This comprehensive and highly readable collection of essays highlights 50 important events that changed the course of American history. What Happened? An Encyclopedia of Events That Changed America Forever is designed to introduce beginning U.S. history students and lay readers to the most significant events in the nation's history. More than that, it also will give readers insight into why a particular event is important. This book consists of 50 chapters in four volumes, each dealing with a critically important event in American history from the 17th century to the present. Each chapter includes a factual essay on the subject prepared by John Findling or Frank Thackeray. The factual material is augmented with an interpretive essay on the same subject, written by a specialist in the field. Through this juxtaposition, readers can learn not only about the who, what, and where of an event, but also why it is important in the sweep of American history.

Tells the story of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers in contextualized biographies of the players, managers, and everyone else important to the team.

America’s greatest days are yet to come. We are in a painful transition period. Our government is crushingly expensive, failing at its basic functions, and unable to keep its promises. It does not work and it cannot continue as it is. But the inevitable end of big government does not mean the end of America. It only means the end of one phase of American life. America is poised to enter a new era of freedom and prosperity. The cultural roots of the American people go back at least fifteen centuries, and make us individualistic, enterprising, and liberty-loving. The Founding generation of the United States lived in a world of family farms and small businesses, America 1.0. This world faded away and was replaced by an industrialized world of big cities, big business, big labor unions and big government, America 2.0. Now America 2.0 is outdated and crumbling, while America 3.0 is struggling to be born. This new world will bring immense productivity, rapid technological progress, greater scope for individual and family-scale autonomy, and a leaner and strictly limited government. America has made one major transition already, and industrial America became an economic colossus. We are now making a new transition, which will surprise many Americans, and astonish the world.

The only full biography of Benjamin Rush, an extraordinary Founding Father and America's leading physician of the Colonial era While Benjamin Rush appears often and meaningfully in biographies about John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, this legendary man is presented as little more than a historical footnote. Yet, he was a propelling force in what culminated in the Declaration of Independence, of which he was a signer. Rush was an early agitator for independence, a member of the First Continental Congress, and one of the leading surgeons of the Continental Army during the early phase of the Revolutionary War. He was a constant and indefatigable adviser to the foremost figures of the American Revolution, notably George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Even if he had not played a major role in our country's creation, Rush would have left his mark in history as an eminent physician and a foremost social reformer in such areas as medical teaching, treatment of the mentally ill (he is considered the Father of American Psychiatry), international prevention of yellow fever, establishment of public schools, implementation of improved education for women, and much more. For readers of well-written biographies, Brodsky has illuminated the life of one of America's great and overlooked revolutionaries.