Ebooks

I've started reading some of my virtual library.  Through Bookbub I've been getting a lot of history ebooks for just a dollar or two, but they aren't worth much until I read them...

Two of them are American Heritage magazine publications about the Great Frontier and the USA's "confident years" between the Civil War and World War I respectively.  The latter begins with a chapter about how Andrew Johnson's 1868 impeachment came about.

Some years back I enjoyed Only Yesterday, Frederick Allen's "informal" history of the United States in the 1920s.  Now I've started Since Yesterday, Allen's sequel dealing with the '30s.  It starts with a long description of September 3, 1929, the day the New York Stock Exchange reached its pre-crash peak. (It was also exactly ten years before Britain and France declared war on Germany and World War II started!) Just to confuse you, the 1929 stock market crash actually happened on two days:  the first part was on Black Thursday, the second five days later on Black Tuesday.

I've also been reading Struwwelpeter, Heinrich Hoffmann's 19th-century German collection of gleefully cruel children's stories! (Stuff like the kid who wouldn't stop sucking his thumb, so a man came along with a huge pair of scissors and cut his thumbs off...) Seems he wrote it because he wanted to buy his child a book, but all the children's books he could find were bland.  Lucky for me, the German is simple enough that I can figure it out with help from Google Translate.