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The Stammering Century

10 best books like The Stammering Century (Gilbert Seldes): Wheat that Springeth Green, Reveille in Washington, 1860-65, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign, Victorine, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

Wheat that Springeth Green
AuthorJ.F. Powers
ISBN0940322242
Wheat That Springeth Green, J. F. Powers's beautifully realized final work, is a comic foray into the commercialized wilderness of modern American life. Its hero, Joe Hackett, is a high school track star who sets out to be a saint. But seminary life and priestly apprenticeship soon damp his ardor, and...
Reveille in Washington, 1860-65
AuthorMargaret Leech
ISBN1931313237
1860: The American capital is sprawling, fractured, squalid, colored by patriotism and treason, and deeply divided along the political lines that will soon embroil the nation in bloody conflict. Chaotic and corrupt, the young city is populated by bellicose congressmen, Confederate 
conspirators,...
The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World
AuthorFranklin T. Lambert
ISBN0809095335
American independence was secured from Britain on September 3, 1783. Within a year, the American merchant ship Betsey was captured by Sallee Rovers, state-sponsored pirates operating out of the ports of Morocco. Algerian pirates quickly seized two more American ships: the boats were confiscated,...
Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America
AuthorPeter Silver
ISBN0393062481
The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh—groups that rarely intermingled...
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership
AuthorHarold Cruse
ISBN1590171357
Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual electrified a generation of activists and intellectuals. The product of a lifetime of struggle and reflection, Cruse's book is a singular amalgam...
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
AuthorEdmund Wilson
ISBN0393312569
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,...
Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign
AuthorPhilippe-Paul de Ségur
ISBN1590172825
In the summer of 1812 Napoleon gathered his fearsome Grande Armée, more than half a million strong, on the banks of the Niemen River. He was about to undertake the most daring of all his many campaigns: the invasion of Russia. Meeting only sporadic opposition and defeating it easily along the way, the...
Victorine
AuthorMaude Hutchins
ISBN1590172701
Victorine is thirteen, and she can’t get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine’s older brother Costello...
Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley
AuthorRobert Sheckley
ISBN1590174941
Robert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic city­scapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new...
For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus
AuthorFrederick Brown
ISBN0307266311
Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile Zola (“Magnificent”—The New Yorker) and Flaubert (“Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written”—The New Republic) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book—a perfect joining...
The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation
AuthorKatherine Ramsland
ISBN0425213781
From ancient Rome through the Dark Ages to the burgeoning West to the open highways of urban America, from the unconscionable exploits of French religious zealot Gilles de Rais to such all-American monsters as Jeffrey Dahmer and Aileen Wournos.

Katherine Ramsland makes an eye-opening case...
The World as I Found It
AuthorBruce Duffy
ISBN0395900573

If I wrote a book called The World As I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it...
An Ermine in Czernopol
AuthorGregor von Rezzori
ISBN1590173414
Set just after World War I, An Ermine in Czernopol centers on the tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, determined to defend the virtue of his cheating sister-in-law at any cost. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters,...
Dionysus: Myth and Cult
AuthorWalter F. Otto
ISBN0253208912
In this classic study of the myth and cult of Dionysus, Walter F. Otto recreates the theological world of ancient Greek religion. Otto's provocative starting point is to accept the immanent reality of the gods. To understand the cult of Dionysus, it is necessary to reimagine the original vision of the...
When the World Spoke French
AuthorMarc Fumaroli
ISBN1590173759
“Conceived as ‘a portrait gallery of foreigners conquered by Enlightenment France,’ Fumaroli’s book provides biographical essays about diverse and fascinating cast of characters. He depicts them all as wonderfully distinct individuals—real people whose eclectic interests, messy...
A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age
AuthorSteven Nadler
When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published--"godless," "full of abominations," "a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself." Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political...
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (Scribner library)
AuthorReinhold Niebuhr
ISBN0684718545
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic...
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
AuthorNorman Cohn
ISBN0195004566

ISIS AND THE TALIBAN – JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.


Ecclesiastes 1:9


This book is a brilliant account of the really crazy cults which sprang...
Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States
AuthorGeorge R. Stewart
ISBN1590172736
This beloved classic about place-naming in the United States was written during World War II in a conscious effort to pay tribute to the heritage of the nation's peoples. George R. Stewart's love of the surprising story, and his focus not just on language but on how people interact with their environment,...
The Judges of the Secret Court
AuthorDavid Stacton
ISBN1590174526
David Stacton’s The Judges of The Secret Court is a long-lost triumph of American fiction as well as one of the finest books ever written about the Civil War. Stacton’s gripping and atmospheric story revolves around the brothers Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, members of a famous theatrical family....
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
AuthorDwight Macdonald
A New York Review Books Original

An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to...
Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature
AuthorD. Graham Burnett
ISBN0691129509
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael declares, "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that a whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." Few readers today know just how much argument Ishmael is waiving aside. In fact, Melville's antihero here takes sides in one of the great...
Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
AuthorJack Beatty
ISBN1400040280
Age of Betrayal is a brilliant reconsideration of America's first Gilded Age, when war-born dreams of freedom and democracy died of their impossibility. Focusing on the alliance between government and railroads forged by bribes and campaign contributions, Jack Beatty details the corruption of...
A History of the Indians of the United States
AuthorAngie Debo
ISBN0806118881
In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, "for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow." Yet even today most intelligent...
Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960
AuthorChristopher Simpson
Science of Coercion provides the first thorough examination of the role of the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. security agencies in the evolution of modern communication research, a field in the social sciences which crystallized into a distinct discipline in the early 1950s. Government-funded...
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