Bøger af Carlton Jackson

Hattie McDaniel was the first black to ever win an Oscar. She was also the first black woman to ever sing on American radio. In this fresh assessment of her life and career, Carlton Jackson tells the inside story of her working relationships, her personal life, and the many obstacles she faced as a black performer in the white world of show business during the first half of the twentieth century.

In Kentucky Maverick, Carlton Jackson details the life of a legendary and highly decorated Marine whose career spanned both world wars, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

Beginning with the origins of their population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author traces the Scotch-Irish development from Lowland Scotland to Northern Ireland to the American colonies.Arriving in the East, the Scotch-Irish were characterized by other colonists as being fiery tempered, stubborn, hard drinking, and very religious, and they quickly made lasting impressions. Though the Scotch-Irish were in the minority, they managed to impact history. Most notably, they introduced the appeals system and the checks and balances system.

In 1953, the same year that Elvis Presley cut his first demo, Cash Box magazine named the Hilltoppers the top vocal group of the year. Hits such as "e;Trying"e; and "e;P.S. I Love You"e; raced up the charts and kept the group in Billboard's Top 40. The four fresh-faced singers appeared on The Toast of the Town with Ed Sullivan, who introduced them to the nation. On weekends the Hilltoppers performed in cities across the country, but on Monday mornings they were better known as Western Kentucky State College students Jimmy Sacca, Seymour Spiegelman, Don McGuire, and Billy Vaughn. The Korean War, military drafts, and changing public tastes in music, however, cut short singing careers that should have lasted much longer. Sacca was drafted in 1953, mere months before the end of the war. Vaughn left the group shortly after that for a career at Dot Records and found fame elsewhere with his orchestra. McGuire and Spiegelman were drafted as well, and despite a set of temporary replacement members, the group eventually called it quits. Fifty years later, historian Carlton Jackson revisits the Kentucky college kids who made it big between classes. He follows the group from their first hit, recorded in Western's Van Meter Auditorium, to their brief 1970s reunion. Their story recalls the nature of celebrity and youth in the early days of rock 'n' roll.

At the memorial held after Martin Ritt's death in 1990, he was hailed as this country's greatest maker of social films. From No Down Payment early in his career to Stanley & Iris, his last production, he delineated the nuances of American society. In between were other social statements such as Hud, Sounder, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Norma Rae, and The Great White Hope. He was a leftist who embraced various radical movements of the 1930s and, largely because of this involvement, was blacklisted from television in the early 1950s. His film The Front, about the blacklisting, was his most autobiographical. He was a Jew from New York; yet he went to a small college in North Carolina, Elon, where he played football for "The Fighting Christians". His school days in the South gave him a lifelong love for the region. Thus, in his movies, he was just as much at home with southern as with northern topics. He did not deal totally in his southern experience with racism and poverty. He directed The Long Hot Summer and The Sound and the Fury, both of which described conflicts between and among white social groups. He once remarked, "I have spent most of my film life in the South". Some referred to his films as "think movies", and perhaps this is why he never won an Oscar for best directing. But he gave moviegoers all over the world an opportunity to see what America was really like - from the viewpoint both of the wealthy and of the poor. It may be, unfortunately, that we will never see his likes again.

Genora Johnson Dollinger helped create the Women's Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike's leaders. She and her followers helped to achieve victory for the United Auto Workers and generated the first contract ever signed between GM and the UAW. This biography tells about one of the first female labor activists.

The evacuation of British children before and during World War II transformed the country forever and vastly altered the lives of thousands of English children and their families. This book incorporates information and first-person accounts from former evacuees and others involved in the wartime relocation effort.

Greyhound, the largest and most enduring bus company in the US, had its beginning in the 1920s in the frigid climes of northern Minnesota. This work shows how the Greyhound Corporation has turned into a multimillion-dollar company.