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Explore the secrets of America's past with the official companion to PBS's History Detectives Could a Civil War POW have fashioned a working camera from a tin can, a spyglass lens, and a pine plank? What can an ancient and battered banjo reveal about America's musical and segregated past? How could a man save his own life by proving that he had forged a painting? These are just a few of the intriguing and puzzling questions posed to super sleuths Wes Cowan, Elyse Luray, Gwendolyn Wright, and Tukufu Zuberi in this fascinating book. The perfect companion to the hit public television series, including an episode guide, this book is filled with intriguing case files, pictures, how-to's, and checklists that bring mysteries to life and give you the practical advice and tips you need to solve your own historical puzzles. From genealogical research to patent and property searches to DNA analysis and more, it gives you the lowdown on all of the high-tech tools that can help get to the bottom of a case. Packed with fun and useful information for the whole family, it will deepen your appreciation for the way in which seemingly ordinary objects can connect you to important people and events from the past and give you the know-how to do some history detecting of your own.

A collection of witty, irreverent essays on subjects running the gamut from the space program to airport bans on smoking are included in this anthology. Written by Spider Robinson, The Crazy Years takes its name from Robert A. Heinlein's designation of the last years of the 20th century and contains essays from Robinson's tenure as op-ed columnist for The Globe and Mail and from Galaxy Online. Environmentalists that place the survival of earth before the survival of humanity, the idiocy of computer designs, and the downsides of the Internet are among the subjects Robinson uses to take the world to task.

An addictive fantasy romance from TikTok sensation Piper CJ, now newly revised and edited. Two orphans grow into powerful young women as they face countless threats to find their way back to each other. Farleigh is just an orphanage. At least, that's what the church would have the people believe, but beautiful orphans Nox and fae-touched Amaris know better. They are commodities for sale, available for purchase by the highest bidder. So when the madame of a notorious brothel in a far-off city offers a king's ransom to purchase Amaris, Nox ends up taking her place — while Amaris is drawn away to the mountains, home of mysterious assassins. Even as they take up new lives and identities, Nox and Amaris never forget one thing: they will stop at nothing to reunite. But the threat of war looms overhead, and the two are inevitably swept into a conflict between human and fae, magic and mundane. With strange new alliances, untested powers, and a bond that neither time nor distance could possibly break, the fate of the realms lies in the hands of two orphans — and the love they hold for each other.

With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.

The Washington Post hails Greil Marcus as our greatest cultural critic. Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voice to Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believer and currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission. Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

World War II was a great conflagration of unimaginable horror and destruction resulting in over seventy million killed, millions more displaced, families broken or destroyed, great cities and even whole countries left in ruins. This book will backdrop, from the end of World War I, or "The War to End All Wars" and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the almost immediate series of events that led to World War II. We will chronicle these events as they relate to the life of one individual and his ultimate entanglement with the dynamics of a world engulfed in war. This book will retrace the mission of one solitary B-24 Liberator bomber crew on a single day in March 1945 when they met their "fate, somewhere among the clouds above." We will see the kindred spirit of complete strangers who were thrust into and subsequently banded together by untenable circumstance, to rise and act to cast off the yoke of evil.