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Illustrates three verses of our national anthem, written at the battle of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Includes music, background history, and pictures of flags used in the United States, past and present.

A feminist manifesto by the great modernist writer contends that women's literature would be on a par with that of men, if women had the same levels of income, privacy, and experience as their counterparts. Her main illustration of this principle is a hypothetical sister to Shakespeare, who, even with the same talents as her brother, would have never been given the chance to display her talents to the world.

Jazz is a uniquely American art form. This popular style of music sprang from post-slavery African-American culture, as children of slaves settled in big cities. They began to fuse their musical heritage with the influences of their new surroundings, and the result is still felt in the music we know as jazz today.

"The Aeneid" is considered by some to be one of the most important epic poems of all time. The story is as much one of the great epic hero, Aeneas, as it is of the foundation of the Roman Empire. Aeneas, a Trojan Prince who escapes after the fall of troy, travels to Italy to lay the foundations for what would become the great Roman Empire. Virgils "Aeneid" is a story of great adventure, war, love, and of the exploits of an epic hero. In the work Virgil...

Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the origins of the Cynthia Ann Parker Indian captivity story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth that bares the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality, and violence in the settling of the West and the making of America.

"From the dime novels of the Civil War era to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century to modern paperbacks, lurid fiction has provided escapism. Covering the history of pulp literature from 1850 through 1960, the author describes how sensational tales filled a public need and flowered during the evolving social conditions of the Industrial Revolution"--

In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, book critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman's seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped make us who we are today and why his legacy remains so strong.

"The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how it made its way into the darker corners of our psyche on the bloody battlefield, the screaming asylum, and desolated...

"The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking." "Professor James Murray, an astonishingly...

"Describes the beginnings and evolution of punk and indie music, spotlighting important artists and songs"--Provided by publisher.