Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress in 1955 Alabama, had no idea she was changing history when, work-weary, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail & triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., into the national spotlight. Who was she, before & after her historic act, & how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow?...

DEAN ACHESON is best remembered as President Harry Truman's powerful secretary of state, the American father of NATO, and a major architect of U.S. foreign policy in the decade following the Second World War. But Acheson also played a major role in politics and foreign affairs after his tenure in the Truman administration, as an important Democratic Party activist and theorist during the Eisenhower presidency and as a valued adviser during the Kennedy,...

In Wheels for the world, Douglas Brinkley reveals the riveting details of Ford Motor Company's epic achievements, chronicling the success of the Tin Lizzie to the beloved Model A through the glory days of the Thunderbird, Mustang, and Taurus, as well as the revolutionary plants where they were built-Highland Park and River Rouge. Brinkley tells of the amazing acquisitions of Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Mazda in the 1990s. His narrative also explores...

This engrossing biography recounts the life of one of twentieth-century America's most celebrated--though ultimately tragic--public figures, a man who mastered both Wall Street and Washington. James Forrestal was a brilliant financier and military organizer, and he was the first United States Secretary of Defense. Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley follow Forrestal through his Irish upbringing in upstate New York--he was the son of immigrants--through...

In recent years the United Nations has become more active in - and more generally respected for - its peacekeeping efforts than at any other period in its fifty-year history. During the same period, the United States has been engaged in a debate about the place of the U.N. in the conduct of its foreign policy. This book, the first account of the American role in creating the United Nations, tells an engrossing story and also provides a useful historical...

Chronicles the rise of Henry Ford from machinist and engineer to powerful industrialist. Examines his development of an automobile affordable to the masses and his institution of the five-dollar-a-day wage. Explores his disapproval of organized labor and his antagonistic relationship with his son.