Star Spangled Scandal

A HISTORY BOOK CLUB BESTSELLER "True crime fans will relish this thoughtful look at a murder and its aftermath that riveted a nation." — Publisher's Weekly book review "There may be no two more addicting topics to people right now than politics and true crime. Star Spangled Scandal delves into both of these—with a heavy dose of sex added in." — NPR book review “… and sir I do assure you he has as much the use of your wife as you have.” — From an anonymous note delivered to Congressman Daniel Sickles on February 24, 1859 It is two years before the Civil War, and Congressman Daniel Sickles and his lovely wife Teresa are popular fixtures in Washington, D.C. society. Their house sits on Lafayette Square across from White House grounds, and the president himself is godfather to the Sickles’ six-year-old daughter. Because Congressman Sickles is frequently out of town, he trusts his friend, U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key—son of Francis Scott Key—to escort the beautiful Mrs. Sickles to parties in his absence. Revelers in D.C. are accustomed to the sight of the congressman’s wife with the tall, Apollo-like Philip Barton Key, who is considered “the handsomest man in all Washington society… foremost among the popular men of the capital.” Then one day an anonymous note sets into motion a tragic course of events that culminates in a shocking murder in broad daylight in Lafayette Square. This is the riveting true story of the murder and trial that sparked a national debate on madness, male honor, female virtue, fidelity, and the rule of law. Bestselling author Chris DeRose (The Presidents’ War) uses diary entries, letters, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness testimonies to bring the characters to thrilling life in this antebellum true crime history..

Based on the true story of an 1859 murder that occurred in front of the White House in Washington D.C. Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, carried on a love affair with the young, beautiful wife of Congressman Dan Sickles. The affair is revealed in an inflammatory anonymous letter to Dan, the author of which remains a mystery to this day. Follow the trail back in time through history to when the country was young, Abraham Lincoln was still a nobody, and the Civil War had not yet begun. Through the eyes of the victim, the adulteress, and the family of Francis Scott Key, discover the events leading to the murder and the disastrous fallout after. Ask yourself the shocking question, could Abraham Lincoln be to blame for the death of Francis Scott Key’s son?.

Historian Michael Martinez surveys political sex scandals in American history, from the earliest years of the Republic to today, to explore how these events impacted the politics of the day and the legacy they left for future generations of American leaders..

Picking America's best presidents is easy. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt usually lead the list, But choosing the nation's worst presidents requires more thought. In Star-Spangled Men, respected presidential biographer Nathan Miller puts on display those leaders who were abject failures as chief executive. With pointed humor and a deft hand, he presents a rogues' gallery of the men who dropped the presidential ball, and sometimes their pants as well. Miller includes Richard M. Nixon, who was forced to resign to escape impeachment; Jimmy Carter, who proved that the White House is not the place for on-the-job training; and Warren G. Harding, who gave "being in the closet" new meaning as he carried on extramarital interludes in one near the Oval Office. This current edition also includes a new assessment of Bill Clinton -- who has admitted lying to his family, his aides, his cabinet, and the American people..

Moments in History II is similar in format to Moments in History, but each book stands alone in that one does not have to read one in order to enjoy the other. They each contain chapters that examine a historical event and then look at the life of the individual at the center of that event. These people are sometimes famous, sometimes obscure, sometimes heroic, and sometimes scoundrels--but they are always interesting..

"Presidents are ranked wrong. In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of Coolidge He's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy..

Covering people and events from the 1630s to the present day, this reference offers 455 entries on such topics as dirty politics, white-collar scams, botched cover-ups, tawdry love affairs, and despicable acts of corruption..

The fascinating story of America’s national anthem and an examination of its powerful meaning today. Most Americans learn the tale in elementary school: During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key witnessed the daylong bombardment of Baltimore’s Fort McHenry by British navy ships; seeing the Stars and Stripes still flying proudly at first light, he was inspired to pen his famous lyric. What Americans don’t know is the story of how this everyday “broadside ballad,” one of thousands of such topical songs that captured the events and emotions of early American life, rose to become the nation’s one and only anthem and today’s magnet for controversy. In O Say Can You Hear? Mark Clague brilliantly weaves together the stories of the song and the nation it represents. Examining the origins of both text and music, alternate lyrics and translations, and the song’s use in sports, at times of war, and for political protest, he argues that the anthem’s meaning reflects—and is reflected by—the nation’s quest to become a more perfect union. From victory song to hymn of sacrifice and vehicle for protest, the story of Key’s song is the story of America itself. Each chapter in the book explores a different facet of the anthem’s story. In one, we learn the real history behind the singing of the anthem at sporting events; in another, Clague explores Key’s complicated relationship with slavery and its repercussions today. An entire is chapter devoted to some of the most famous performances of the anthem, from Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock to Roseanne Barr at a baseball game to the iconic Whitney Houston version from the 1991 Super Bowl. At every turn, the book goes beyond the events to explore the song’s resonance and meaning. From its first lines Key’s lyric poses questions: “O say can you see?” “Does that banner yet wave?” Likewise, Clague’s O Say Can You Hear? raises important questions about the banner; what it meant in 1814, what it means to us today, and why it matters..

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States..

The name Daniel Sickles and the word controversy are synonymous. Any student of 19th century American political history is familiar with Sickles’ 1859 murder of Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, who had seduced Sickles’ young wife. That murder, because Sickles was at the time a New York Congressman and Key a district attorney for Washington, captured the country’s imagination, a front-page event that inevitably ensnarled President James Buchanan, a close Sickles friend, inviting in the process explorations of what was seen as a sordid Washington society of the late 1850s. Civil War historians know Sickles as the General who led the men of the Union’s III Corps out onto the exposed expanse of the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, a decision many scholars have regarded as disastrous, and one that nearly led to an overall Union defeat at the famous battlefield, while losing for Sickles his right leg from Confederate shelling. But these two singular, if spectacular events, in a very real sense represent only two days out of an extraordinary lifetime of 94 years. The rest of Sickles’ career was made up of his rise as a young stalwart of New York’s notorious Tammany Hall; his two terms in Congress leading up to the Civil War; his contentious service as a military governor of the Carolinas after the War; his newsworthy tenure as U.S. Minister to Spain in the late 1860s and early 70s; and even his stint, at the age of 70, as the sheriff of the county encompassing New York City. Beyond the headlines were Sickles’ relationships with presidents ranging from Franklin Pierce to Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, not to mention an improbable friendship with Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century. Daniel Sickles: A Life is the first full-length published treatment looking in depth at the entirely of one man’s almost unbelievably colorful and contentious career. Garry Boulard is the author of The Expatriation of Franklin Pierce—The Story of a President and the Civil War (iUniverse, 2006), and The Worst President—The Story of James Buchanan (iUniverse, 2015). Boulard’s essays and reviews have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Journal of Ethnic Studies, Louisiana History, Journal of Mississippi History, and Florida Historical Quarterly, among many other publications..

In The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution, New York Times bestselling author Chris DeRose reveals the true, never-before-told story of the men who brought their overseas combat experience to wage war against a corrupt political machine in their hometown. Bill White and the young men of McMinn County answered their nation's call after Pearl Harbor. They won the freedom of the world and returned to find that they had lost it at home. A corrupt political machine was in charge, protected by violent deputies, funded by racketeering, and kept in place by stolen elections - the worst allegations of voter fraud ever reported to the Department of Justice, according to the U.S. Attorney General. To restore free government, McMinn's veterans formed the nonpartisan GI ticket to oppose the machine at the next election. On Election Day, August 1, 1946, the GIs and their supporters found themselves outgunned, assaulted, arrested, and intimidated. Deputies seized ballot boxes and brought them back to the jail. White and a group of GIs - "The Fighting Bunch" - men who fought and survived Guadalcanal, the Bulge, and Normandy, armed themselves and demanded a fair count. When they were refused the most basic rights they had fought for, the men, all of whom believed they had seen the end of war, returned to the battlefield and risked their lives one last time. For the past seven decades, the participants of the "Battle of Ballots and Bullets" and their families kept silent about that conflict. Now in The Fighting Bunch, after years of research, including exclusive interviews with the remaining witnesses, archival radio broadcast and interview tapes, scrapbooks, letters, and diaries, Chris DeRose has reconstructed one of the great untold stories in American history..

Unruly women have been making a spectacle of themselves in film and on television from Mae West to Roseanne Arnold. In this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Rowe explores how the unruly woman—often a voluptuous, noisy, joke-making rebel or "woman on top"—uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority. At the heart of the book are detailed analyses of two highly successful unruly women—the comedian Roseanne Arnold and the Muppet Miss Piggy. Putting these two figures in a deeper cultural perspective, Rowe also examines the evolution of romantic film comedy from the classical Hollywood period to the present, showing how the comedic roles of actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Marilyn Monroe offered an alternative, empowered image of women that differed sharply from the "suffering heroine" portrayed in classical melodramas..

This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraw's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers, the shouters, the muckrakers and whistleblowers. America's obsession with scandal-and the media's boundless capacity to report and sometimes even create it-did not start with O.J. Simpson, Rush Limbaugh, or Britney Spears. It was ingrained in the fabric of our nation even before Paul Revere made his famous ride. Indeed, our media's cherished right to free expression was hard-won and is now protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but it comes with responsibilities and is fraught with peril. The tension between the two forces of free expression and permissible subject matter has, throughout American history, caused media scandals-public outcries, legal proceedings, denunciations, violence and, in the case of Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel IThe Satanic Verses deaths. The early battles by the print media-newspapers, magazines, books-over censorship, book banning, book burning, obscenity, blasphemy and libel set the groundwork for even greater battles as the media expanded into radio, television and the Internet. This fascinating volume offers an overview of the most influential and notorious media scandals, from newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger's groundbreaking 1735 trial for printing and publishing false, scandalous, malicious and seditious statements to Dr. Phil McGraw's 2008 thwarted attempt to force his television cameras inside Britney Spears' hospital room, from the attempts to ban literature by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg to the excesses of gossip mongers like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Geraldo Rivera, and Matt Drudge. It delves into the tabloid press and walks through the minefields of political opinion shapers, the shouters, the muckrakers and whistleblowers. Media Scandals examines this fascinating, troubled and sometimes inspiring subject from two different perspectives. First, through its recurrent themes, which reach across all media: politics; censorship; race and religion; sex and morals. The second half of the volume then examines each industry in more detail: book publishing; newspapers and magazines; radio and television, and the Internet. Augmenting this invaluable resource is a detailed timeline to help students put the wide-ranging scandals into historical perspective, and a thorough bibliography to encourage further research..

Profiles significant scandals in U.S. sports, discussing violence, drugs, gambling, sex, cheating, regrettable commentary, and politics..

Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge, and College Writing invites students to learn about and participate in a series of related conversations about student identities, the aims of the university, and the conventions of academic writing. Rather than seeing academic writing as consisting of objective statements of truth, the editors of this textbook view it as a social construction of knowledge that requires rhetorical choices as well as empirical research. This book represents academic writing as a sequence of continuing conversations within discourse communities provides a variety of oppotunities to engage with and participate in these converstaions..

Smart, educated and accomplished people, the pillars of our society, try to cheat the system in the most convoluted and fascinating ways. History's Greatest Scandals tells the stories of adultery, perversion, shameless greed, theft and deception that have brought down presidents, prime ministers, clergy and famous people of practically every stripe. The gripping cloak-and-dagger dramas climax in catastrophic exposures and career-destroying indiscretions that rival great fiction and are all the more astounding because they areseminal moments in our history. The stories star famous names and often share selfish desires, yet each tale shocks us, sometimes for its audacity, sometimes its complexity and sometimes its pure idiocy, from Bill Clinton's famous and recanted, 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman!' and King Edward VIII abdicating the throne to marry Wallis Simpson to televangelist Jimmy Swaggart caught with a prostitute, Howard Hughes's bizarre personal hygiene and Anthony Blunt who attained British royal favour while spying for the Soviet Union. Alternately disturbing and amazing, the narratives reveal clandestine affairs, underhanded political dealings, blatant criminal activity and other dramatic episodes that erupt in the lives of successful people gone bad..

In Ulysses S. Grant: A Bibliography, Dr. Kelsey has created an invaluable resource for Grant scholars. The bibliography consists of twenty chapters covering Grant's early life, his careers both as soldier and as president, his associations with various individuals, his post-presidency activities, the role alcohol played in his life, his battle with throat cancer, and ultimately, his tragic death. What makes this book truly special is that Kelsey cites not only the usual books and journals but also a wide variety of nontraditional materials ranging from manuscripts to musical scores. Additionally, she has created a list of cited journals with OCLC numbers, making precise identification of old and obscure journals easy for researchers. Kelsey's sources are varied and multidimensional: she includes scholarly, popular, and ephemeral works to present the fullest possible picture of the legendary president. Kelsey also lists many obscure sources on not only Grant but also his associates, including all his cabinet members. The work includes citations about Julia Dent Grant, other Grant family members, Grant's cabinet members, John Rawlins, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ely Parker, Abraham Lincoln. Libraries of all types could benefit from including this resource in the reference collection. The text might get the most use in historical society libraries, as well as in the libraries of colleges and universities. Public libraries and private individuals interested in Grant and the Civil War would also appreciate the book's comprehensive nature..