Books by Terry Golway
American Political Speeches (Penguin Civic Classics)
by Richard Beeman, Terry Golway
A selection of speeches by the most inspiring and persuasive orators in American history
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, these slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens.
American Political Speeches includes the best American rhetoric from inside and outside the White House. Some of the greatest words spoken in American history have come from men and women who lacked the biggest bully pulpit in the country, but who nevertheless were able to move the nation with words. Frederick Douglass explained the irony of Independence Day from the perspective of a slave. Martin Luther King, Jr. described his dream of an interracial America. William Jennings Bryan gave voice to social discontent with a single phrase, "a cross of gold." Barbara Jordan summoned the nation"s outrage during the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon. And the best presidents, not by coincidence, have tended to be those with an appreciation for the use of language: Lincoln explaining a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg; John Kennedy voicing moral outrage at the Berlin Wall; Franklin D. Roosevelt chatting to a nation gathered in front of radios; Ronald Reagan addressing Congress freshly healed from an assassination attempt.
Copies
-
$16.00
Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses (Penguin Classics)
by Robert V. Remini, Terry Golway
The complete American presidential inaugural addresses featuring historical background by a National Book Award winner
A testament to the power of oratory, this stirring and often surprising collection includes all fifty-five United States presidential inaugural addresses, as well as a general introduction and commentary that provides historical context for each speech. Marking pivotal moments in American history, readers will learn:
- How George Washington came to ad-lib 'So help me, God' at the end of his first inaugural address
- Why Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address is considered one of the finest ever delivered
- The historical background behind Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself' and John F. Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.'
Copies
No copies available.
Washington's General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution
by Terry Golway
The overlooked Quaker from Rhode Island who won the American Revolution's crucial southern campaign and helped to set up the final victory of American independence at Yorktown
Nathanael Greene is a revolutionary hero who has been lost to history. Although places named in his honor dot city and country, few people know his quintessentially American story as a self-made, self-educated military genius who renounced his Quaker upbringing-horrifying his large family-to take up arms against the British. Untrained in military matters when he joined the Rhode Island militia in 1774, he quickly rose to become Washington's right-hand man and heir apparent. After many daring exploits during the war's first four years (and brilliant service as the army's quartermaster), he was chosen in 1780 by Washington to replace the routed Horatio Gates in South Carolina.
Greene's southern campaign, which combined the forces of regular troops with bands of irregulars, broke all the rules of eighteenth-century warfare and foreshadowed the guerrilla wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His opponent in the south, Lord Cornwallis, wrote, "Greene is as dangerous as Washington. I never feel secure when I am encamped in his neighborhood. He is vigilant, enterprising, and full of resources." Greene's ingenious tactics sapped the British of their strength and resolve even as they "won" nearly every battle. Terry Golway argues that Greene's appointment as commander of the American Southern Army was the war's decisive moment, and this bold new book returns Greene to his proper place in the Revolutionary era's pantheon.
"Washington said if he went down in battle, Greene was his choice to succeed him. Read this book and you will understand why." -- Joseph J. Ellis, author of His Excellency: George Washington
Copies
No copies available.
Washington's General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution
by Terry Golway
The overlooked Quaker from Rhode Island who won the Revolutionary War's crucial southern campaign and helped to set up the final victory of American independence at Yorktown
Nathanael Greene is a revolutionary hero who has been lost to history. Although places named in his honor dot city and country, few people know his quintessentially American story as a self-made, self-educated military genius who renounced his Quaker upbringing-horrifying his large family-to take up arms against the British. Untrained in military matters when he joined the Rhode Island militia in 1774, he quickly rose to become Washington's right-hand man and heir apparent. After many daring exploits during the war's first four years (and brilliant service as the army's quartermaster), he was chosen in 1780 by Washington to replace the routed Horatio Gates in South Carolina.
Greene's southern campaign, which combined the forces of regular troops with bands of irregulars, broke all the rules of eighteenth-century warfare and foreshadowed the guerrilla wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His opponent in the south, Lord Cornwallis, wrote, "Greene is as dangerous as Washington. I never feel secure when I am encamped in his neighborhood. He is vigilant, enterprising, and full of resources." Greene's ingenious tactics sapped the British of their strength and resolve even as they "won" nearly every battle. Terry Golway argues that Greene's appointment as commander of the American Southern Army was the war's decisive moment, and this bold new book returns Greene to his proper place in the Revolutionary era's pantheon.
Copies
No copies available.
Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
by Terry Golway
A major, surprising new history of New York’s most famous political machine―Tammany Hall―revealing, beyond the vice and corruption, a birthplace of progressive urban politics. For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes; Tammany's corruption was real, but so was its heretofore forgotten role in protecting marginalized and maligned immigrants in desperate need of a political voice.
Irish immigrants arriving in New York during the nineteenth century faced an unrelenting onslaught of hyperbolic, nativist propaganda. They were voiceless in a city that proved, time and again, that real power remained in the hands of the mercantile elite, not with a crush of ragged newcomers flooding its streets. Haunted by fresh memories of the horrific Irish potato famine in the old country, Irish immigrants had already learned an indelible lesson about the dire consequences of political helplessness. Tammany Hall emerged as a distinct force to support the city's Catholic newcomers, courting their votes while acting as a powerful intermediary between them and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class. In a city that had yet to develop the social services we now expect, Tammany often functioned as a rudimentary public welfare system and a champion of crucial social reforms benefiting its constituency, including workers' compensation, prohibitions against child labor, and public pensions for widows with children. Tammany figures also fought against attempts to limit immigration and to strip the poor of the only power they had―the vote.
While rescuing Tammany from its maligned legacy, Golway hardly ignores Tammany's ugly underbelly, from its constituents' participation in the bloody Draft Riots of 1863 to its rampant cronyism. However, even under occasionally notorious leadership, Tammany played a profound and long-ignored role in laying the groundwork for social reform, and nurtured the careers of two of New York's greatest political figures, Al Smith and Robert Wagner. Despite devastating electoral defeats and countless scandals, Tammany nonetheless created a formidable political coalition, one that eventually made its way into the echelons of FDR’s Democratic Party and progressive New Deal agenda.
Tracing the events of a tumultuous century, Golway shows how mainstream American government began to embrace both Tammany’s constituents and its ideals. Machine Made is a revelatory work of revisionist history, and a rich, multifaceted portrait of roiling New York City politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 8 pages of illustrations
Copies
No copies available.
Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
by Terry Golway
“Golway’s revisionist take is a useful reminder of the unmatched ingenuity of American politics.”―Wall Street Journal History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work Machine Made, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland’s potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake. Tammany’s transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms―such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation, and minimum wages― and Golway demonstrates that American political history cannot be understood without Tammany’s profound contribution. Culminating in FDR’s New Deal, Machine Made reveals how Tammany Hall “changed the role of government―for the better to millions of disenfranchised recent American arrivals” (New York Observer). 8 pages of illustrations
Copies
No copies available.
Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words
by Robert Dallek, Terry Golway
Let Every Nation Know is the first book of its kind-a historical biography in Kennedy's own words. Combining a remarkable audio CD of Kennedy's most famous speeches, debates and press conferences with the insights of two of America's preeminent historians, the result is a unique look at the world-changing words and presidency of John F. Kennedy.
Robert Dallek, author of the #1 bestselling biography An Unfinished Life, and Terry Golway, author of Washington's General, bring to life the soaring oratory, marvelous wit and the intense drama of Kennedy's words and the events they evoke.
"I had forgotten just how powerful these speeches were but the CD brings them to life once more and Dallek and Golway have done a masterful job of putting them into context."-Bob Schieffer, CBS News
Copies
No copies available.
Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words
by Robert Dallek, Terry Golway
A collection of thirty-four of John F. Kennedy's speeches, debates, and interviews offers insight into the ideals, politics, and life of the charismatic president.
Copies
No copies available.
Together We Cannot Fail: FDR and the American Presidency in Years of Crisis
by Terry Golway
"While listening to the audio, readers will be struck by Roosevelt's immense oratory skills. In his famous 'fireside chats,' the president adopted a down-to-earth, fatherly tone, but when the occasion demanded it, he could thunderously deliver such lines as, 'this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.' A fine contextualization of Roosevelt's life and times."
Kirkus Reviews
An uncommon portrait of Roosevelt's presidency, in words, photographs, and his own voice
This vivid portrait shows a nation at its best and at its worst, through the lens of a president's words during the first presidency truly impacted by the media age. An FDR biography unlike any other, Together We Cannot Fail offers a new view of Roosevelt's transformation of an insular America into the world's most revered and feared superpower. An exclusive accompanying CD integrates with the biography to reveal in his own words how he led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II to its "rendezvous with destiny."
Historian Terry Golway brings alive how Roosevelt saved America from its worst fears and led the nation to victory in a cataclysmic world war and by doing so forever changed how Americans live and view themselves. Crafted from Roosevelt's own stirring words, this unique biography shows how he invented and established the practice of the media presidency with his famous fireside chats, the first presidential speeches broadcast nationally from the White House.
Hear FDR speak to the nation in 30 famous speeches on an exclusive audio CD
For twelve tumultuous presidential years, Roosevelt regularly spoke to the American people, this man of wealth and privilege giving voice to the downtrodden's American Dream. The first in a long line of media presidencies, Roosevelt's innate ability to connect with the people remains the standard by which even the best of them—Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama alike—are judged. Roosevelt's words would define a remarkable presidency that faced and overcame the country's worst economic crisis and a war to end all wars.
Together We Cannot Fail brings the president and his era to life like no other biography, combining the insight of noted historian Terry Golway with Roosevelt's own voice in audio excerpts from his most memorable speeches and chats. (20090715)
Copies
No copies available.
Words that Ring Through Time: The Fifty Most Important Speeches in History and How they Changed Our World
by Terry Golway
About the Author
Terry Golway is a frequent contributor to American Heritage, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times. His previous books include So That Others Might Live, The Irish in America, For the Cause of Liberty, Irish Rebel, Washington's General, Fellow Citizens, and Let Every Nation Know. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Product Description
Copies
No copies available.
No Greater Sacrifice, No Greater Love: A Son's Journey to Normandy
by Terry Golway, Carter Wf, Walter Ford Carter
Describes how a journal and a collection of letters, excerpted here, taught him about the life of the father--who had died in combat in France during World War II--he had known and details his odyssey to the battlefields of Normandy to find the place that he had died.
Copies
No copies available.
Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance That Created the Modern Democratic Party
by Terry Golway
"This is history told the old-fashioned way. The book is only as long as it needs to be, the adroit narrative full of heroes (Smith, Roosevelt, big-city Democratic bosses) and villains (William Randolph Hearst, William Jennings Bryan, the Ku Klux Klan). The scenes are vivid and the anecdotes plentiful." ―The Wall Street Journal
"Frank & Al is the latest of Mr. Golway’s several captivating books on New York politics. He delivers once again, with a timely narrative on the centennial of Smith’s first election as governor." ―The New York Times
"The tangled, tragic story of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt is one of the great tales of American politics, and Terry Golway has told it beautifully. This is a joyous book... an especially important book now." ―Joe Klein
"I highly recommend this fascinating and enlightening book." ―Franklin D. Roosevelt, III
"Beautifully written...The book is must reading for anyone interested in the history of American politics and the rise of the country’s welfare state." ―Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
“A marvelous portrait... Highly recommend!” ―Douglas Brinkley, author of Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America
The inspiring story of an unlikely political partnership―between a to-the-manor-born Protestant and a Lower East Side Catholic―that transformed the Democratic Party and led to the New Deal
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Democratic Party was bitterly split between its urban machines―representing Catholics and Jews, ironworkers and seamstresses, from the tenements of the northeast and Midwest―and its populists and patricians, rooted in the soil and the Scriptures, enforcers of cultural, political, and religious norms. The chasm between the two factions seemed unbridgeable. But just before the Roaring Twenties, Al Smith, a proud son of the Tammany Hall political machine, and Franklin Roosevelt, a country squire, formed an unlikely alliance that transformed the Democratic Party. Smith and FDR dominated politics in the most-powerful state in the union for a quarter-century, and in 1932 they ran against each other for the Democratic presidential nomination, setting off one of the great feuds in American history.
The relationship between Smith and Roosevelt, portrayed in Terry Golway's Frank and Al, is one of the most dramatic untold stories of early 20th Century American politics. It was Roosevelt who said once that everything he sought to do in the New Deal had been done in New York under Al Smith when he was governor in the 1920s. It was Smith who persuaded a reluctant Roosevelt to run for governor in 1928, setting the stage for FDR’s dramatic comeback after contracting polio in 1921. They took their party, and American politics, out of the 19th Century and created a place in civic life for the New America of the 20th Century.
Copies
No copies available.