Nonbelievers have often had second-class legal status and have had to fight for their rights as citizens.As R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick demonstrate in their sharp and convincing work, avowed atheists were derided since the founding of the nation. Even Thomas Paine fell into disfavor and his role as a patriot forgotten. Popular Republican Robert Ingersoll could not be elected in the nineteenth century due to his atheism, and the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton was shunned when she questioned biblical precepts about women’s roles.Moore and Kramnick lay out this fascinating history and the legal cases that have questioned religious supremacy. It took until 1961 for the Supreme Court to ban religious tests for state officials, despite Article 6 of the Constitution. Still, every one of the fifty states continues to have God in its constitution. The authors discuss these cases and more current ones, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which address whether personal religious beliefs supersede secular ones.In Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic, the authors also explore the dramatic rise of an "atheist awakening" and the role of organizations intent on holding the country to the secular principles it was founded upon.

    Hirshson creates the most balanced portrait of Patton ever written. General Patton: A Soldier’s Life reveals Patton as a complex soldier capable of brilliant military maneuvers but also of inspiring horrendous acts with fiery speeches. It explains Patton’s belief in a soldier’s Valhalla, connects the family’s wealth to one of America’s bitterest labor strikes, and disputes the usual interpretation of Patton’s relief from command of the Third Army.While investigating this complex man, Hirshson has uncovered surprising material about a series of civilian and military massacres in Sicily, attempts to exploit Patton’s diary after his death, and Patton’s relations with top Allied generals. In this meticulously documented volume, Patton comes to life.

    As he recounts his adventures to Dido, who gives him sanctuary, they fall in love. But the Gods intervene and Aeneas realizes their relationship cannot last.

    Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.

    Self-serving monarchic social systems, which collectively reduced common people to servitude, were now attacked by Enlightenment philosophers, of whom Rouseau was a leading light.His masterpiece, The Social Contract, profoundly influenced the subsequent development of society and remains provocative in a modern age of continuing widespread vested interest. This is the most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction, notes, index and chronology of Rousseau's life and times.

    In his characteristic and provocative dialectic style, John Dewey clarifies the meaning and implications of such concepts as “the public,” “the state,” “government,” and “political democracy”; distinguishes his a posteriori reasoning from a priori reasoning which, he argues, permeates less meaningful discussions of basic concepts; and repeatedly demonstrates the interrelationships between fact and theory. As in his other writings, Dewey exhibits his strong faith in the potential of human intelligence to solve the public’s problems.

    Yet in arenas that range from the battlefield of abortion to the information highway, privacy is under siege. In this eye-opening and sometimes hair-raising book, Alderman and Kennedy survey hundreds of recent cases in which ordinary citizens have come up against the intrusions of government, businesses, the news media, and their own neighbors. At once shocking and instructive, up-to-date and rich in historical perspective, The Right to Private is an invaluable guide to one of the most charged issues of our time."Anyone hoping to understand the sometimes precarious state of privacy in modern America should start by reading this book."--Washington Post Book World"Skillfully weaves together unfamiliar, dramatic case histories...a book with impressive breadth."--Time

    policies have taken on civilians around the world and the role activists are (or aren’t) playing to stop the carnage. The Western world was stunned to wake up on 9-11 to find that the Third World had "pushed back." By ignoring the suffering and loss of life of their victims while grieving over our own, Amercans have made themselves complicit in their government’s global slaughter. In a heartwrenching recount, Churchill reminds us of the untold millions who have perished as a result of U.S. military intervention (in either a physical, diplomatic or economic sense) in Iraq, Cambodia, Palestine, East Timor, the Americas . . . and the list goes on.To further illustrate his point, included are annotated chronologies of U.S. military actions from 1776 to the present and a compilation of International Laws either broken or ignored by the United States. Comprehensive, yet remaining concise, this book cannot be overlooked by those still asking: "Why do they hate us?""Few are as eloquent or as able to maintain lucidity for the lay reader as is Churchill."—Bloomsbury Review"Ward Churchill has carved out a special place for himself in defending the rights of oppressed people, and -exposing the dark side of past and current history, often marginalized or suppressed. These are achievements of inestimable value."—Noam ChomskyWard Churchill is co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, a national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, and an associate professor of American Indian Studies and Communications at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Author of more than a dozen titles, he is also an indefatigable lecturer on government repression, American Indian affairs and global politics.

    But since its birth was announced a century ago in 1898 by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets.Now the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and Cornel West, have been brought together and reprinted unabridged. From the first generation of pragmatists, including the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, to the leading figures in the contemporary pragmatist revival, including the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the jurist Richard Posner, and the literary critic Richard Poirier, all the contributors to this volume are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader will provide both the general reader and the student of American culture with excitement and pleasure.

    seemed on the cusp of a golden age. Although Americans had been shocked by the assassination in 1963 of President Kennedy, they exuded a sense of consensus and optimism that showed no signs of abating. Indeed, political liberalism and interracial civil rights activism made it appear as if 1965 would find America more progressive and unified than it had ever been before. In January 1965, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed that the country had “no irreconcilable conflicts.”Johnson, who was an extraordinarily skillful manager of Congress, succeeded in securing an avalanche of Great Society legislation in 1965, including Medicare, immigration reform, and a powerful Voting Rights Act. But as esteemed historian James T. Patterson reveals in The Eve of Destruction, that sense of harmony dissipated over the course of the year. As Patterson shows, 1965 marked the birth of the tumultuous era we now know as “The Sixties,” when American society and culture underwent a major transformation. Turmoil erupted in the American South early in the year, when police attacked civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Many black leaders, outraged, began to lose faith in nonviolent and interracial strategies of protest. Meanwhile, the U.S. rushed into a deadly war in Vietnam, inciting rebelliousness at home. On August 11th, five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, racial violence exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The six days of looting and arson that followed shocked many Americans and cooled their enthusiasm for the president's remaining initiatives. As the national mood darkened, the country became deeply divided. By the end of 1965, a conservative resurgence was beginning to redefine the political scene even as developments in popular music were enlivening the Left.In The Eve of Destruction, Patterson traces the events of this transformative year, showing how they dramatically reshaped the nation and reset the course of American life.

    Its political and social institutions distribute rights and privileges universally and proclaim the equality of all citizens. Yet economic institutions, with efficiency as their guiding principle, create disparities among citizens in living standards and material welfare. This mixture of equal rights and unequal economic status breeds tensions between the political principles of democracy and the economic principles of capitalism. Whenever the wealthy try for extra helpings of supposedly equal rights, and whenever the workings of the market deny anyone a minimum standard of living, "dollars transgress on rights"—in the author's phrase.In this revised and expanded version of the Godkin Lectures presented at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University in April 1974, Arthur M. Okun explores the conflicts that arise when society's desire to reduce inequality would impair economic efficiency, confronting policymakers with "the big tradeoff."Other economic systems have attempted to solve this problem; but the best of socialist experiments have achieved a greater degree of equality than our mixed capitalist democracy only at heavy costs in efficiency, and dictatorial governments have reached heights of efficiency only by rigidly repressing their citizenry.In contrast, our basic system emerges as a viable, if uneasy, compromise in which the market has its place and democratic institutions keep it in check. But within the existing system there are ways to gain more of one good thing at a lower cost in terms of the other. In Okun's view, society's concern for human dignity can be directed at reducing the economic deprivation that stains the record of American democracy—through progressive taxation, transfer payments, job programs, broadening equality of opportunity, eliminating racial and sexual discrimination, and lowering barriers to access to capital.

    They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans.   If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution is a 2007 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

    The text draws from political science, public administration, economics, decision analysis, and social and political theory.

    He overturned the orthodoxy that markets were optimally self-regulating, and instead argued for state intervention to ensure full employment and economic stability. This new selection is the first comprehensive single-volume edition of Keynes's writings on economics, philosophy, social theory and policy, including several pieces never before published. Full of irony and wit, they offer a dazzling introduction to a figure whose ideas still have urgent relevance today.John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is widely considered to have been the most influential economist of the 20th century. His key books include The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919); A Treatise on Probability (1921); A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923); A Treatise on Money (1930); and his magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick. His three-volume biography of Keynes received numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize.

    He looks at the theological origins of political Islam and takes us through the rise of militant Islam in Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, examining the impact of radical Wahhabi proselytizing, and Saudi oil money, on the rest of the Islamic world. The Crisis of Islam ranges widely through thirteen centuries of history, but in particular it charts the key events of the twentieth century leading up to the violent confrontations of today: the creation of the state of Israel, the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the September 11th attacks on the United States.While hostility toward the West has a long and varied history in the lands of Islam, its current concentration on America is new. So too is the cult of the suicide bomber. Brilliantly disentangling the crosscurrents of Middle Eastern history from the rhetoric of its manipulators, Bernard Lewis helps us understand the reasons for the increasingly dogmatic rejection of modernity by many in the Muslim world in favor of a return to a sacred past. Based on his George Polk Award–winning article for The New Yorker, The Crisis of Islam is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what Usama bin Ladin represents and why his murderous message resonates so widely in the Islamic world.