"Life after the war takes an unexpected turn for the Kopp sisters, but soon enough, they are putting their unique detective skills to use in new and daring ways"-- Winter 1919; the war is over. Norma is summoned home from France, Constance is called back from Washington, and Fleurette puts her own plans on hold as the sisters rally around their recently widowed sister-in-law and her children. To help support them, Fleurette does clandestine legal...

A collection of the best interviews from eight of Terkel's classic oral histories together with his introductions to each work.

The year 1900 ushers in a new century and the promise of social change, and women rise together toward equality. Yet rules and restrictions remain, especially for women like Alice Butterworth, whose husband has abruptly disappeared. Desperate to make a living for herself and the child she carries, Alice leaves the bitter cold of Chicago far behind, offering sewing lessons at a New Orleans orphanage. Constance Halstead, a young widow reeling with shock...

Challenging both conservative and liberal myths about Betty Friedan's bestselling book,The Feminine Mystique, historian Stephanie Coontz re-examines the dawn of the 1960s (when the sexual revolution had barely begun) and brilliantly illuminates how a generation of women came to realize that their dissatisfaction with domestic life didn't reflect their personal weakness but rather a social and political injustice.

"Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. In the panoramic tradition of Charles Frazier's fiction, Phantoms is a fierce saga of American culpability. A Vietnam vet still reeling from war, John Frazier finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor,...

Life was hard for children during the Great Depression: kids had to do without new clothes, shoes, or toys, and many couldn't attend school because they had to work. Even so, life still had its bright spots. Take a closer look at the lives of young Americans during this era.

"On a winter day in 1910, at a train station in Ohio, two girls wait in the cold with their mother to begin a new life in the West. Tommy, the eldest, feels responsible for her sister, and in the years to come, as their mother campaigns for women's suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses across Montana, she takes care of Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while her sister goes to school. But as soon as Katherine graduates,...

"The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means...