Book picks similar to
Labor and the Course of American Democracy: US History in Latin American Perspective by Charles Bergquist
latin-america
imperialism-and-anti-imperialism
language-english
united-states
Strenuous Life
Theodore Roosevelt - 1899
Teddy Roosevelt lived a full and accomplished life and shared many of his beliefs in this book, in which he tells how to live life to its most productive and fullest.
Cryptography and Network Security
Behrouz A. Forouzan - 2007
In this new first edition, well-known author Behrouz Forouzan uses his accessible writing style and visual approach to simplify the difficult concepts of cryptography and network security. This edition also provides a website that includes Powerpoint files as well as instructor and students solutions manuals. Forouzan presents difficult security topics from the ground up. A gentle introduction to the fundamentals of number theory is provided in the opening chapters, paving the way for the student to move on to more complex security and cryptography topics. Difficult math concepts are organized in appendices at the end of each chapter so that students can first learn the principles, then apply the technical background. Hundreds of examples, as well as fully coded programs, round out a practical, hands-on approach which encourages students to test the material they are learning.
Dragonfly In Amber: by Diana Gabaldon (Outlander, Book 2) | Summary & Analysis
Book*Sense - 2014
The sweeping saga begun in Outlander continues in Diana Gabaldon’s 1992 Dragonfly in Amber. In it, the Frasers return from France to Scotland, only to be separated, and revelations of the strange relationships within families come to light. Dragonfly in Amber, follows the continuing escapades of the time-shifting Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser and her Highlander husband, Jamie Fraser, straddling the centuries-old and near pasts to offer a compelling tale of intrigue, romance, war and the strains of complicated familial connections. Focusing largely on the 1745 Jacobite Rising in Scotland, it offers a down-to-earth view of a historical event that does not receive much attention in American classroom, simultaneously promoting interest in it and providing an authentic background in which the story of how the Frasers handle the series of circumstances that confront them can take place. You also get the following in this Summary & Analysis of Dragonfly in Amber: • Detailed Book Review from Experts • Story Setting Analysis of Dragonfly in Amber • Plot Analysis that will make you see the book from another angle. • Pick up bits you might have missed as we decipher the novel. • Details of Characters & Key Character Analysis • Summary of the text, with some analytical comments interspersed • Discussion & Analysis of Themes, Symbols… • And Much More! This Analysis of Dragonfly in Amber fills the gap, making you understand more while enhancing your reading experience.
Lost Ground
Michiel Heyns - 2010
The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades – unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story. On checking into the Queen’s Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville – and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia. As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée’s story, he now starts to rewrite his own – till events take an even more shocking turn….Lost Ground explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.Michiel Heyns is the author of four previous novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic. He is a translator and was professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch.
Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society
Sandra Lauderdale Graham - 2002
The slave woman struggled to avoid an unwanted husband and the woman of privilege assumed a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. Sandra Lauderdale Graham casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male, through these compact histories.
They Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration
Aviva Chomsky - 2007
Chomsky dismantles twenty of the most common assumptions and beliefs underlying statements like "I'm not against immigration, only illegal immigration" and challenges the misinformation in clear, straightforward prose.In exposing the myths that underlie today's debate, Chomsky illustrates how the parameters and presumptions of the debate distort how we think—and have been thinking—about immigration. She observes that race, ethnicity, and gender were historically used as reasons to exclude portions of the population from access to rights. Today, Chomsky argues, the dividing line is citizenship. Although resentment against immigrants and attempts to further marginalize them are still apparent today, the notion that non-citizens, too, are created equal is virtually absent from the public sphere. Engaging and fresh, this book will challenge common assumptions about immigrants, immigration, and U.S. history.
The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Europe and Latin America
John Henry Merryman - 1969
This new edition deals with recent significant events—such as the fall of the Soviet empire and the resulting precipitous decline of the socialist legal tradition—and their significance for the civil law tradition. The book also incorporates the findings of recent important literature on the legal cultures of civil law countries.
Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope
Chalmers Johnson - 2010
Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces. Our reliance on Pentagon economics, a global empire of bases, and war without end is, he declares, nothing short of "a suicide option.""Dismantling the Empire" explores the subjects for which Johnson is now famous, from the origins of blowback to Barack Obama's Afghanistan conundrum, including our inept spies, our bad behavior in other countries, our ill-fought wars, and our capitulation to a military that has taken ever more control of the federal budget. There is, he proposes, only one way out: President Obama must begin to dismantle the empire before the Pentagon dismantles the American Dream. If we do not learn from the fates of past empires, he suggests, our decline and fall are foreordained. This is Johnson at his best: delivering both a warning and an urgent prescription for a remedy.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
Richard Hofstadter - 1964
In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?”, The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States."Recent months have witnessed an attack of unprecedented passion and ferocity against the national government. The Republican Party has apparently embarked on a crusade to destroy national standards, national projects, and national regulations and to transfer domestic governing authority from the national government to the states. A near majority of the Supreme Court even seems to want to replace the Constitution by the Articles of Confederation…"Unbridled rhetoric is having consequences far beyond anything that antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of angry words seems to have activated and in a sense legitimized what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid strain' in American politics." - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1995
The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925
David Montgomery - 1987
David Montgomery, Farnam Professor of History at Yale University since 1979, is the author of Worker's Control in America (CUP, 1979) and is co-editor of the journal International Labor and Working Class History.
There's No José Here: Following the Hidden Lives of Mexican Immigrants
Gabriel Thompson - 2006
Once Mexicans had a sizable presence in a few select states like California, Texas, Arizona and New York; today the fastest growing populations are in places like North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee.. What motivates people to risk their very lives, and why don't Mexicans just "play by the rules" and enter legally? How do they cope, living in a strange country among people that speak a language they can't understand? And after everything they have gone through, do they see immigration as a blessing, a curse, or something in between? There's No Jose Here allows Mexicans in the U.S. to speak in their own words. The central narrative follows Enrique, a 34-year-old livery cab driver who came to the US illegally at the age of 16 and has since seen his daughter lead poisoned, his mother abandoned in Mexico by his father, his cousin murdered on the streets of Brooklyn, and his best friend deployed to Iraq. This book gives readers a look into these stories as people struggle to survive in a new and often hostile land.
The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy
Stephen M. Walt - 2018
Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions dissects the faults and foibles of recent American foreign policy--explaining why it has been plagued by disasters like the "forever wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan and outlining what can be done to fix it.In 1992, the United States stood at the pinnacle of world power and Americans were confident that a new era of peace and prosperity was at hand. Twenty-five years later, those hopes have been dashed. Relations with Russia and China have soured, the European Union is wobbling, nationalism and populism are on the rise, and the United States is stuck in costly and pointless wars that have squandered trillions of dollars and undermined its influence around the world.The root of this dismal record, Walt argues, is the American foreign policy establishment's stubborn commitment to a strategy of "liberal hegemony." Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to use U.S. power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes.Donald Trump won the presidency promising to end the misguided policies of the foreign policy "Blob" and to pursue a wiser approach. But his erratic and impulsive style of governing, combined with a deeply flawed understanding of world politics, are making a bad situation worse. The best alternative, Walt argues, is a return to the realist strategy of "offshore balancing," which eschews regime change, nation-building, and other forms of global social engineering. The American people would surely welcome a more restrained foreign policy, one that allowed greater attention to problems here at home. This long-overdue shift will require abandoning the futile quest for liberal hegemony and building a foreign policy establishment with a more realistic view of American power.Clear-eyed, candid, and elegantly written, Stephen M. Walt's The Hell of Good Intentions offers both a compelling diagnosis of America's recent foreign policy follies and a proven formula for renewed success.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto
Aaron Bastani - 2018
Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.
The Portable Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli - 1979
For example, the famous "the ends justifies the means" quote is actually a gross exaggeration of what Machiavelli originally wrote, which was "in the actions of all men...when there is no impartial arbiter, one must consider the final result." The biggest counterargument Bondanella and Musa can supply is the simple fact that they include a less famous piece Machiavelli did called "The Discourses." This piece is often not mentioned or even casually footnoted because it presents the true Machiavelli - a man who was supportive of a Republic government run by the citizens. Any one who believes Machiavelli is a supporter of despots will be surprised to read him speaking in support for fair and public trials and a balance of power between rulers and their people.
We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
Myles Horton - 1990
Throughout their highly personal conversations recorded here, Horton and Freire discuss the nature of social change and empowerment and their individual literacy campaigns. The ideas of these men developed through two very different channels: Horton's, from the Highlander Center, a small, independent residential education center situated outside the formal schooling system and the state; Freire's, from within university and state-sponsored programs. Myles Horton, who died in January 1990, was a major figure in the civil rights movement and founder of the Highlander Folk School, later the highlander Research and Education Center. Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, established the Popular Culture Movement in Recife, Brazil's poorest region, and later was named head of the New National Literacy Campaign until a military coup forced his exile from Brazil. He has been active in educational development programs worldwide. For both men, real liberation is achieved through popular participation. The themes they discuss illuminate problems faced by educators and activists around the world who are concerned with linking participatory education to the practice of liberation and social change. How could two men, working in such different social spaces and times, arrive at similar ideas and methods? These conversations answer that question in rich detail and engaging anecdotes, and show that, underlying the philosophy of both, is the idea that theory emanates from practice and that knowledge grows from and is a reflection of social experience.