Page Smith

In 1942, following Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the U.S. Army to "exclude" "all persons" considered a threat to national security. In the final analysis these turned out to be some 110,000 Japanese Americans. Losing their jobs, their businesses, their personal property, and their homes, these "persons of Japanese ancestry" - 72,000 of whom were U.S. citizens by birth - were first taken to temporary "assembly centers" (including stalls in converted racetrack stables) and then shipped to "relocation centers" in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Arkansas, where many of them spent the next three years of their lives. In Democracy on Trial, Page Smith tells the dramatic story of the men, women, and children who endured this tragic chapter in American history. Democracy on Trial also exposes the remarkable - and unexpected - range of military, political, economic, racial, and personal motives of public figures such as General John DeWitt, who was in charge of the evacuation; U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, who vigorously opposed the internment; Walter Lippmann, the influential liberal columnist, who warned that the whole Pacific Coast was "in imminent danger of attack from within"; Earl Warren, California Attorney General and later Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who at first opposed the evacuation but then bowed to political pressure; the editors of the Los Angeles Times, who warned that "a viper is a viper wherever the egg is hatched"; and J. Edgar Hoover, who argued that the Japanese American community did not pose a military threat. Drawing on interviews and archival research, Smith shows how behavior in the camps ranged from patriotic cooperation to outright resistance. Everyday life raised a whole host of unanticipated problems that demanded new forms of political, social, and even familial organization. Because the government barred the older Japanese-speaking generation from holding positions of authority in the camps, younger Japanese Americans gained power and status that they otherwise would not have had. At the same time, women gained equality in the camps, where they often did the same work as men. Thus relocation, which began by isolating Japanese Americans from the rest of American society, had the paradoxical effect of speeding up their assimilation, by breaking down the traditional immigrant social structure.

Page Smith, the distinguished American historian, in Rediscovering Christianity confronts the United States of the 1990s as a society fractured by the dissolution of the family, adrift in a sea of moral and intellectual disarray, and crippled by the alienation of its young. Tracing Christian thought through Western history, Smith looks to see if it might have any solutions to offer to our present malaise. Pulling the idea of two distinct and separate cities of God and man from Augustine's The City of God, Smith molds the concept around history to discuss exactly where and when man began to stray from the basic Christian values of faith, unity, and spirituality. Tracing the two cities from the Roman Empire to the present day, we are able to see ourselves far off the path, lost in a quagmire of consumerism, decadence, and overindulgence . The road Smith travels begins in Rome with the preachings of Jesus and moves onward through the collapse of the Roman Empire. After detailing the tenets of Christian philosophy, he moves past Rome, geographically north, on a stimulating historical adventure through Europe and the philosophies of Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, John Winthrop, and Descartes, among others. As the centuries toll on, Christianity, plagued with corruption, exclusivity, usury, and blind worship, prompts the pure of spirit toward America, searching for an unsullied faith unavailable in Europe. In an examination of the political and religious origins of democracy in America, Smith contrasts the humble, and largely holy, motives of earlier generations of Americans, with the capitalistic ones that seem so prevalent today. Page Smith separates Christianity from the tangled web of capitalism and calls for a return to values of decency, generosity, and piety, which have been with us since the beginning of time. By looking back through the past, he gives us a vision of a new future, for without it "society [will] slip into a kind of hell of selfishness and self indulgence...where all is decadence and disintegration." In this timely and seminal work, Smith not only reclaims our past, but he guides us on the way to a brilliant hereafter.

A people's history of the Progressive Era and World War I.

A history of America between 1876 and 1901 focuses on the influence of new scientific ideas, such as evolution, and the growing conflicts between business and labor.

A history of America from 1826 to 1861.

Volume one examines how an immense diversity of ethnic and religious groups ultimately created a set of distict regional societies. Volume two emphasises the flux, uncertainty, and unpredictablilty of the expansion into continental America, showing how a multitude of individuals confronted complex and problematic issues.

Examines the origins and growth of the Constitution and discusses its functions in American life.

A history of the United States from 1777 to 1783. From review: Page Smith's history of the United States is a phenomenal work, packed with details and eyewitness reports from all sides of both the small and larger events that shaped the path of the modern United States. Page Smith presents both side's opinions, attitudes and angst. In doing so I feel that he brings out the real humanity of British officers like Howe trying to solve or suppress the Rebellion. The incomprehension of a King who couldn't understand the motivations of his citizens, or the endless confusion and misunderstanding created by the Atlantic time lag and his orders. The colonials who had grievances both real and manufactured. Whom felt pushed into an action they didn't want to take and then under the most amazing leadership, that spanned the arc from inept to magnificent struggled to gain their interpretation of liberty and government. In all of this Page Smith takes you through month by month and in the case of moments of destiny or defeat almost minute by minute. He, unlike others, does not descend into jingoism, or hero worship. All the characters of this historical pageant are alive, some hopelessly flawed but still brave, some perceptive and farsighted but hindered by chance or support. In the end this is not a dry recitation of revisionist history, it is alive and Page Smith as any good historian takes you to the heart of the events. - Gregory House's Reviews on GoodReads.com, 2 Jul. 2011.

An informal survey of chicken biology and embryology, the cock and hen in art, song, folklore, literature, and religion, the historical, economic, and anthropological importance of the chicken, cockfighting, domestication, and the cooking and eating of chicken and egg.

Excepting the family and the church, the basic form of social organization experienced by the vast majority of Americans up to the early decades of the twentieth century was the small town. This book examines the small town in American history and culture.

"This work is not offered in any sense as a history of the American Indians or even a comprehensive account of white-Indian relations. It is, rather, an effort to suggest the nature of that interchange, of its inherent drama and abiding human interest; and to trace the hold that Indian culture has had on the imagination of the European settlers who ventured to the part of the New World that became the United States"--