"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...

Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating wealth into the Eighties.

Documents the kaleidoscopic year during which transformative talents from Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills heavily influenced pop culture, politics, and social movements.

Before 1929, America's relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished. In 1933, for the first time in American history, the federal government assumed some of the responsibility for feeding its citizens. 'Home economists' brought science into the kitchen and imposed their vision of a sturdy, utilitarian cuisine on the American dinner table. Ziegelman and...

Reflections from America's prominent writers on the seminal poem "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary.

Beginning with New York City's first ever New Year's ball drop, 1908 got off to a spectacular start. As the year went on, America witnessed President Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet sailing around the globe, Henry Ford's unveiling of the Model T, and the Wright Brothers' year-end, history making longest recorded flight. Sandwiched between these events, great social changes were also occurring, as race relations deteriorated in the South and the...

"A provocative, intimate look at the evolution of America's political soul through the lives of six political figures--from Whittaker Chambers to Christopher Hitchens--who abandoned the left and joined the right. In Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer tells the stories of six major political figures whose journeys away from the left reshaped the contours of American politics in the twentieth century. By going deep into the minds of six apostates--Whittaker...

Reveals Upton Sinclair's role as a social, political, and cultural reformer who was also a writer, filmmaker, women's rights advocate, and health pioneer, providing a new perspective on the activist's productive life.

A history of the post-World War II decades traces the efforts of an activist federal government to guide the U.S. toward a realization of the American Dream, exploring the era's unprecedented economic, social, and environmental growth. --Publisher. "In The Gifted Generation, a fresh interpretation of post-World War II America, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after the war. He argues that the federal government was instrumental...