait of a Young Womand, Woman with a Water Jug and A Girl Asleep...
| Author | Walter Lippmann |
| ISBN | 0766195589 |
1929. Lippman, a Pulitzer Prize winning political columnist, helped found the liberal New Republic magazine. His writings there influenced Woodrow Wilson, who selected Lippman to help formulate his famous Fourteen Points and develop the concept of the League of Nations. A Preface to Morals endorses...
| Author | Cecil Woodham-Smith |
| ISBN | 0689706529 |
I don't usually write reviews because I feel I can never do the book justice. But for this one I'm going to try.
If I could give this book 10 stars, I would. Incredibly well-written, well organized, and obviously well researched.
I love reading biographies but I've often found the biographer...
| Author | Reinhold Niebuhr |
| ISBN | 0664257097 |
The Nature and Destiny of Man issues a vigorous challenge to Western civilization to understand its roots in the faith of the Bible, particularly the Hebraic tradition. The growth, corruption, and purification of the important Western emphases on individuality are insightfully chronicled here....
| Author | David Cecil |
| ISBN | 0517537826 |
David Cecil's classic biographies The Young Melbourne (and the Story of his Marriage with Lady Caroline Lamb) and Lord M (or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne) are here published in a single volume, as the author had always intended.
Melbourne, who lived from 1779-1848, was one of the most curious...
| Author | Gunnar Myrdal |
| ISBN | 1560008563 |
In this landmark effort to understand African American people in the New World, Gunnar Myrdal provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The title of the book, 'An American Dilemma', refers to the moral contradiction of a nation...
| Author | Ian Hacking |
| ISBN | 0521380146 |
In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late nineteenth century it became...
| Author | H.L. Mencken |
| ISBN | 0394400755 |
The American Language, first published in 1919, is H. L. Mencken's book about the English language as spoken in the United States. Mencken was inspired by "the argot of the colored waiters" in Washington, as well as one of his favorite authors, Mark Twain, and his experiences on the streets of Baltimore....
| Author | Jonathan D. Spence |
| ISBN | 0140062793 |
“A milestone in Western studies of China.” (John K. Fairbank)
In this masterful, highly original approach to modern Chinese history, Jonathan D. Spence shows us the Chinese revolution through the eyes of its most articulate participants—the writers, historians, philosophers,...
Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 1: Introductory Orientations
Dr Joseph Needham's account of the Chinese achievement in science & technology will stand as one of the great works of our time. It's been acclaimed by specialists in both East & West & also by readers with wider & more general interests. The text, based on research of a high critical...
| Author | Bertrand Russell |
| ISBN | 0521626064 |
The great three-volume Principia Mathematica is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premisses and primitive ideas, and so to prove that mathematics...
| Author | R.H. Tawney |
| ISBN | 1406724181 |
A recent discussion, with a Goodreads friend, of Western socio-economic history and the accompanying socio-economic thought brought to mind this gem of a book, read in my early college days and a germinal influence on my own thought. (In terms of its effect on my thinking, I'd actually rank it as one...
| Author | George Dangerfield |
| ISBN | 0804729301 |
At the beginning of the twentieth century England's empire spanned the globe, its economy was strong, and its political system seemed immune to the ills that inflicted so many other countries. After a resounding electoral triumph in 1906, the Liberals formed the government of the most powerful nation...
| Author | Erwin Panofsky |
| ISBN | 0064300250 |
Gran bel saggio, grande classico degli studi sull'iconologia (e della storia dell'arte in genere).Dopo una ricca introduzione dove Panofsky spiega la genesi dell'opera e il suo metodo di lavoro, si passa a una serie di saggi dedicati, nell'ordine, dine, a:
- Preistoria umana in due cicli...
