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Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 1594631743
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and Unfamiliar Fishes, a humorous and insightful account of the Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette - the one Frenchman we could all agree on - and an insightful portrait of a nation's idealism and its reality.
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2005-04-04
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 0743282531
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s This American Life Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and history. Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other—a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and—the author’s favorite—historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2003-10
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 0743243803
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The author shares her perspective on such topics as the 2000 election, present-day civil rights activists, and the relationship between the United States and Canada.
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-03-06
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 159448564X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the bestselling author of "The Wordy Shipmates" comes an examination of Hawaii's emblematic and exceptional history, retracing the impact of New England missionaries who began arriving in the early 1800s to remake the island paradise into a version of New England.
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2016-10-04
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 0399573100
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, an insightful and unconventional account of George Washington’s trusted officer and friend, that swashbuckling teenage French aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette. Chronicling General Lafayette’s years in Washington’s army, Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and various kings, Quakers and redcoats along the way. Drawn to the patriots’ war out of a lust for glory, Enlightenment ideas and the traditional French hatred for the British, young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic expecting to join forces with an undivided people, encountering instead fault lines between the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, rebel and loyalist inhabitants, and a conspiracy to fire George Washington, the one man holding together the rickety, seemingly doomed patriot cause. While Vowell’s yarn is full of the bickering and infighting that marks the American past—and present—her telling of the Revolution is just as much a story of friendship: between Washington and Lafayette, between the Americans and their French allies and, most of all between Lafayette and the American people. Coinciding with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, Vowell lingers over the elderly Lafayette’s sentimental return tour of America in 1824, when three fourths of the population of New York City turned out to welcome him ashore. As a Frenchman and the last surviving general of the Continental Army, Lafayette belonged to neither North nor South, to no political party or faction. He was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what the founders hoped this country could be. His return was not just a reunion with his beloved Americans it was a reunion for Americans with their own astonishing, singular past. Vowell’s narrative look at our somewhat united states is humorous, irreverent and wholly original.
Author: Laura Auricchio
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2015-08-18
Total Pages: 450
ISBN-13: 0307387453
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Winner of the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award The Marquis de Lafayette at age nineteen volunteered to fight under George Washington and became the French hero of the American Revolution. In this major biography Laura Auricchio looks past the storybook hero and selfless champion of righteous causes who cast aside family and fortune to advance the transcendent aims of liberty and fully reveals a man driven by dreams of glory only to be felled by tragic, human weaknesses. Drawing on substantial new research conducted in libraries, archives, museums, and private homes in France and the United States, Auricchio, gives us history on a grand scale revealing the man and his complex life, while challenging and exploring the complicated myths that have surrounded his name for more than two centuries
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-10-06
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13: 1594484007
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this New York Times bestseller, the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States "brings the [Puritan] era wickedly to life" (Washington Post). To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Sarah Vowell investigates what that means-and what it should mean. What she discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoebuckles- and-corn reputation might suggest-a highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty people, whose story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Vowell takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where "righteousness" is rhymed with "wilderness," to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America's most celebrated voices.
Author: Olivier Bernier
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2017-10-24
Total Pages: 770
ISBN-13: 1640191003
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Historian Olivier Bernier draws an indelible portrait of the man who represented, more than anyone else, the idea of French nobility to all Americans of the early Republic and who represented to the French the idea of freedom and its American expression. Lafayette was, indeed, the hero of two worlds. Bernier's Lafayette - much of it based on previously inaccessible documents - is a man who lived the liberal ideal as few others have. In the war for American independence, this twenty-year-old was a stubborn, tenacious, and ultimately victorious commander, the favorite of George Washington with whom he developed a unique father-son relationship. Returning to Paris with yearnings for a liberalized government, he was soon caught up in the 1789 revolution, first as its champion, then as the guardian of the king, finally as the only man capable of maintaining order in 1790 and 1791. Once the king fled the capital, however, Lafayette's position became untenable, and he was forced to escape to Belgium. But there, the right-wing emigres considered him a traitor, and he was arrested and sent to Austria, where he languished in prison for years. Finally, the diplomatic efforts of George Washington and other Americans led to his release and return to France. Now, Napoleon feared him as a potential rival, a fear heightened when Lafayette went into self-imposed exile to protest Napoleon's abuse of power. During the revolution that followed Napoleon's downfall, Lafayette maintained his liberal principles as few others bothered to, and his position was vindicated by the uprising that installed the July monarchy and France's first middle-class constitution. Enriching this chronicle of a man and his age are the stories of young "Gilbert's" many loves, as well as the steadfast relationship with his adoring wife. And never far from the marquis's heart was his love for his adopted home. He maintained it through a forty-year correspondence with the Founding Fathers and an unrelenting, if often quixotic, defense of liberal ideals. For its part, the young American republic knew no grander celebrations than those thrown in honor of his return in 1824.
Author: Tom Chaffin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2019-11-26
Total Pages: 440
ISBN-13: 1250113741
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a narrative both panoramic and intimate, Tom Chaffin captures the four-decade friendship of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette shared a singularly extraordinary friendship, one involved in the making of two revolutions—and two nations. Jefferson first met Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state’s governor, in fighting off the British. The charismatic Lafayette, hungry for glory, could not have seemed more different from Jefferson, the reserved statesman. But when Jefferson, a newly-appointed diplomat, moved to Paris three years later, speaking little French and in need of a partner, their friendship began in earnest. As Lafayette opened doors in Paris and Versailles for Jefferson, so too did the Virginian stand by Lafayette as the Frenchman became inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of his country's revolution. Jefferson counseled Lafayette as he drafted TheDeclaration of the Rights of Man and remained a firm supporter of the French Revolution, even after he returned to America in 1789. By 1792, however, the upheaval had rendered Lafayette a man without a country, locked away in a succession of Austrian and Prussian prisons. The burden fell on Jefferson, along with Lafayette's other friends, to win his release. The two would not see each other again until 1824, in a powerful and emotional reunion at Jefferson’s Monticello. Steeped in primary sources, Revolutionary Brothers casts fresh light on this remarkable, often complicated, friendship of two extraordinary men.
