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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991'
Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1950, the Golden Age, 1950-1973, and the Landslide, 1973-1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution. Includes 32 pages of photos. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Revolution'
This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime'
In the first hectic days of the American Civil War, the future of the Union was in doubt. Troops traveling to defend Washington were waylaid by mobs in Maryland. In the midst of this crisis, Abraham Lincoln sought to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to permit the military to detain those who were interfering with the prosecution of the war. When the Supreme Court limited his ability to do so, Lincoln complained that the Court was allowing "all the laws, but one, go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated." Eventually, civil liberties were curtailed for the duration of the Civil War--as they would be again in World Wars I and II.
That Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist's analysis of civil liberties in wartime is entitled All the Laws but One hints where he comes down on the subject. Rehnquist acknowledges and criticizes the excesses of civil liberties violations in wartime--during World War I, for example, editorial cartoonists critical of the government were prosecuted for sedition. But he defends the need to curtail some liberties in emergency situations--including, surprisingly, some instances of the evacuation and relocation of Japanese Americans that took place during World War II. Rehnquist's style can be disjointed at times--as when cursory biographical information of key players seems to have been tacked on to fill out the otherwise slim volume--but the historical analysis of martial law and other Civil War controversies, which comprises the overwhelming majority of the book, remains fascinating. --Ted Frank [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon--what Happened And Why'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'America in the Seventies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson'
Well timed to coincide with Ken Burns's documentary (on which the author served as a consultant), this new biography doesn't aim to displace the many massive tomes about America's third president that already weigh down bookshelves. Instead, as suggested by the subtitle--"The Character of Thomas Jefferson"--Ellis searches for the "living, breathing person" underneath the icon and tries to elucidate his actual beliefs. Jefferson's most ardent admirers may find this perspective too critical, but Ellis's portrait of a complex, sometimes devious man who both sought and abhorred power has the ring of truth. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress'
In the 1830s slavery was so deeply entrenched that it could not even be discussed in Congress, which had enacted a "gag rule" to ensure that anti-slavery petitions would be summarily rejected. This stirring book chronicles the parliamentary battle to bring "the peculiar institution" into the national debate, a battle that some historians have called "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." The campaign to make slavery officially and respectably debatable was waged by John Quincy Adams who spent nine years defying gags, accusations of treason, and assassination threats. In the end he made his case through a combination of cunning and sheer endurance. Telling this story with a brilliant command of detail, Arguing About Slavery endows history with majestic sweep, heroism, and moral weight.
"Dramatic, immediate, intensely readable, fascinating and often moving."--New York Times Book Review [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Arguing the World : The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Autobiography of William Allen White'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606-1865'
Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say I am strong.--Joel 3:10
Beating Plowshares into Swords inaugurates an extraordinarily ambitious effort by Paul Koistinen to compose a comprehensive and wide-ranging study on the economics of American warfare from the colonial period to the present. When completed, this multi-volume project will stand as the definitive work on a complex subject that until now has been superficially treated or completely ignored.
Koistinen focuses not upon battlefields and battles but upon the means used to make and sustain the armies and navies that have fought in such horrific arenas. Drawing upon a vast array of sources in a number of diverse fields, he analyzes how America has mobilized itself for the conduct of war. He argues that to fully understand that process we must closely examine the complex interrelations among economic, political, and military institutions within the context of relentless modernization and technological innovation.
In this first volume, Koistinen describes how an undeveloped "preindustrial" economy forced Americans to fight defensive wars of attrition like the Revolution and the War of 1812. By the time of the Mexican War, however, a gradually maturing economy allowed the United States to use a much more offensive-minded strategy to achieve its goals. The book concludes with an exhaustive examination of the Civil War, a conflict that both anticipated and differed from the total wars of the industrialized era. Koistinen demonstrates that the North relied upon its enormous economic might to overwhelm the Confederacy through a strategy of annihilation while the South bungled its own strategy of attrition by failing to mobilize effectively a much less-developed economy.
With this and subsequent volumes, Koistinen's sweeping synthesis provides a panoramic view that enlarges and in significant ways alters our vision of the turbulent relationship between war and society in America.
This book is part of the Modern War Studies series. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'
Benjamin Franklin, writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still for a formal portrait. What's more, Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography, the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today, one that prizes pragmatism over moralism, religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity, and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradictions, as Isaacson shows. Though a man of lofty principles, Franklin wasn't shy of using sex to sell the newspapers he edited and published; though far from frivolous, he liked his toys and his mortal pleasures; and though he sometimes gave off a simpleton image, he was a shrewd and even crafty politician. Isaacson doesn't shy from enumerating Franklins occasional peccadilloes and shortcomings, in keeping with the iconoclastic nature of our time--none of which, however, stops him from considering Benjamin Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age," and one of the most admirable of any era. And heres one bit of proof: as a young man, Ben Franklin regularly went without food in order to buy books. His example, as always, is a good one--and this is just the book to buy with the proceeds from the grocery budget. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best and the Brightest'
David Halberstams masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.
Using portraits of Americas flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our countrys recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Betrayal of Richard III'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon'
The Nixon crisis of 1973-1974 threatened the nation in ways we did not immediately understand. Stripped of drama and confusion, however, the problem was that our President had placed himself above the law. The nation had to decide whether that could be allowed.
Theodore H. White starts this story with the last days of Richard Nixon in the White House -- as those closest recognized that he had deceived them and that they must force him out.
He follows the thread of manipulation back to its origin 20 years earlier and shows how the Nixon team came to see politics as war in which no quarter was given, in which the White House was a command post where ordinary rules did not apply, where power could be used without restraint. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Britain and Her Army, 1509-1970: A Military, Political and Social Survey'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Caesar'
20 pages of color plates, 100 black and white illustrations. A biography of Julius Caesar. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order'
As people increasingly define themselves by ethnicity or religion, the West will find itself more and more at odds with non-western civilizations that reject its ideals of democracy, human rights, liberty, the rule of law, and the separation of the church and the state. Huntington feels that the fundamental source of conflict in the post-Cold War period will not be primarily ideological or economic, but cultural. Picturing a future of accelerated conflict and increasingly "de-westernized" international relations, he argues for greater understanding of non-western civilizations and offers strategies for maximizing western influence, by promoting co-operative relations with Russia and Japan, by exploiting differences between Confucian and Islamic states, and by maintaining military superiority in East and South-West Asia. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century'
As the European Union introduces a common currency to world financial markets, Mark Mazower's Dark Continent critically examines the notion of "Europe." The Euro notwithstanding, Mazower argues that the "'Europe' of the European Union may be a promise or a delusion, but it is not a reality." Renouncing the notion of an essential "Europe," Mazower instead explores the conflicts which dominated the continent in the 20th century and the social value systems which informed them.
Mazower orders his examination chronologically, commencing with the collapse of Europe's continental empires following World War I and the initial European experiments in democracy and national self-determination which followed. He continues with analyses of state interventions in family health and the importance of healthy progeny, the financial crisis of the 1920s, the Hitler regime, the transformed democracy that emerged following World War II, the gradual erosion of the social state in the 1980s, and, finally, the collapse of communism. He consistently displays a firm grip of European history, directing his argument to readers with a foundational knowledge of the events that shaped 20th century Europe rather than historical novices unfamiliar with the period. Provocatively insightful, Dark Continent makes a convincing argument for a European 21st century characterized by continuity and harmony through divergence. "If Europeans can give up their desperate desire to find a single, workable definition of themselves," Mazower concludes, "they may come to terms more easily with the diversity and dissension which will be as much their future as their past." --Bertina Loeffler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Day of Reckoning : The Consequences of American Economic Policy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals'
Don't look for President Clinton's picture in The Book of Virtues; bestselling author and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett considers Bill Clinton uniquely unvirtuous. In the wake of the White House intern sex scandal, Bennett accuses Clinton of crimes at least as serious as those committed by Richard Nixon during the Watergate imbroglio. Rising above anti-Clinton polemics, The Death of Outrage urges the American public--which initially displayed not much more than a collective shrug--to take issue with the president's private and public conduct. Clinton should be judged by more than the state of the economy, implores Bennett. The commander in chief sets the moral tone of the nation; a reckless personal life and repeated lying from the bully pulpit call for a heavy sanction. The American people should demand nothing less, says the onetime federal drug czar. In each chapter, Bennett lays out the rhetorical defenses made on Clinton's behalf (the case against him is "only about sex," harsh judgmentalism has no place in modern society, independent counsel Kenneth Starr is a partisan prosecutor, etc.) and picks them apart. He may not convince everybody, but this is an effective conservative brief against Bill Clinton. --John J. Miller [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Democracy in America'
Democracy in America is the classic analysis of America's unique political character, quoted heavily by politicians and perennially popping up on history professors' reading lists. The book's enduring appeal lies in the eloquent, prophetic voice of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French aristocrat who visited the United States in 1831. A thoughtful young man in a still-young country, he succeeded in penning this penetrating study of America's people, culture, history, geography, politics, legal system, and economy. Tocqueville asserts, "I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress."
In addition to a brilliant, perceptive outline of "the philosophical method of the Americans," Volume II of Democracy in America includes the oddly modern-sounding "Why the Americans Are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity," the surprising and provocative "How Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes," and the more archaic "The Study of Greek and Latin is Peculiarly Useful in Democratic Communities." This edition--which many consider the best--contains the Henry Reeve text, revised by Francis Bowen, and further edited with introduction, editorial notes, and bibliographies by Phillips Bradley. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the '60s'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Empire Statesman : The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence'
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Bernard Bailyn brings us a book that combines portraits of American revolutionaries with a deft exploration of the ideas that moved them and still shape our society today. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fall of the Roman Empire'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States'
The series of essays that comprise The Federalist constitutes one of the key texts of the American Revolution and the democratic system created in the wake of independence. Written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to promote the ratification of the proposed Constitution, these papers stand as perhaps the most eloquent testimonial to democracy that exists. They describe the ideas behind the American system of government: the separation of powers; the organization of Congress; the respective positions of the executive, legislative, and judiciary; and much more. The Federalist remains essential reading for anyone interested in politics and government, and indeed for anyone seeking a foundational statement about democracy and America.
This new edition of The Federalist is edited by Robert Scigliano, a professor in the political science department at Boston College. His substantive Introduction sheds clarifying new light on the historical context and meaning of The Federalist. Scigliano also provides a fresh and definitive analysis of the disputed authorship of several sections of this crucial work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fifties'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'First in His Class'
Lots of people have put forth theories on what makes Bill Clinton tick, but the most trustworthy source may be David Maraniss of the Washington Post. Maraniss won a Pulitzer covering Clinton's campaign, and his book on the man is nonpareil; you simply can't understand Clinton without reading Maraniss's anaylsis of his past. When Bill Clinton is good, he is very, very good, and when he's bad, he's exactly like he has been all his life. Fair-minded but no apologist, Maraniss is essentially an inspiring reporter who, virtually alone among Americans, has troubled to interview Clinton's Oxford classmates and therefore knows that Clinton was, according to them, not lying when he said he "never inhaled"; his classmates devoted hours to teaching Bill to inhale, but he just couldn't do it. Maraniss also casts light on what Clinton did imbibe intellectually at Oxford; precisely what he did to elude the draft, and its moral significance; how Arkansas politics shaped his political style; and what his character and marriage might actually be like. Yes, Maraniss gives us a comic scene in which fiancée Hillary comes through the front door of the campaign headquarters while a young female staffer is hustled out the back--but more importantly, Maraniss puts such events in perspective. As he once observed in the Post, "The question of whether a president who cannot control his sexual appetite should not be president is a tough one. It might mean that most of our presidents should not have been presidents." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'For the Survival of Democracy : Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930's'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gladstone's Foreign Policy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Great Little Madison'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam'
The #1 national bestseller--an indispensable document for anyone interested in the Vietnam War. McNamara's controversial book tells the inside and personal story of America's descent into Vietnam from a unique point of view, and is one of the most enlightening books about government ever written. This new edition features a new Foreword by McNamara. of photos. Military History [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Israel in the International Arena'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Israel: The Partitioned State A Political History Since 1900'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John Adams'
Left to his own devices, John Adams might have lived out his days as a Massachusetts country lawyer, devoted to his family and friends. As it was, events swiftly overtook him, and Adams--who, David McCullough writes, was "not a man of the world" and not fond of politics--came to greatness as the second president of the United States, and one of the most distinguished of a generation of revolutionary leaders. He found reason to dislike sectarian wrangling even more in the aftermath of war, when Federalist and anti-Federalist factions vied bitterly for power, introducing scandal into an administration beset by other difficulties--including pirates on the high seas, conflict with France and England, and all the public controversy attendant in building a nation.
Overshadowed by the lustrous presidents Washington and Jefferson, who bracketed his tenure in office, Adams emerges from McCullough's brilliant biography as a truly heroic figure--not only for his significant role in the American Revolution but also for maintaining his personal integrity in its strife-filled aftermath. McCullough spends much of his narrative examining the troubled friendship between Adams and Jefferson, who had in common a love for books and ideas but differed on almost every other imaginable point. Reading his pages, it is easy to imagine the two as alter egos. (Strangely, both died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.) But McCullough also considers Adams in his own light, and the portrait that emerges is altogether fascinating. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky-His Life and Legacy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Look Away! : A History of the Confederate States of America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Making of the President, 1968'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Manifesto of the Communist Party'
Check out ngims Publishing's other illustrated literary classics. The vast majority of our books have original illustrations, free audiobook download link at the end of the book, navigable Table of Contents, and are fully formatted. Browse our library collection by typing in ngims or ngims plus the title you're looking for, e.g. ngims Gulliver's Travels. Free ebooks on the web are not organized for easy reading, littered with text errors and often have missing contents. You will not find another beautifully formatted classic literature ebook that is well-designed with amazing artworks and illustrations and a link to download free audiobook for a very low price like this one. The nominal price of this ebook covers the time and effort in formatting the materials and putting everything together in one place for your convenience. As a reader, you would want everything readily available at your fingertips because you many not have the time, interest or know where to look for your favorite book. The Communist Manifesto, originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) is a short 1848 book written by the German Marxist political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms. The book contains Marx and Engels' Marxist theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism, and then eventually communism. FEATURES ? Includes beautiful artworks and illustrations [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics'
Quentin Skinner is one of the leading thinkers in the social sciences and humanities today. Since the publication of his first important articles some two decades ago, debate has continued to develop over his distinctive contributions to contemporary political philosophy, the history of political theory, the philosophy of social science, and the discussion of interpretation and hermeneutics across the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, his most valuable essays and the best critical articles concerning his work have been scattered in various journals and difficult to obtain. Meaning and Context includes five of the most widely discussed articles by Skinner, which present his approach to the study of political thought and the interpretation of texts. Following these are seven articles by his critics, five of these drawn from earlier publications and two, by John Keane and Charles Taylor, written especially for this volume. Finally, there appears a fifty-seven page reply by Skinner--a major new statement in which he defends and reformulates his method and lays out new lines of research. The editorial introduction provides a systematic overview of the evolution of Skinner's work and of the main reactions to it.
Besides James Tully, John Keane, and Charles Taylor, the contributors include Joseph V. Femia, Keith Graham, Martin Hollis, Kenneth Minogue, and Nathan Tarcov.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Miami'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865-1919'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Monarchy Transformed : Britain, 1603-1714'
At the accession of James I, Britain was an isolated archipelago; a century later it had become a world-class intellectual, commercial, and military center. In "A Monarchy Transformed", Kishlansky blends scholarship with insight and learning with imagination to profile Britain in the 17th century--an era of of profound social, economic, and religious change. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No Ordinary Time: Franklin And Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front In World War II'
A compelling chronicle of a nation and its leaders during the period when modern America was created. With an uncanny feel for detail and a novelist's grasp of drama and depth, Doris Kearns Goodwin brilliantly narrates the interrelationship between the inner workings of the Roosevelt White House and the destiny of the United States. Goodwin paints a comprehensive, intimate portrait that fills in a historical gap in the story of our nation under the Roosevelts. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution'
This is the first major interpretation of the framing of the Constitution to appear in more than two decades. Forrest McDonald, widely considered one of the foremost historians of the Constitution and of the early national period, reconstructs the intellectual world of the Founding Fathers--including their understanding of law, history political philosophy, and political economy, and their firsthand experience in public affairs--and then analyzes their behavior in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in light of that world. No one has attempted to do so on such a scale before. McDonald's principal conclusion is that, though the Framers brought a variety of ideological and philosophical positions to bear upon their task of building a "new order of the ages," they were guided primarily by theiy own experience, their wisdom, and their common sense. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Ocean Apart : The Relationship Between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution'
Imagine, for a preposterous moment, that 55 national leaders convened to write a document to guide the country for hundreds of years. It seems unlikely--given that our current contingent of so-called leaders can't agree on how to balance a checkbook--that they could reach consensus on such issues as the allotment of congressional seats. The political and ideological issues that faced the creators of the Constitution were similar in some ways to those at play today. And in some ways they were vastly different ones. Jack Rakove, a history professor at Stanford University, has in this book framed the process that led to the drafting of the constitution in its historical and political context to offer insight into the difficulty of interpreting that most influential of documents. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Philip the Second and Macedonian Imperialism'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65'
In "Pillar of Fire", the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, "Parting the Waters", won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of the narrative, Branch recounts the climactic struggles as they commanded the national and international stage.
"Pillar of Fire" covers the far-flung upheavals of the years 1963 to 1965-- Dallas, St. Augustine, Mississippi Freedom Summer, LBJ's Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Vietnam, Selma. And it provides a frank, revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr.-- haunted by blackmail, factionalism, and hatred while he tried to hold the nonviolent movement together as a dramatic force in history. Allies, rivals, and opponents addressed racial issues that went deeper than fair treatment at bus stops or lunch counters. Participants on all sides stretched themselves and their country to the breaking point over the meaning of simple words: dignity, equal votes, equal souls.
Branch's gallery of historic characters also includes:
Malcolm X, who challenged King's vision of nonviolent integration and lived under threat of death from the Nation of Islam.
Lyndon Johnson, who believed racial conflict was destroying his political base in the South and threatening his dream to end poverty.
J. Edgar Hoover, under whose direction the FBI, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy's approval, spied on King with wiretaps and bugs, and yet solved the most heinous racial crimes of the era.
Diane Nash, the passionate leader behind sit-ins and Freedom Rides, whose determination shaped the Selma voting rights movement.
Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic theologian who bonded with King in devotion to the Hebrew prophets.
Robert Moses, the Mississippi SNCC leader who finally came undone over the human suffering caused by his Freedom Summer.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who commanded a powerful voice for the unlettered.
"Pillar of Fire" takes readers inside the dramas that shook every American institution, from the local pulpit to the Presidency. We disappear with courageous young people into Mississippi's feudal Parchman Penitentiary. We absorb the shock of a single Presidential election in 1964 that revolutionized the structure of partisan politics. We follow Northern rabbis summoned by King, and Mary Peabody, mother of the governor of Massachusetts, into the segregated jails of St. Augustine, Florida. We witness the Shakespearean conflicts between Lyndon Johnson and King and Hoover and Robert Kennedy.
Branch brings to bear fifteen years of research-- archival investigation; nearly two thousand interviews: new primary sources, from FBI wiretaps to White House telephone recordings-- in a seminal work of history. "Pillar of Fire" captures the intensity of the legendary King years, when the movement broke down walls between races, regions, sexes, and religions, and between America and the larger world. Its struggle to rescue and redeem, its victories and defeats, its failings and sacrifices gave rise to opposing tides that still dominate the national debate about justice and democratic government. The story of this movement is an incandescent chapter in America's distinctive quest for freedom. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1920-1939'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Presidency of George Washington'
In this volume, Forrest McDonald admits that George Washington was no executive genius, and notes that a number of his advisers and cabinet members were considerably more important in formulating programs and policies than he was. Nevertheless, he maintains that, but for Washington, the office of president might not exist today. McDonald asserts that Washington's reputation as a man of integrity, dignity, candor, and republican virtue was well-deserved, and that he contributed best by serving as a symbol.
The book covers the central concerns of Washington's administration: a complex tangle of war debts; the organization of the Bank of the United States; geographical and social factionalism; the emergence of strong national partisan politics; adjustments in federal-state relations; the effort to remain neutral in the face of European tumult; the opening of the Mississippi River; and the removal of the threat of Indians and British in the Northwest Territory. McDonald also describes the rivalry between Washington's two most important department heads, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Presidency of James Buchanan'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson'
Thomas Jefferson occupies a special niche in the hagiology of American Founding Fathers. His name is invoked for a staggering range of causes; statists and libertarians, nationalists and States' righters, conservatives and radicals all claim his blessing. In this book, Forrest McDonald examines Jefferson's performance as the nation's leader, evaluating his ability as a policy-maker, administrator, and diplomat.
He delineates, carefully and sympathetically, the Jeffersonian ideology and the agrarian ideal that underlay it; he traces the steps by which the ideology was transformed into a program of action; and he concludes that the interplay between the ideology and the action accounted both for the unparalleled success of Jefferson's first term in office, and for the unmitigated failure of the second term.
Jefferson as president was a man whose ideological commitments prevented him from reversing calamitous policy stances, a man who could be ruthless in suppressing civil rights when it was politically expedient, a man who was rarely, in the conventional sense of the word, a Jeffersonian. McDonald's portrait reveals him to be at once greater, simpler, and more complexly human than the mere "apostle of liberty" or "spokesman for democracy" that his adulators have relegated him to being.
This book is part of the American Presidency Series. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class'
Robin D. G. Kelley is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990). [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000'
About national and international power in the "modern" or Post Renaissance period. Explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the 5 centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in W. Europe. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt'
Seven men in one--naturalist, writer, lover, hunter, cowboy, soldier, and politician, Theodore Roosevelt, by the turn of the century, built himself up from a frail, asthmatic boy to become the youngest and most charismatic president in our history to that time. 10 cassettes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Seventies : The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics'
During the past two decades, the 1970s have been trivialized, misunderstood, or dismissed as having kitsch value only. But as we move into a new millennium, the seventies are passing from pop culture into history. Bruce Schulman, the first historian to grapple with the seventies, here provides the only comprehensive history of America between 1968 and 1984. He argues persuasively that the "long decade" -- from Nixon's election to Reagan's reelection -- involved a crucial cultural and political shift.
Beginning with Richard Nixon's "southern" strategy in 1968, to the rise of the Sunbelt cities and the explosion of country music, the 1970s saw the decline of the North's cultural dominance. By the end of the decade, the South had shed its rural, agricultural heritage and erased its reputation as hopelessly backward and impoverished. A transformed, commercialized southern white culture flourished and spread across the country.
In an engaging blend of anecdote and analysis, Changes in Latitude provides the first real assessment of these crucial years, and the ways in which they changed America forever. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shadow'
There are two ways to look at this bestseller by Watergate scoopmeister Woodward. First, it's an original take on Clinton's sex scandal, framing it as the latest consequence of Nixon's assault on the U.S. political system. Woodward sketches each president's tussles with scandal managing after Watergate permanently turned up the press heat on the White House. Ford lies about a meeting concerning a potential deal to pardon Nixon, but remains convinced he did nothing wrong. Carter's pious advocacy of truth telling backfires when he's confronted with conundrums involving his pal Bert Lance, the fallout from CIA-provided hookers, and cash for King Hussein. Reagan's men try to make him understand the lies and shocking wrongness of the Iran-Contra debacle, but he simply, stubbornly doesn't get it. And by the time prosecutors interview Reagan in 1992, he's so ill he can't remember his own oldest friends and advisers.
All provocative stuff, some of it new. But most readers will flip to the book's second half, a fly-on-the-wall account of the backroom mud-wrestling in both the Clinton and Starr camps in the Monicagate morass. It's a trove of racy facts (mostly from anonymous sources). We read that Clinton called Nixon a "war criminal," yet tried to minimize Watergate in his Nixon eulogy, that he disgusted Ford and Jack Nicklaus by cheating while golfing with them, and that he kept falsely assuring aides, "I'm retired! [as an adulterer]." We hear Hillary's alleged words of agony and see the pain on Bill's face after Chelsea reads The Starr Report on the Internet. Starr comes off like RoboCop without the human side. Woodward calls him "pathetic and unwise" in rejecting his staff's urgent demand not to send the lurid details of presidential sex to Congress. "I love the narrative!" Starr weirdly exulted, according to Woodward's new Deep Throat (or Throats). Since Monica was interrogated at Starr's mother-in-law's apartment, which he called "Grandma's place," ethics expert Sam Dash suggested they call it "Operation Red Riding Hood." What sharp teeth everyone in this book has!
To tell the truth, Woodward doesn't really knit together 25 years' worth of scandals into a single strong narrative. But the Clinton part is the closest thing yet to what we all crave: a tale of Monicagate with some of the flavor of a John Grisham thriller. --Tim Appelo [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Short History of Byzantium'
The Byzantine Empire, one of its most eminent students reminds us, lasted "for a total of 1,123 years and 18 days," which is an astonishing duration matched by only a few others. Condensing Norwich's three-volume history, this overview captures the splendor and strangeness of Byzantine rule, marked by family intrigues, constant warfare, political and religious strife, and personal ambition--a "somewhat lurid background," as Norwich modestly declares in passing. Norwich is a master of the telling vignette. In one, he writes of imperial guards made up of "Anglo-Saxons who had left their country in disgust after Hastings and had taken service with Byzantium." Facing a Norman enemy in southern Italy, these Anglo-Saxons exacted terrible vengeance until the Normans rallied under the leadership of a fearless woman, one Sichelgaita, and massacred their enemy. Norwich's book abounds in similarly surprising and absorbing episodes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Short History of World War I'
Despite the numerous books on World War II, until now there has been no one-volume survey that was both objective and comprehensive. Previous volumes have usually been written from an exclusively British or American point of view, or have ignored the important causes and consequences of the War.
A Short History of World War II is essentially a military history, but it reaches from the peace settlements of World War I to the drastically altered postwar world of the late 1940's. Lucidly written and eminently readable, it is factual and accurate enough to satisfy professional historians. A Short History of World War II will appeal equally to the general reader, the veteran who fought in the War, and the student interested in understanding the contemporary political world.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right'
In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century.
Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism.
While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens--and often upsets--our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vietnam : The Necessary War'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vietnam, the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The War for the Union'
With The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865, Allan Nevins completes his masterly study of the American Civil War. The qualities of clarity, absolute command of the sources, and full recognition of the drama inherent in the theme, which have distinguished the previous volumes can all be found here as well. And there is something more: a communication without sentimentality of the heartbreak of this national tragedy for the victors as well as the vanquished. ("He seemed," wrote one observer of President Lincoln, "to be in mourning for all the dead of all the endless battles.") Nevins provides the reader with an analysis of the social and economic effects of the conflict which is outstanding for wisdom and depth.Allan Nevins won the National Book Award for The Organized War to Victory: 1864-1865 and The Organized War: 1863-1864, the preceding volume in The War for the Union.All four volumes of the War for the Union are currently available from Konecky & Konecky. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred'
The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalizing, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead, the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong? How did we do this to ourselves? "The War of the World" comes up with compelling, fascinating answers. It is Niall Ferguson's masterpiece. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The White-Boned Demon: A Biography of Madame Mao Zedong'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic'
In 1786 William Cooper, determined to become a self-made gentleman of substance in post-revolutionary America, founded Cooperstown, N.Y., through a dodgy land deal. His town rose to become county seat, and Cooper became a judge and then a congressman. He lost most of the prestige he earned later, when he overstretched himself, and his local patronage weakened when he backed the Federalists against the victorious Republicans. Nonetheless, his son, James Fenimore Cooper, the early 19th century's best-selling novelist, wrote essentially a justification of his father in his third novel, The Pioneers (1823). Taylor's book--a combination of biography, personal history, social history, literary exegesis and analysis of father-son dynamics--charts the interplay between the fact and the fiction of the days when upstate New York was the frontier. William Cooper's Town won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wives of Henry VIII'
When we think of the wives of Henry VIII, we tend to think of women who literally lost their heads. But Antonia Fraser opens the door to the political and cultural demands that shaped the destinies of the king and his royal wives. Romance, unfortunately, rarely had anything to do with it. And if you think the modern American media is too tough on political leadership, you oughta READ about the royal court in King Henry's day! That's one family you'd never want to marry into. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Companero: Vida Y Muerte Del Che Guevara'
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