James Stuart Olson

"Intended for AP-focused American history high school students, this book supplies a complete quick reference source and study aide on the Great Depression and New Deal in America, covering the key themes, events, people, legislation, economics, and policies. Represents an invaluable reference source for a key period of American history that is an integral part of the AP U.S. History curriculum. Presents 15 primary documents accompanied by introductions that place them in their proper historical context. Provides thematic tagging of encyclopedic entries, period chronology, and primary documents for ease of reference, Includes a Historical Thinking Skills section based on AP U.S. History course learning objectives"-- "Approximately one presidential administration removed from the Great Recession of 2008, an event still referred to as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a study of that first economic crisis is not only timely but relevant, as the country still struggles to fully regain the economic footing that it lost with the burst of the housing bubble and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The Great Depression--the worst economic crisis the industrialized Western world has ever seen--permanently changed public policy, setting in motion many of the economic patterns, political templates, and government programs that still govern U.S. social and economic policy. Until the 1930s, most Americans believed that the economy regulated itself according to impersonal, natural economic laws, and they were comfortable leaving economic matters to those market forces"--

In 1967, an Italian surgeon touring Amsterdam's Rijks museum stopped in front of Rembrandt's Bathsheba at the Well, on loan from the Louvre, and noticed an asymmetry to Bathsheba's left breast it seemed distended, swollen near the armpit, discolored, and marked with a distinctive pitting. With a little research, the physician learned that Rembrandt's model, his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels, later died after a long illness, and he conjectured in a celebrated article for an Italian medical journal that the cause of her death was almost certainly breast cancer. A horror known to every culture in every age, breast cancer has been responsible for the deaths of 25 million women throughout history. An Egyptian physician writing 3,500 years ago concluded that there was no treatment for the disease. Later surgeons recommended excising the tumor or, in extreme cases, the entire breast. This was the treatment advocated by the court physician to sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian, though she chose to die in pain rather than lose her breast. Only in the past few decades has treatment advanced beyond disfiguring surgery. In this book, historian James S. Olson provides an absorbing and often frightening narrative history of breast cancer told through the heroic stories of women who have confronted the disease, from Theodora to Anne of Austria, Louis XIV's mother, who confronted "nun's disease" by perfecting the art of dying well, to Dr. Jerri Nielson, who was dramatically evacuated from the South Pole in 1999 after performing a biopsy on her own breast and self-administering chemotherapy. Olson explores every facet of the disease: medicine's evolving understanding of its pathology and treatment options, its cultural significance, the political and economic logic that has dictated the terms of a war on a "woman's disease", and the rise of patient activism. Olson concludes that, although it has not yet been conquered, breast cancer is no longer the story of individual women struggling alone against a mysterious and deadly foe.

Individual demands for equality and civil rights are central themes in U.S. history and American Indian people are no exception. They have had to deal with white racism and its expression in local and national political institutions while trying to define the rights of individual Indians vis-a-vis their own tribal governments. The struggle has made their civil rights movement unique. This encyclopedia, designed to meet the curriculum needs of high school and college students, provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of American Indian civil rights issues. More than 600 entries cover a variety of perspectives, issues, individuals, incidents, and court cases central to an understanding of the history of civil rights among American Indian peoples.

"...The story of the ethnic diversity of the Catholic church has not been told with such illuminating clarity before this ground-breaking book. The author focuses on the conflicting religious and ethnic forces--both in and out of the church--to explore the history of American Catholicism"--Book jacket.

In this insightful and fascinating survey of Cuban-American settlement in the United States, James and Judith Olson look at the unique Cuban-American identity - still intact, highly visible, and politically active - maintained by a people separated from their homeland by ideology and a mere 90 miles across the Straits of Florida. The Olsons point out that, more so than any other U.S. ethnic group, Cuban Americans have achieved a remarkable degree of demographic concentration, primarily settling in the Miami area, and have been among the most politically visible and the most economically successful of immigrant groups, considering that in the early 1990s they were among the most recent arrivals to the United States. The Olsons take a chronological approach to Cuban immigration, covering the origins of a Cuban culture in America, the early Cuban-American community here, Castro's 1955 revolution and reaction to it in Cuba and the United States, Cuban America in the 1950s, the "Golden Exiles" who entered the United States from 1959 to 1970, change and assimilation within the Cuban-American community from 1970 to 1980, immigrants from the Mariel boatlift, and, finally, Cuban America in 1995. Today, the Olsons note, American corporations and Cuban-American entrepreneurs stand poised to do business on the island the minute Castro's stranglehold gives way: hotels, cruise lines, airline companies, cable-television companies, and fast-food franchises are ready to bring capitalism and American popular culture back to Cuba. In the meantime, culturally, economically, and politically rich and bustling Cuban-American enclaves contribute to a unique, hybrid heritage that may one day be returned to Cuba but with a character distinctly its own.