Charles L. Mee's Books

Erasmus

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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By the age of thirty-one, the scholarly monk Desiderius Erasmus was the most renowned and revered humanist theologian in Renaissance Europe. A sickly man, driven by a childhood fear of the plague, Erasmus devoted his life to the goal of uplifting people through faith, reason, and education. He satirized the corruption he found in the Roman Catholic Church in such brilliant works as The Praise of Folly and Julius Exclunis. Ironically, his painstaking translation of the New Testament, written to reconcile disputes and to aid in the internal purification of Church doctrine, had considerable influence on Martin Luther, militant leader of the Protestant Reformation. As the conflict between Luther and the Church grew fiercer, Erasmus refused to endorse either side, seeking instead to mediate the argument. Eventually, both sides denounced him, and Erasmus was discredited throughout Europe. Charles L. Mee Jr.'s finely observed, compelling biography gives the reader an excellent understanding of the ideas, people, and events that were shaping European thought just prior to the Reformation. His portrait of Erasmus, with all his faults and virtues, shows him to be a man whose philosophy and courage have special meaning for our times.

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107

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1640191895

ISBN 13

9781640191891

White Robe, Black Robe: Pope Leo X, Martin Luther, and the Birth of the Reformation

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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White Robe, Black Robe: Pope Leo X, Martin Luther, and the Birth of the Reformation

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

In 1517, Martin Luther, the Germany theologian, tacked his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, thereby setting off the theological revolution that gave birth to the Reformation. Luther confronted a papal establishment headed by Leo X, the pleasure-loving son of Lorenzo de Medici who made the Vatican the glittering center of the Italian Renaissance and whose driving ambition was the completion of St. Peter's Cathedral. This book is, in part, a brilliant study of Luther and Pope Leo X, revealing two men of vastly different backgrounds, outlooks, and philosophies. The split in the Christian Church that was the inevitable result is dramatically portrayed. Written sure-handedly and in a lively fashion, the entire world of the Italian Renaissance comes alive. Charles L. Mee Jr., Harvard scholar and biographer, brings the Reformation into sharp new focus as he presents Luther as the typical revolutionary and Leo X as his establishment protagonist. He gives us an immensely illuminating, informed, lively, and gossipy account of history's pivotal figures and the turbulent times in which they lived. Altogether, this book offers an engrossing, biographical history.

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283

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1640191739

ISBN 13

9781640191730

Saving a Continent: The Untold Story of the Marshall Plan

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Saving a Continent: The Untold Story of the Marshall Plan

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

The imperial powers of the nineteenth century, having weakened one another in World War I, destroyed themselves in World War II. In the aftermath of the war, Europe was in shambles. Nearly all of France, Germany, Italy, and Poland had been devastated. Bridges and roads were gone. Rivers and canals were clogged with sunken ships and fallen bridges. Unexploded bombs and shells littered fields. Postwar inflation whipsawed the survivors: cigarettes, coffee, and chocolate were better currencies than Deutsche marks. Prices rose in Italy to thirty-five times their prewar level. Before the year was over, disastrous harvests across the continent would leave Europeans hungry, and, in some places, even starving. Only two great powers remained strong enough to consider taking over, or materially influencing, Europe - the United States and the Soviet Union. United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall had a plan. Here's the story of that plan and the fascinating man who put it together.

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324

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612308414

ISBN 13

9781612308418

Gorbachev Vs. the West

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Gorbachev Vs. the West

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

At the July 1991 meeting of the so-called G7, President George H. W. Bush of the United States and leaders of the other industrial nations were joined by Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, of what was then still the Soviet Union, for his last hurrah. He was seeking direct foreign aid to shore up his rapidly failing economy and ease the transition to a market economy. He asked for billions; he got only some millions. Here, in this essay by award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr., is the dramatic story of Gorbachev’s disappointed – and some would argue tragic - confrontation with the West.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1640190171

ISBN 13

9781640190177

Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

Throughout time, leaders at the pinnacle of power - popes and kings, presidents and prime ministers, czars and generals - have subscribed to the belief that they can change the course of history, not by the force of arms, but through charm, skillful negotiation, honesty, deceit, and all the other arts of peaceful human exchange. Award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr. reproduces seven singular moments when heads of state have come together to decide the future of the world. He examines the uses of summitry, from the directness of Pope Leo's confrontation with Attila the Hun near Rome to Henry VIII and Francis I's meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; from the surprise encounter between Cortés and Moctezuma to the intricacies negotiated by Metternich and Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna; from the ironies of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George's summit at the Paris Peace Conference to the unintended consequences of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt's gathering at Yalta; and finally to Gorbachev's desperate appeal to the G7 nations in London to be included in their powerful club. Mee peeks through the curtains of diplomacy to reveal the hidden agendas and the glorious personalities at work. Taken together, these seven fateful moments are bracing and humbling reminders of the enormous complexity and mystery of human affairs.

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257

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612309062

ISBN 13

9781612309064

The Deal: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin Remake the World

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The Deal: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin Remake the World

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

For two weeks in the summer of 1945, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin gathered to reconstruct the world out of the ruins of World War II. They met "only a few miles," as President Truman noted, "from the war-shattered seat of Nazi power" - around a baize-covered table in the Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. The Allied powers had met twice before, engaging in the cordial horse-trading of properties and promises, to perpetuate a united military front against Germany. Potsdam, however, was different. With Germany defeated, the Allies knew victory in the Far East was imminent. The objective was no longer how to unite for victory, but how instead to divide the spoils and create a new balance of power. In The Deal, Charles L. Mee Jr. demonstrates how, with national self-interest the primary motivation, peace was destined to be sacrificed to deliberate discord. If Allied harmony would stand in the way of expanding "spheres of influence," then it would become necessary to maintain the political expedient of aggression. What did each power want and were these objectives of sufficient importance to warrant forfeiting peace? Would the outcome have been different had Churchill's rhetoric been less powerfully disruptive, had Stalin been surer of domestic calm, had Truman been more open? Would the history of the last seventy years have been the same? Through logbooks, eyewitness accounts, and conference transcripts, Mee vividly reconstructs this moment in history, when three men came together to forge a peace and a new face for Western Europe and left with a tri-partite declaration of the Cold War.

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330

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612307485

ISBN 13

9781612307480

Yalta

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Yalta

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

In diplomatic history, there is perhaps no better example of the rule of unintended consequences than the Yalta Conference. In 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin met to ensure a peaceable aftermath to World War II. But, as this illuminating short-form book by Charles L. Mee Jr. shows, the results were anything but. Stalin created the conditions that would lead to the Soviet Union's demise. Churchill was presiding over an empire in decline and attached Britain to the fortunes of the United States. Roosevelt, meanwhile, set America and the world on the path to the Cold War.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612306195

ISBN 13

9781612306193

A Nearly Normal Life

A Memoir

By: Charles L. Mee

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A Nearly Normal Life

A Memoir

By: Charles L. Mee

In the summer of 1953 the author was a carefree, athletic boy of fourteen. But after he collapsed during a school dance one night, he was suddenly bedridden, drifting in & out of consciousness, as his body disintegrated into a shadow of its former self. He had been stricken with spinal polio. When he emerged from the grip of the disease, he was confronted with a life change so enormous that it challenged all he had believed in & forced him, despite his young age, to redefine himself. His once stereotypically normal life, filled with baseball & swimming pools & dreams of girls, had been irreversibly altered. He was almost the same person he had been; he was nearly normal. His moving personal narrative is a textured portrait of life in the fifties - a time when America & her fighting spirit collided with this disease. Both funny & profound, he is a gifted, unique writer, who unravels the mysteries of youth in a Cold War climate, who gives voice to the mind of a child with a potentially fatal disease, & whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider heightens his brilliant talents as a storyteller.

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155

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Hachette+ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

0316400580

ISBN 13

9780316400589

1919 Versailles: The End of the War to End All Wars

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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1919 Versailles: The End of the War to End All Wars

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

World War I and the Versailles Treaty that followed produced the most serious upheaval in a long and stormy course of modern world history. Four great empires - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - were part of the war's rubble. Far from restoring order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at Paris and Versailles plunged the world into the chaos of the twentieth century. Here, from award-winning historian Charles Mee, is the account of what happened when the three most powerful heads of state gathered to establish a new order.

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286

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612307566

ISBN 13

9781612307565

The Black Death

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The Black Death

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

In the 1300s, a third of the population of Europe died of plague carried by rat-borne fleas, shocking the medieval world to its foundations. "Very rarely," award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr. writes in this short-form book, "does a single event change history by itself. Yet an event of the magnitude of the Black Death could not fail to have had an enormous impact." Here, in this short-form book, is the counterintuitive story of the plague and how, despite the horrible suffering it created, it actually opened people's minds to the possibilities of science and human creativity.

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New Word City

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1612306217

ISBN 13

9781612306216

Rembrandt: A Life

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Rembrandt: A Life

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

Until now he has remained a mystery, leaving only a few sentences, the letters of his bankruptcy, a mistress's notarized complaint - and the most glorious, compassionate paintings ever to astonish the eye. The first pure biography of this enigmatic legend is a fascinating detective story in which, clue by clue, the man himself emerges. Charles Mee, historian and playwright, renders a finely textured portrait of the artist against a richly described background of seventeenth-century life. He captures the human Rembrandt, the ordinary man and unexpected genius. We see the youthful, arrogant poseur, son of a small-town miller, seeking a life of art amid the cosmopolitan bustle of Amsterdam. We see the outsider struggling to rise without patron or court commissions, failing as an entrepreneur while immortalizing simple people in works of haunting complexity. We see the inspired moments behind masterworks like The Anatomy Lesson and Nightwatch and all the conflicting guises of their creator - bohemian and aspiring bourgeois, husband and lover, honored genius, penurious vagabond, and finally, the essential dichotomy - the egocentric master who, despite his intense self-absorption, captured the diversity of humanity with extraordinary empathy, sensitivity, and grace.

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257

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612307000

ISBN 13

9781612307008

The Black Death

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The Black Death

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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New Word City

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1612306217

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9781612306216

Lorenzo de Medici

By: Charles L. Mee, Jr.

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Lorenzo de Medici

By: Charles L. Mee, Jr.

Lorenzo de’ Medici was never an old man. He died in 1492 at the age of forty-three. He came to power in fifteenth-century Florence at the age of twenty. In the twenty-odd years of his rule, this banker, politician, international diplomat, free-wheeling poet and songwriter, and energetic revolutionary helped to give shape, tone, and tempo to that truly dazzling time of Western history, the Renaissance. This book, by award-winning author Charles L. Mee, Jr., recounts the remarkable life of Lorenzo de’ Medici and of the times in which he lived.

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105

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612307191

ISBN 13

9781612307190

The Ohio Gang

The World of Warren G. Harding

By: Charles L. Mee

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The Ohio Gang

The World of Warren G. Harding

By: Charles L. Mee

When Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he brought to Washington some of his political chums from Ohio. They played poker; they sold illegal liquor permits, pardons and paroles. They sold fixes in the Justice Department and transported contraband across state lines. They sold naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome and sheets out of Army warehouses. The Ohio Gang, an historical entertainment peopled with the characters of the day, follows Harding and his cronies from their Ohio childhoods to the smoke-filled rooms of the Republican convention and on to the White House. We meet Henry Daugherty, the attorney general with the disconcerting eyes; Jess Smith, tall and pigeon-toed; Nan Britton, the teenage girl who fell in love with Harding’s campaign posters and who later became his mistress and mother to his illegitimate daughter; and America’s first lady, the Duchess. Following the antics of the president and his administration, The Ohio Gang concludes with Harding’s whistle-stop tour of the country—his final, despairing attempt to keep his presidency from coming undone. An entertaining and immensely readable encapsulation of democracy American-style, The Ohio Gang is an historical tour de force in which the presidency is seen as a traveling medicine show.

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257

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590772881

ISBN 13

9781590772881

Genius of the People

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Genius of the People

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

Charles Mee has recreated the vivid drama of 1787 . . . Genius of the People is an absorbing look at the incomparable personalities who brought us our Constitution." - Michael Beschloss Genius of the People is a timely account of the birth of America's national government during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Charles L. Mee Jr. vividly describes the personalities, issues, conflicts, compromises, and implications of an epoch-making meeting of brilliant and not-so-brilliant political leaders, whose vision and shortsightedness still direct our lives today.

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309

Publisher

New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

161230740X

ISBN 13

9781612307404

Moses, Moses

By: Charles L. Mee

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Moses, Moses

By: Charles L. Mee

Retells the early events in the life of Moses.

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HarperCollins Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060241799

ISBN 13

9780060241797

The Pope Vs. Attila the Hun

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The Pope Vs. Attila the Hun

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

When Pope Leo rode out of Rome in 452 to meet Attila the Hun, he had no arms, no army, no bodyguards, no great retinue of ambassadors and advisers. Only a few churchmen and lesser officials of the enfeebled and fading Roman Empire accompanied him. Attila came to the encounter leading a large, well-armed, battle-hardened army of Huns on horseback. Having plundered northern Italy, they were on their way south with the apparent intention of sacking Rome. Leo had to convince Attila to spare the center of Western civilization. Here, in this essay by award-winning historian Charles L. Mee Jr. is the surprising story of that fateful encounter and its aftermath.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612306160

ISBN 13

9781612306162

Henry VIII Vs. Francis I

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Henry VIII Vs. Francis I

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

The illusion of power - the spectacle of politics - as it is used to dazzle one's own followers, to fool an opponent, and to bemuse oneself has never been displayed more grandly than in the meeting in 1520 of England's Henry VIII and the French King Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Here, in this essay by award-winning writer Charles L. Mee Jr., is the little-told story of how the two kings made peace - but only for a relative moment.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1640190236

ISBN 13

9781640190238

The End of the Aztecs

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The End of the Aztecs

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

The moment Hernán Cortés and his men landed on the shore of Mexico in 1519 was a catastrophic one for Aztec leader Moctezuma, and their chance meeting led to the destruction of an entire civilization. Here, in this essay by award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr., is the haunting, humbling story of the end of the Aztecs and the inevitability of the unpredictable in human affairs.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1612306144

ISBN 13

9781612306148

Life in the Renaissance

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Life in the Renaissance

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

Here, award-winning historian Charles L. Mee Jr. explores life in Renaissance Italy - from the ascendancy of Florence and the Medicis to the genius of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Through wars and violence to festivals and feasts, Mee examines the people - artists, clergy, courtiers, merchants, scholars, and women - who fashioned the cradle for the rebirth of the Western world.

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137

Publisher

New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612309453

ISBN 13

9781612309453

The Architects: Louis Kahn

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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The Architects: Louis Kahn

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

Louis Kahn's monolithic buildings defied convention and defined an era. Like the architect himself, his structures were both complex and simplistic, expressing an underlying strength while displaying a singularly bold vision. Here, in this short-form book by award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr., is Kahn's extraordinary story.

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New Word City

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ISBN 10

1640191119

ISBN 13

9781640191112

Rembrandt: A Life

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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Rembrandt: A Life

By: Charles L. Mee Jr.

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257

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612307000

ISBN 13

9781612307008

The Lives of the Artists

By: Charles Mee

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The Lives of the Artists

By: Charles Mee

. . . what unfurls on the stage . . . is brashly, unapologetically entertaining. . . ." - The New York Times Here are six enthusiastically received plays by Charles Mee inspired by immortal artists: Matisse's Self Portrait, Picasso's Masterpiece, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, bobrauschenbergamerica, Hotel Cassiopeia, and soot and spit. "Charles L. Mee's fascinating and luminous bobrauschenbergamerica . . . is awash with warmth and has a vibrant emotional and intellectual center. . . . It's a stunner." - Variety ". . . bobrauschenbergamerica is a stunning tableau of dance, comedy, memory, feeling, and storytelling." - The Indypendent "Bobrauschenbergamerica is a dizzying, exciting collage of America." - nytheatre.com

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387

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New Word City

Published Date

ISBN 10

1640191291

ISBN 13

9781640191297

The Ohio Gang

The World of Warren G. Harding

By: Charles L. Mee

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The Ohio Gang

The World of Warren G. Harding

By: Charles L. Mee

An entertaining and immensely readable encapsulation of democracy American-style, The Ohio Gang follows the corruption, scandal and inept leadership behind Warren G. Harding's weak presidency.

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