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Showing 3321 - 3340 of 7151 items
By Ann Richards. 1989
Straight from the Heart is Ann Richards's story, told with her trademark candor and spicy humor.Born in a tiny town…
near Waco, Texas, she entered politics when her husband wouldn't--and went on to become state treasurer, the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in fifty years. She's had her victories and her battles (the breakup of a thirty-year marriage and a bout with alcohol), but it's her love of Texas and Texas politics that has made her who she is. This extraordinary memoir by one of the nation's leading politicians proves the wisdom of her observation that women "can have a good and wonderful life, but that it only begins when they accept responsibility for it, not when they expect someone else to make it happen." Richards talks openly about the course her life has taken and the choices she has made on the way. Her hard-won triumphs and savvy political career provide inspiring examples for all.By Ed Kilman, Ross S. Sterling. 1918
Born on a farm near Anahuac, Texas, in 1875 and possessed of only a fourth-grade education, Ross Sterling was one…
of the most successful Texans of his generation. Driven by a relentless work ethic, he become a wealthy oilman, banker, newspaper publisher, and, from 1931 to 1933, one-term governor of Texas. Sterling was the principal founder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company, which eventually became the largest division of the ExxonMobil Corporation, as well as the owner of the Houston Post. Eager to "preserve a narrative record of his life and deeds," Ross Sterling hired Ed Kilman, an old friend and editorial page editor of the Houston Post, to write his biography. Though the book was nearly finished before Sterling's death in 1949, it never found a publisher due to Kilman's florid writing style and overly hagiographic portrayal of Sterling.By Bruce Chadwick. 2009
He signed the Declaration of Independence, represented Virginia at the Constitutional Convention, and became America's first professor of law. With…
his close friend and former pupil Thomas Jefferson, who once described him as a "second father," he wrote an entire new legal code for the State of Virginia. At the age of eighty in 1806, George Wythe was loved, admired, and respected by all who knew him--all but one, that is. In I Am Murdered, celebrated historian Bruce Chadwick tells the grisly, fascinating, and often astounding tale of Wythe's murder and America's very first "trial of the century." Brimming with fascinating details of early nineteenth-century medicine, forensic science, and legal issues, this fast-moving account features compelling portraits of all major players in the case and asks penetrating questions about the many controversies that swirled around the trial. George Wythe lived long enough to accuse his grandnephew George Wythe Sweeney of poisoning him and two other members of his household. Why did three prominent doctors, all friends of Wythe, insist that he hadn't been poisoned at all? Why did Wythe repeatedly refuse to press charges against Sweeney, who had forged Wythe's name on checks and stolen and sold many of his rare and precious books? Wythe's maid, Lydia Broadnax, the sole survivor of the poisoning, was also the only eyewitness to the crime. Her account was entirely credible, and she was widely recognized as an honest, reliable, and honorable woman. Why was she forbidden to testify at the trial? The answers to these questions and many more become lenses through which to view a city and a nation at a crucial and formative period of their history. Among the many distinctive figures you'll meet in this strange and chilling true story are the two attorneys who came to Sweeney's defense. Both had been good friends of Wythe and were certain of the young man's guilt, but each man had a powerful personal motive to work tirelessly for Sweeney's acquittal. One was a former attorney general of the United States, and the other was destined to become the longest-sewing attorney general in American history: Complete with a satisfying account of Wythe's ultimate revenge and a poignant depiction of his deep and abiding friendship with Jefferson, I Am Murdered is part American tragedy, part CSI circa 1806, and all intriguing examination of the unjust death of a Founding Father.By Nicholas Michael Sambaluk. 2015
The Other Space Race is a unique look at the early U. S. space program and how it both shaped…
and was shaped by politics during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s "New Look” expanded the role of the Air Force in national security, and ultimately allowed ambitious aerospace projects, namely the "Dyna-Soar,” a bomber equipped with nuclear weapons that would operate in space. Eisenhower’s space policy was purely practical, creating a strong deterrent against the use of nuclear arms against the United States. With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the political climate changed, and space travel became part of the United States’ national discourse. Sambaluk explores what followed, including the scuttling of the "Dyna-Soar” program and the transition from Eisenhower’s space policy to John Kennedy’s. This well-argued, well-researched book gives much needed perspective on the Cold War’s influence on space travel and it’s relation to the formation of public policy.By Connie Roop. 2002
What you might not have known about him: Abraham Lincoln had many nicknames during his life. One of Abraham Lincoln's…
nicknames was "Honest Abe." Do you know how he got this nickname? Young Abraham Lincoln lived in three states. Do you know which ones? All of his life Abe Lincoln liked to learn. Do you know how many years Abe was actually in school? Abe Lincoln liked to write, but his family was poor. Do you know what he wrote on instead of paper? Abraham Lincoln had a hero whom he admired. Abraham Lincoln ran in many elections. Do you know which one he was the most proud of? President Lincoln was our tallest president. He was the first president to grow a beard. Do you know who asked him to grow it? Abraham Lincoln died while he was President. Did you know he almost accidentally died twice when he was young?By Daniel Gordis. 2014
Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel's underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel…
Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky and soon became a leader within Jabotinsky's Betar movement. A powerful orator and mesmerizing public figure, Begin was imprisoned by the Soviets in 1940, joined the Free Polish Army in 1942, and arrived in Palestine as a Polish soldier shortly thereafter. Joining the underground paramilitary Irgun in 1943, he achieved instant notoriety for the organization's bombings of British military installations and other violent acts.Intentionally left out of the new Israeli government, Begin's right-leaning Herut political party became a fixture of the opposition to the Labor-dominated governments of Ben-Gurion and his successors, until the surprising parliamentary victory of his political coalition in 1977 made him prime minister. Welcoming Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and cosigning a peace treaty with him on the White House lawn in 1979, Begin accomplished what his predecessors could not. His outreach to Ethiopian Jews and Vietnamese "boat people" was universally admired, and his decision to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 is now regarded as an act of courageous foresight. But the disastrous invasion of Lebanon to end the PLO's shelling of Israel's northern cities, combined with his declining health and the death of his wife, led Begin to resign in 1983. He spent the next nine years in virtual seclusion, until his death in 1992. Begin was buried not alongside Israel's prime ministers, but alongside the Irgun comrades who died in the struggle to create the Jewish national home to which he had devoted his life. Daniel Gordis's perceptive biography gives us new insight into a remarkable political figure whose influence continues to be felt both within Israel and throughout the world. This title is part of the Jewish Encounters series.From the Hardcover edition.By Daniel Francis. 2004
LD is the colourful biography of Louis Taylor, the longest-serving mayor in Vancouver's history; he was first elected mayor in…
1910, and served off and on until 1934, for a total of eleven years. Taylor's story is also the story of Vancouver in the early decades of the 20th century, a young city experiencing a turbulent adolescence.Louis Taylor, or LD as he was known, arrived in Vancouver from Chicago in 1896 at the age of 39. He got involved in the newspaper business, first as an executive with The Daily Province, then as proprietor of The World, during which time he built the World Tower, which remains one of Vancouver's landmark buildings (now better known as the Sun Tower).He launched his political career in 1902 when he ran successfully for licence commissioner; it was the first of 26 civic elections in which he ran, including 20 for mayor. In his early political life he was considered "the workers' friend" and was opposed by the city's business elite, who portrayed him as corrupt. He also had a reputation for being soft on crime, and was implicated in a 1928 police investigation that lost him an election. But his achievements included the establishment of the airport, a town planning commission, and the water board.His private life, however, was another story, a virtual soap opera that mirrored the ups and downs of his political career; his wife was addicted to opium, and he found himself mired in bigamy and divorce scandals.As Vancouver grew from small frontier town to a major international port city, LD saw the city through the Depression, and in a sense Vancouver grew up under his tutelage.LD: Mayor Louis Taylor and The Rise of Vancouver vividly documents the life of a man who dominated the city for years.By Frances Fitzgerald. 2000
Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Fire in…
the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself. The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him. The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day. Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow. FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended. Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.By Ignacio Ramonet. 2013
Pocos personajes de la historia reciente han tenido el impacto de Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (1954-2013). Presidente de Venezuela desde…
1999 hasta 2013, su mensaje de las realizaciones de la Revolución Bolivariana inició un movimiento en América Latina que abrió el camino para dirigentes nuevos, de origen sindical, militante social, militar o hasta guerrillero: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva y Dilma Rousseff en Brasil, Evo Morales en Bolivia, Rafael Correa en Ecuador, Néstor Kirchner y Cristina Fernández en Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez y José "Pepe" Mujica en Uruguay, y tantos otros. En este revelador libro, fruto de cinco años de trabajo y más de doscientas horas de conversaciones con Chávez, Ignacio Ramonet logra retratar al dirigente venezolano a través de sus propias palabras. ¿Quién era Chávez antes de convertirse en una personalidad pública universalmente conocida? ¿Cómo fue su infancia? ¿Cómo se formó? ¿Cuándo se inició en la política? ¿Cuáles fueron sus lecturas? ¿Qué influencias recibió? ¿Cuál era su visión geopolítica? ¿Qué corriente ideológica reclamaba? Estas memorias dialogadas, centradas en la primera etapa de la vida del presidente venezolano, clave y explicación de su posterior trayectoria, son una obra de historia insoslayable para quien quiera entender el arranque del siglo-- en América Latina y el mundo.By Tom Hayden, Junius Williams. 2014
Unfinished Agenda offers an inside look at the Black Power Movement that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the…
sixties. A political memoir that teaches grass-roots politics and inspires organizing for real change in the Age of Obama, this book will appeal to readers of black history, Occupy Wall Street organizers, and armchair political advocates. Based on notes, interviews, and articles from the 1950s to present day, Junius Williams's inspiring memoir describes his journey from young black boy facing prejudice in the 1950s segregated South to his climb to community and political power as a black lawyer in the 1970s and 80s in Newark, New Jersey. Accompanied by twenty-two compelling photographs highlighting key life events, Unfinished Agenda chronicles the turbulent times during the Civil Rights Movement and Williams's participation every step of the way including his experiences on the front lines of racial riots in Newark and the historic riot in Montgomery, Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Williams speaks of his many opportunities and experiences--beginning with his education at Amherst College and Yale Law School, his travel to Uganda and Kenya, and working in Harlem. His passion for fighting racism ultimately led him to many years of service in politics in Newark, New Jersey as a community organizer and leader. Williams advocates for renewed community organizing and voting for a progressive party to carry out the "Unfinished Agenda" the Black Power Movement outlined in America during the 60s and early 70s for empowerment of the people.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Michelle Ann Stephens. 2005
In Black Empire, Michelle Ann Stephens examines the ideal of "transnational blackness" that emerged in the work of radical black…
intellectuals from the British West Indies in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writings of Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and C. L. R. James, Stephens shows how these thinkers developed ideas of a worldwide racial movement and federated global black political community that transcended the boundaries of nation-states. Stephens highlights key geopolitical and historical events that gave rise to these writers' intellectual investment in new modes of black political self-determination. She describes their engagement with the fate of African Americans within the burgeoning U. S. empire, their disillusionment with the potential of post-World War I international organizations such as the League of Nations to acknowledge, let alone improve, the material conditions of people of color around the world, and the inspiration they took from the Bolshevik Revolution, which offered models of revolution and community not based on nationality. Stephens argues that the global black political consciousness she identifies was constituted by both radical and reactionary impulses. On the one hand, Garvey, McKay, and James saw freedom of movement as the basis of black transnationalism. The Caribbean archipelago--a geographic space ideally suited to the free movement of black subjects across national boundaries--became the metaphoric heart of their vision. On the other hand, these three writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of militarism, empire, and male sovereignty that shaped global political discourse in the early twentieth century. As such, their vision of transnational blackness excluded women's political subjectivities. Drawing together insights from American, African American, Caribbean, and gender studies, Black Empire is a major contribution to ongoing conversations about nation and diaspora.By Edward Steers, William C Edwards. 2009
On April 22, 1865, Brevet Colonel H. L. Burnett was assigned to head the investigation into the murder of President…
Abraham Lincoln and the attempted murder of Secretary of State William H. Seward. Burnett orchestrated the collection of thousands of documents for the Military Commission's trial of the conspirators. This deep archive of documentary evidence--consisting of letters, depositions, eyewitness accounts, investigative reports, and other documents--provides invaluable insight into the historical, cultural, and judicial context of the investigation. Only a fraction of the information presented in these documents ever made its way into the trial, and most of it has never been readily accessible. By presenting an annotated and indexed transcription of these documents, this volume offers significant new access to information on the events surrounding the assassination and a vast new store of social and political history of the Civil War era. "With tears in my eyes I think it your duty to hang every rebel caught. I feel as bad as if was my own mother or father & will be one to volunteer to try & shoot every Southern man. May God have mercy on the man's soul that done such a deed. With much Respect for our Country, I remain Weeping" --Anonymous letter, New York, April 15, 1865 "I know Booth. He was in the habit of coming to my place to shoot. . . . He shot well, and practiced to shoot with accuracy in every possible position. . . . He was a quick shot; always silent, reticent." --Deposition of Benjamin Barker, Pistol Gallery proprietorBy Emily S. Rosenberg, Gilbert M. Joseph. 2004
America's Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era:…
America's commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U. S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam's highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America's mid-century religious revival and policymakers' perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem's Catholicism and the extent to which he violated American notions of "Oriental" passivity and moral laxity made him a more attractive ally to Washington than many non-Christian South Vietnamese with greater administrative experience and popular support. A diplomatic and cultural history, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam draws on government archives, presidential libraries, private papers, novels, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television and radio broadcasts. Jacobs shows in detail how, in the 1950s, U. S. policymakers conceived of Cold War anticommunism as a crusade in which Americans needed to combine with fellow Judeo-Christians against an adversary dangerous as much for its atheism as for its military might. He describes how racist assumptions that Asians were culturally unready for democratic self-government predisposed Americans to excuse Diem's dictatorship as necessary in "the Orient. " By focusing attention on the role of American religious and racial ideologies, Jacobs makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the disastrous commitment of the United States to "sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem. "By Margaret A. Banks. 1957
In 1892, Edward Blake, ex-Premier of Ontario and former leader of the Liberal party in the Canadian House of Common,…
was invited by the Irish parliamentary party to stand for election in the British Parliament. This surprising invitation grew out of the conflicts of the Irish "Home Rule" controversy, then a critical issue in British politics. When Blake abandoned the Canadian political scene he had just severed connections with the Liberal party, which he had served as Minister of justice in the only federal Liberal administration down to 1896, and as Leader of the Opposition from 1880 to 1887. Irish Home Rule was a cause which engaged the sympathies of Liberals all over the British Empire, and although Blake intended to return permanently to Canada, he remained a member of the British Parliament, devoting ceaseless efforts to the Irish interest, until illness forced his retirement in 1907.Up to the present time, little attention has been given by either Irish or Canadian historians to the Irish career of Edward Blake. It spanned the years of failure and frustration which stretched between the spectacular period of Gladstone and Parnell to the excitements of the third Home Rule Bill, the Ulster resistance, and the Sinn Fein movement. Although Blake declined much part in parliamentary debate during these arid years, he played a vital and unappreciated role in the inner discussions and struggles of the Irish Nationalist movement. Blake was not only a statesman of blameless reputation, but a constitutional authority whose superior abilities were lying unused in Canada after Confederation. He brought to the Irish party a cool judgment, and a consciousness of the role of statesmanship in politics, which won the highest respect of all its leaders, including McCarthy and Redmond.Dr. Banks has made a searching assessment of Blake's historical position: the reason why, in the eyes of his contemporaries, he never attained the political status which he merited, and the basis for the enormous respect which he was accorded by all who worked with him in the inner circles of the party. It is an informative account, based on careful research, of an enigmatic figure in Canadian politics, whose career encountered unequalled frustrations and discouragement, but whom Sir Wilfrid Laurier unhesitatingly termed "the most powerful intellectual force in Canadian political history." Of interest to everyone concerned with Irish and Imperial problems, it will merit the attention of political analysts and historians alike.By Allen Wells. 2009
Seven hundred and fifty Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany and founded the agricultural settlement of Sosa in the Dominican Republic,…
then ruled by one of Latin America's most repressive dictators, General Rafael Trujillo. In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells, a distinguished historian and the son of a Sosa settler, tells the compelling story of General Trujillo, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and those fortunate pioneers who founded a successful employee-owned dairy cooperative on the north shore of the island. Why did a dictator admit these desperate refugees when so few nations would accept those fleeing fascism? Eager to mollify international critics after his army had massacred 15,000 unarmed Haitians, Trujillo sent representatives to vian, France, in July, 1938 for a conference on refugees from Nazism. Proposed by FDR to deflect criticism from his administration's restrictive immigration policies, the vian Conference proved an abject failure. The Dominican Republic was the only nation that agreed to open its doors. Obsessed with stemming the tide of Haitian migration across his nation's border, the opportunistic Trujillo sought to "whiten" the Dominican populace, welcoming Jewish refugees who were themselves subject to racist scorn in Europe. The Roosevelt administration sanctioned the Sosa colony. Since the United States did not accept Jewish refugees in significant numbers, it encouraged Latin America to do so. That prodding, paired with FDR's overriding preoccupation with fighting fascism, strengthened U. S. relations with Latin American dictatorships for decades to come. Meanwhile, as Jewish organizations worked to get Jews out of Europe, discussions about the fate of worldwide Jewry exposed fault lines between Zionists and Non-Zionists. Throughout his discussion of these broad dynamics, Wells weaves vivid narratives about the founding of Sosa, the original settlers and their families, and the life of the unconventional beach-front colony.By Srirupa Roy. 2007
Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two…
decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project--of making the state the entity identified as the nation's authoritative representative--emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the "naturally" fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity. Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to "see the state"; how the "unity in diversity" formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India's annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns--industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants--which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.By John Quincy Adams, David Waldstreicher. 1795
For the 250th anniversary of John Quincy Adams's birth, a landmark new edition of an American masterpiece: the incomparable self-portrait…
of a man and his times from the Revolution to the coming of the Civil War.The diary of John Quincy Adams is one of the most extraordinary works in American literature. Begun in 1779 at the age of twelve and kept more or less faithfully until his death almost 70 years later, it is both an unrivaled record of historical events and personalities from the nation's founding to the antebellum era and a masterpiece of American self-portraiture, tracing the spiritual, literary,and scientific interests of an exceptionally lively mind. Now, for the 250th anniversary of Adams's birth, Library of America and historian David Waldstreicher present a two-volume reader's edition based for the first time on the original manuscript diaries, restoring personal and revealing passages suppressed in earlier editions.Volume 2 opens with Adams serving as Secretary of State, amid political maneuverings within and outside James Monroe's cabinet to become his successor, a process that culminates in Adams's election to the presidency by the House of Representatives after the deadlocked four-way contest of 1824. Even as Adams takes the oath of office, rivals Henry Clay, his Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, his vice president, and an embittered Andrew Jackson, eye the election of 1828. The diary records in candid detail his frustration as his far-sighted agenda for national improvement founders on the rocks of internecine political factionalism, conflict that results in his becoming only the second president, with his father, to fail to secure reelection. After a short-lived retirement, Adams returns to public service as a Congressman from Massachusetts, and for the last seventeen years of his life he leads efforts to resist the extension of slavery and to end the notorious "gag rule" that stifles debate on the issue in Congress. In 1841 he further burnishes his reputation as a scourge of the Slave Power by successfully defending African mutineers of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court. The diary achieves perhaps its greatest force in its prescient anticipation of the Civil War and Emancipation, an "object," as Adams described it during the Missouri Crisis, "vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue."By Eric Alexander. 1961
The author's grandfather, Aretas Akers-Douglas (1857-1926) was in his day called "The Prince of Whips". Starting in 1880 as a…
confederate of the brilliant but unorthodox Lord Randolph Churchill, he graduated in record time to the position of chief dispenser of the official Conservative party line and held it for ten exceptionally arduous years at the height of the Home Rule controversy with its complications, Liberal unionism, parliamentary sabotage and obstruction.This position was rendered all the more responsible through the distaste felt by the two great leaders whom he served—Lord Salisbury and A.J. Balfour—for the details of party management; and even after he had been moved to another office his advice continued to be sought on all questions relating to the party's domestic affairs.Out of the intimate and informal correspondence received in these capacities Lord Chilston has made an entertaining political biography, unraveling a most complex period of parliamentary history and revealing much about Lord Salisbury, Lord Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, A.J. Balfour and lesser figures, like the loyal and endearing W.H. Smith, Walter Long and Richard Middleton.By Lee Edwards. 2013
The remarkable history of The Heritage Foundation, its influential founder, and the conservative movement in America.Leading the Way tells the…
story of how Ed Feulner has transformed policymaking in Washington and has led The Heritage Foundation into becoming the most influential conservative think tank in the nation. Under Ed Feulner and for 36 years, Heritage has shaped politics with conservative solutions for such critical issues as entitlements, national security, missile defense, health care, welfare reform, immigration, free trade, energy, and the role of the family and religion in society. Today, with over hundreds of thousands of members and an annual budget of more than $80 million, Heritage is a permanent Washington institution and the leading exponent of conservative ideas in America and around the world. The man who made it happen is Ed Feulner, intellectual entrepreneur, hands-on manager, legendary fundraiser, presidential adviser, bestselling author, and world traveler--a man who never stops and was described by The Economist as "one of the most influential conservatives in America."By Harlow Giles Unger. 2013
Although the framers gave the president little authority, George Washington knew whatever he did would set precedents for generations of…
future leaders. To ensure their ability to defend the nation, he simply ignored the Constitution when he thought it necessary. In a revealing new look at the birth of American government, #147;Mr. President” describes Washington’s presidency in a time of continual crisis, as rebellion and attacks by foreign enemies threatened to destroy this new nation. Constantly weighing preservation of the Union against preservation of individual liberties and states’ rights, Washington assumed more power with each crisis. In a series of brilliant but unconstitutional maneuvers he forced Congress to cede control of the four pillars of executive power: war, finance, foreign affairs, and law enforcement. Drawing on rare documents and letters, Unger shows how Washington combined political cunning and sheer genius to seize ever-widening powers, impose law and order while ensuring individual freedom, and shape the office of President of the United States.