The Facts of Reconstruction by John R. Lynch

After the American Civil War, John R. Lynch, who had been a slave in Mississippi, began his political career in 1869 by first becoming Justice of the Peace, and then Mississippi State Representative. He was only 26 when he was elected to the US Congress in 1873. There, he continued to be an activist, introducing many bills and arguing on their behalf. Perhaps his greatest effort was in the long debate supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to ban discrimination in public accommodations.

In 1884 Lynch was the first African American nominated after a moving speech by Theodore Roosevelt to the position of Temporary Chairman of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. During the Spanish-American War of 1898, he was appointed Treasury Auditor and then Paymaster under the Republicans. In 1901, he began serving with the Regular Army with tours of duty in the United States, Cuba, and the Philippines.

Lynch retired from the Army in 1911, then married Cora Williams. They moved to Chicago, where he practiced law. He also became involved in real estate. After his death in Chicago 1939 at the age of 92, he was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. He was entitled to this as a Congressman and veteran.

After the turn of the century, Lynch wrote a book, The Facts of Reconstruction, and several articles criticizing the then-dominant Dunning School historiography. Dunning and followers had emphasized the views of former slave owners and routinely downplayed any positive contributions of African Americans during Reconstruction, as well as suggesting they could not manage any political power. Lynch argued that blacks had made substantial contributions during the period. Since he participated directly in Reconstruction-era governments, Lynch’s book is considered a primary source in study of the period.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Queen Elizabeth by Jacob Abbott

Elizabeth I was Queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. The daughter of Henry VIII, she was born a princess, but her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed two and a half years after her birth, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate.
In 1558 Elizabeth succeeded the Catholic Mary I, during whose reign she had been imprisoned for nearly a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Bullets & Billets by Bruce Bairnsfather

A front-line view of life in the trenches of the Western Front in the early part of 1914-1915. Told by Lieutenant (later Captain) Bruce Bairnsfather, cartoonist, whose Alf, Bert, and Old Bill were forerunners to Bill Mauldin and his Willie and Joe in World War II. This volume traces Bairnsfather’s service as a machine gun officer from its inception until he was removed from the battlefield by the intense shelling during the Second Battle of Ypres (April 1915). It is told with a wry, ironic, grim humor often possessed by those who have endured shells, bullets, floods, mud, bully beef, maconochie, and a surfeit of plum and apple jam. His participation in the unofficial Christmas Truce of 1914 (for which he was investigated in view of a court-martial) is documented as well as the horrors of war at close quarters.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Indian Boyhood by Charles Alexander Eastman

Indian Boyhood is a lively and appealing first-person recounting of the life of a Sioux child in the last days of the tribe’s “wild” life in the 19th century, before they succumbed to fences, boundaries, and other constrictions of civilization. Charles Eastman, born in 1858 in Minnesota, spent his childhood first in the forests of the land of lakes and later in the wide-open prairies of the Dakota territory. He describes his comprehensive training in woodcraft, horsemanship, and hunting, and retells many stories from his elders that were so important in conveying his tribe’s oral traditions. Eastman does not minimize the ever-present danger that children experienced in such an upbringing, but he also does not lose his sense of the fun and excitement of it all. Listeners will probably wish they could similarly jump on their pony and gallop across the wild and free prairie like the young Ohiyesa.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

The Promised Land by Mary Antin

Being a Jew in Russia at the end of the 19th century was not easy at all. Jews were persecuted because of their religion. So the Jews found comfort in their ancient traditions. When Mary Antin’s father decided that keeping to his traditions did not suit him anymore, he found no place in Russia. So he emigrated to America with his family. Life was not easy, though as a child, Mary describes life in Boston as almost perfect. A smart and dignified girl, Mary takes the good things in anything and writes her autobiography with a smile.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production – Volume 1 by Karl Marx

Capital, Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx’s monumental work, Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime.

Marx’s aim in Capital, Volume I is to uncover and explain the laws specific to the capitalist mode of production and of the class struggles rooted in these capitalist social relations of production.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Prejudices – First Series by H. L. Mencken

Mencken sharpens his pen and in a collection of short essays delivers acerbic opinions on issues and persons of the time. Among his targets in this volume (the first of six) are critics, H.G. Wells Thorstein Veblen, Arnold Bennett, William Dean Howells, Irvin S. Cobb. Mencken’s critiques are delivered against a background of his own well known ethnic, racial, religious, and sectional prejudices. (It is said that the only thing Mencken loved about the Southern United States was his wife, who hailed from Alabama.) Not for the faint of heart, Mencken’s prickly, yet unapologetic, prose reveals a window into American attitudes at the time they were written and their influences on the larger American culture.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.

Half a Century by Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

In the spring of 1850, while the United States was polarized over the slavery debate and Daniel Webster was negotiating the compromise of that year, the outspoken abolitionist, feminist, and journalist, Jane Grey Swisshelm unleashed a congressional sex scandal. Frustrated by what she saw as the Massachusetts senator’s surrender to the Southern Slave Power, she published an article alleging Webster’s marital infidelities with women of color. As a result of the media storm that followed, Swisshelm lost her job at the New York Tribune. This is but one of the many episodes found in her 1880 autobiography, “Half a Century,” which is a narrative of the frontier, of the fight against slavery, and of Swisshelm’s fearless, compassionate, and innovative work as a surgical nurse treating Union soldiers who had suffered the most terrible wounds of war.

Enjoy this wonderful book from All You Can Books audiobooks and ebooks service. Visit us at AllYouCanBooks.com for more great titles you can enjoy anytime, anywhere.