"This book traces the life of George Washington Carver, from his early childhood and education through his sources of inspiration and challenges faced, early successes, and the agricultural discoveries for which he is best known. A timeline at the end of the book summarizes key milestones and achievements of Carver's life."--

In 1789, when George Washington took office as the nation's first president, the United States was an experiment that could easily fail. Only a few years earlier, the fledgling democracy had broken away from British rule. The thirteen states were vying for power and had only reluctantly accepted a strong central government. Whoever led that central government would face many challenges. Most Americans believed Washington was the right person for the...

"A Team of Rivals for World War II, here is the inside story of how FDR and the towering personalities around him waged war in the corridors of Washington D.C. to secure ultimate victory on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. Faced with the unprecedented challenges posed by a global war against entrenched and implacable totalitarian forces, Franklin Delano Roosevelt surrounded himself with a colorful group of strong-minded counselors, including...

"A biography series highlighting the work and social impact of BIPOC inventors"-- "Meet the inventors and scientists of color who changed the world! Born enslaved during the Civil War in Diamond, Missouri, George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor. He promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. Among his many accomplishments, he developed more than 300 industrial and commercial products from...

Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former.

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable...

"What do you want when you are near the end of life? All too often, Rehm argues, this question goes unaddressed or unresolved, whether from uncertainty, from fear, or from a lack of awareness of the resources that are at hand for helping the terminally ill decide for themselves what they want to do. She argues that every human being deserves to die with dignity, and she points to the recent legislation in six states and Washington, D.C., providing...

Presents a collection of more than fifty important speeches from all periods of history along with an explanation detailing why each speech was significant and its impact on world events.