Uncle Sam

A vagrant is swept away by mysterious voices and visions of a haunted past that spans all of America's history. As the voices in his head begin to make sense, they set off time travelling visions that hint at his own violent past.

It is said that the inspiration for the character of Uncle Sam was a man named Sam Wilson, who provided food for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. By the 1830s, the figure of Uncle Sam had become a personified image of America, commonly used by newspaper and magazine cartoonists to represent the U.S. government's decisions and policies. Perhaps the best-known image of Uncle Sam was created in 1917, during the First World War—a stern, white-haired man wearing star-spangled clothing, encouraging Americans to do their part to support their nation. Uncle Sam remains an important symbol of the United States and the policies and activities of our government.

Analyzing the Mulroney-Chr?tien era's impact on Canadian governance through globalization from without and neoconservatism from within, Clarkson brings together a comprehensive understanding of the current Canadian political climate.

This is Anton F. Bilek's story of his survival as a Japanese prisoner of war. He recounts the Death March that he and other Fil-American prisoners of war endured in Bataan after surrender, his imprisonment in the Philippines and Japan and his subsequent servitude in the Japanese coal mines.

Based on a rich array of sources that capture the voices of both political leaders and ordinary Americans, Uncle Sam Wants You offers a vivid and provocative new interpretation of American political history, revealing how the tensions of mass mobilization during World War I led to a significant increase in power for the federal government. Christopher Capozzola shows how, when the war began, Americans at first mobilized society by stressing duty, obligation, and responsibility over rights and freedoms. But the heated temper of war quickly unleashed coercion on an unprecedented scale, making wartime America the scene of some of the nation's most serious political violence, including notorious episodes of outright mob violence. To solve this problem, Americans turned over increasing amounts of power to the federal government. In the end, whether they were some of the four million men drafted under the Selective Service Act or the tens of millions of home-front volunteers, Americans of the World War I era created a new American state, and new ways of being American citizens.

An enlightening overview of America’s misadventures in economic investment from the Revolutionary era to the Obama administration. From the days of George Washington through World War II to today, government subsidies have failed the American people time and again. Draining the Treasury of cash, this doomed attempt to “pick winners” only serves to impede economic growth—and hurt the very companies receiving aid. But why does federal aid seem to have a reverse Midas touch? In Uncle Sam Can’t Count, Burt and Anita Folsom argue that federal officials don’t have the same abilities or incentives as entrepreneurs. In addition, federal control always leads to politicization. And what works for politicians often doesn’t work in the marketplace. Filled with examples of government failures and free market triumphs, from John Jacob Astor to the Wright Brothers, World War II amphibious landing craft to Detroit, Uncle Sam Can’t Count is a hard-hitting critique of government investment that demonstrates why business should be left exclusively to private entrepreneurs.

Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew "becomes" his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the "truth" still remaining tantalizingly out of reach.

Presents dozens of recipes and historical tidbits that have made their way into the National Archives collections.