Portrait Of America

How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word "American"? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history--and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke to much larger and longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch reviews the founding of the FWP and the significance of its American Guide series, considering the choices made by administrators who wanted to celebrate diversity as a positive aspect of American cultural identity. In his exploration of the FWP's other writings, Hirsch discusses the project's pioneering use of oral history in interviews with ordinary southerners, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers. He also examines congressional critics of the FWP vision; the occasional opposition of local Federal Writers, especially in the South; and how the FWP's vision changed in response to the challenge of World War II. In the course of this study, Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy.

Crisscrossing the continent, a renowned geneticist provides a groundbreaking examination of America through its DNA. The best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve now turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour, interviewing genealogists, geneticists, anthropologists, and everyday Americans with compelling ancestral stories. His findings suggest: • Of Americans whose ancestors came as slaves, virtually all have some European DNA. • Racial intermixing appears least common among descendants of early New England colonists. • There is clear evidence of Jewish genes among descendants of southwestern Spanish Catholics. • Among white Americans, evidence of African DNA is most common in the South. • European genes appeared among Native Americans as early as ten thousand years ago. An unprecedented look into America's genetic mosaic and how we perceive race, DNA USA challenges the very notion of what we think it means to be American.

PORTRAIT OF AMERICA is an anthology of essays written by some of America�s most eminent historians. The collection maintains a loose biographical focus. The essays in this secondary-source reader humanize American history by portraying it as a story of real people with whom students can easily identify. More than 25 percent of the essays in the Tenth Edition are new, many from books that have been nationally and internationally recognized for their insight, accuracy, and timeliness, ensuring that the readings continue to be provocative and trustworthy. Each selection is preceded by an introduction for context, and a helpful glossary identifies important individuals, events, and concepts. Study questions follow each selection, prompting students to make comparisons between the readings.

Portrait of America is an anthology of essays written by some of America s most eminent historians. Suitable for U.S. history survey courses, the collection has a loose biographical focus. The essays in this secondary source reader humanize American history by portraying it as a story of real people with whom students can identify.Each selection is preceded by an introduction that sets the context and a helpful glossary that identifies important individuals, events, and concepts. The Eighth Edition includes an essay in which six major historians reflect on the historical significance of September 11, 2001.

PORTRAIT OF AMERICA is an anthology of essays written by some of America�s most eminent historians. The collection maintains a loose biographical focus. The essays in this secondary-source reader humanize American history by portraying it as a story of real people with whom students can easily identify. More than 25 percent of the essays in the Tenth Edition are new, many from books that have been nationally and internationally recognized for their insight, accuracy, and timeliness, ensuring that the readings continue to be provocative and trustworthy. Each selection is preceded by an introduction for context, and a helpful glossary identifies important individuals, events, and concepts. Study questions follow each selection, prompting students to make comparisons between the readings.

This essential volume showcases portraits of prominent Americans who have influenced the nation's history from its earliest days to the present. It features 150 paintings, photographs, drawings, posters, sculptures, screenprints, and digital video stills carefully selected from the National Portrait Gallery of leading politicians, artists, athletes, celebrities, and scholars. Each image is accompanied by commentary that illuminates the person's life and legacy. Subjects include Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, John Steinbeck, Venus and Serena Williams, Bruce Springsteen, Pedro Martinez, and Oprah Winfrey. Portrait of a Nation is a compelling composite portrait of America.

Overwhelmingly Asian and Latin American yet defying widespread stereotypes of immigrants, they come in luxurious jetliners and the trunks of cars, by boat and on foot. Manual laborers and polished professionals, entrepreneurs and exiles, these immigrants reflect in their motives and origins the forces that have reshaped American society in the second half of the century. Drawing on recent census data and other primary sources, the authors revise our understanding of immigrant America in a sweeping and multifaceted analysis. They probe the dynamics of immigrant politics, examining questions of identity and loyalty among newcomers who are "in a society but not of it," and explore the psychological consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation. They look at patterns of settlement in urban America, discuss the problems of English-language acquisition and bilingual education, and explain how immigrants incorporate themselves into the American economy

Collects approximately three-fourths of Henry Sienkiewicz's reports from America.

Portrait of America describes our nation’s changing population and examines through a demographic lens some of our most pressing contemporary challenges, ranging from poverty and economic inequality to racial tensions and health disparities. Celebrated authorJohn Iceland covers various topics, including America's historical demographic growth; the American family today; gender inequality; economic well-being; immigration and diversity; racial and ethnic inequality; internal migration and residential segregation; and health and mortality. The discussion of these topics is informed by several sources, including an examination of household survey data, and by syntheses of existing published material, both quantitative and qualitative. Iceland discusses the current issues and controversies around these themes, highlighting their role in everyday debates taking place in Congress, the media, and in American living rooms. Each chapter includes historical background, as well as a discussion of how patterns and trends in the United States compare to those in peer countries.

From longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent. The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools. Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.

A striking collection of presidential portraits from the National Portrait Gallery, this volume encapsulates the spirit of the most powerful office in the world. America's Presidents showcases the nation's largest collection of portraits of all the presidents beyond the White House's own, capturing the permanent exhibition that lies at the heart of the Portrait Gallery's mission to tell the American story through the individuals who have shaped it. The book explores presidential imagery through portraits ranging from the traditional, such as the iconic and newly restored "Lansdowne" portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, to the contemporary, such as Elaine de Kooning's colorful depiction of John F. Kennedy. Many of the featured portraits reveal much about the sitter, such as the intimate rendering of an informal George W. Bush by Robert Anderson and the fanciful, mosaic-like Chuck Close image of Bill Clinton. Some tell us more about the artist, such as the likeness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas Chandor planned to include in a larger work about peace that would commemorate Roosevelt's Yalta meeting with wartime Allied leaders Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Works in other media, including sculptures and daguerreotypes, round out the presidential collection. Lively narratives accompany each piece, exploring the president's background and biography as well as the work's artistic and historical significance. Taken together, the portraits are a powerful visual exploration of the history of the highest office in the land and the diverse men who have held it.

This is an anthology of essays written by some of America's most eminent historians. The essays in this secondary source reader humanise American history by portraying it as a story of real people with ehom students can identify.