Storm across Asia: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, The Mongol Expansion

History

WIENCEK, Henry

Asia

Boston Publishing Company

From its earliest beginnings thousands of years ago, the course of man's progress has been measured by his empires. Large, dynamic flows of power, people, and culture that merge, thrive, then break apart - the pieces only to merge again in a new configuration, the process to be repeated. Through pictures and words, "Empires: Their Rise and Fall" brings the reader face to face with many of the world's greatest empires. Full-color photographs are combined with an absorbing narrative in a lively historical account of each empire and an examination of the period's most enduring cultural achievements. This volume in the series focuses on Genghis Khan and the Mongols, and on The Mogul Expansion. In the first half of the 13th Century, mention of the Mongol hordes - "the scourge of God" - struck fear in the hearts of all who knew them. They were considered the instrument of God's punishment for the sins of mankind; yet the legacy the Mongols bequeathed to India in literature, music, architecture and painting, remains one of the most notable accomplishments of any civilization.

Storm Across Asia: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, The Mogul Expansion (Imperial Visions Series: The Rise and Fall of Empires)

Amanda Heller

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

A story of slavery's lasting power traces the Black and white sides of a slaveholding family's history, showing the inspiring rise of the family's Black descendents and the fall of the formerly wealthy whites

Americas

St Martins Pr

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

St.Martin's Press

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 
The Hairstons is the extraordinary story of the largest family in America, the Hairston clan. With several thousand black and white members, the Hairstons share a complex and compelling history: divided in the time of slavery, they have come to embrace their past as one family. 
The black family's story is most exceptional. It is the account of the rise of a remarkable people―the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of slaves―who took their rightful place in mainstream America. 
In contrast, it has been the fate of the white family―once one of the wealthiest in America―to endure the decline and fall of the Old South, and to become an apparent metaphor for that demise. But the family's fall from grace is only part of the tale. Beneath the surface lay a hidden history―the history of slavery's curse and how that curse plagued slaveholders for generations.
For the past seven years, journalist Wiencek has listened raptly to the tales of hundreds of Hairston relatives, including the aging scions of both the white and black clans. He has crisscrossed the old plantation country in Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi to seek out the descendants of slaves. Visiting family reunions, interviewing family members, and exploring old plantations, Wiencek combs the far-reaching branches of the Hairston family tree to gather anecdotes from members about their ancestors and piece together a family history that involves the experiences of both plantation owners and their slaves. He expertly weaves the Hairstons' stories from all sides of historical events like slave emancipation, Reconstruction, school segregation, and lynching. 
Paradoxically, Wiencek demonstrates that these families found that the way to come to terms with the past was to embrace it, and this lyrical work, a parable of redemption, may in the end serve as a vital contribution to our nation's attempt to undo the twisted historical legacy of the past.

Parenting & Relationships

St. Martin's: Griffin

An Imperfect God : George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America

Biographies & Memoirs

Pan Books/Pan Macmillan Ltd

This is the biography of one of the most famous statesmen of all time, George Washington. The author looks beyond the established view of Washington as general, commander in chief and the first President of the United States, to show the other side of his life as an aristocratic slave holder.

Macmillan

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman. Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil. Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility--as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted--that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true. George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

Historical

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book―based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers―opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.
So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek's Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the "silent profits" gained from his slaves―and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he'd vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson's grocery bills. Parents are divided from children―in his ledgers they are recast as money―while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call "a vile commerce."
Many people of Jefferson's time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Community & Culture

An Imperfect God is a major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery
When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only unavoidable subject of regret." In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father's engagement with slavery at every stage of his life--as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman. 
Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system's evil. 
Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility--as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted--that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.
George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WIENCEK, Henry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by WIENCEK, Henry

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WIENCEK, Henry. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Storm across Asia: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, The Mongol Expansion

Storm Across Asia: Genghis Khan and the Mongols, The Mogul Expansion (Imperial Visions Series: The Rise and Fall of Empires)

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

An Imperfect God : George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America

An Imperfect God : George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America