Disciplinary Revolution or The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation

Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe

Author: Philip S Gorski

What explains the rapid growth of state power in early modern Europe? While most scholars have pointed to the impact of military or capitalist revolutions, Philip S. Gorski argues instead for the importance of a disciplinary revolution unleashed by the Reformation. By refining and diffusing a variety of disciplinary techniques and strategies, such as communal surveillance, control through incarceration, and bureaucratic office-holding, Calvin and his followers created an infrastructure of religious governance and social control that served as a model for the rest of Europe—and the world.
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Table of Contents:

	Preface and Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	Body and Soul: Calvinism, Discipline, and State Power in Early Modern Europe	1
2	Disciplinary Revolution from Below in the Low Countries	39
3	Disciplinary Revolution from Above in Brandenburg-Prussia	79
4	Social Disciplining in Comparative Perspective	114
	Conclusion	157
	Notes	173
	Bibliography	209
	Index	237

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The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America's First Five Military Parks

Author: Timothy B Smith

"Smith's book is the first to look at the process of battlefield preservation as a whole. He focuses on how each of these sites was established and the important individuals - the congressmen, the former soldiers, the veteran commissioners who were the catalysts for the creation of these parks." The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation is a watershed book that will be of interest to any reader who wishes to have a better understanding of how such preservation efforts were initiated.

The Age of Diminished Expectations 3rd Edition or Beslan

The Age of Diminished Expectations, 3rd Edition: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s

Author: Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman's popular guide to the economic landscape of the 1990s has been revised and updated to take into account economic developments of the years from 1994 - 1997. New material in the third edition includes:

• A new chapter--complete with colorful examples from Llyod's of London and Sumitomo Metals--on how risky behavior can lead to disaster in private markets.
• An evaluation of the Federal Reserve's role in reining in economic growth to prevent inflation, and the debate over whether its targets are too low.
• A look at the collapse of the Mexican peso and the burst of Japan's "bubble" economy.
• A revised discussion of the federal budget deficit, including the growth concern that Social Security and Medicare payments to retiring baby boomers will threaten the solvency of the government.

Finally, in the updated concluding section, the author provides three possible scenarios for the American economy over the next decade. He warns us that we live in age of diminished expectations, in which the voting public is willing to settle for policy drift--but with the first baby boomers turning 65 in 2011, the economy will not be able to drift indefinitely.

Library Journal

This book occupies fairly rare territory: the middle ground. Krugman's most likely scenario for the 1990s is neither crash nor boom but a continuation of the 1980s, with some unemployment, more inflation, and only slow growth in income. Surprisingly, Krugman notes, the public will continue to be satisfied with this performance. Designed for the general reader, the book covers the important economic problems and proposed solutions. One also discovers which problems should be real concerns and which are even amenable to solution. Recommended especially for public libraries as a well-balanced introduction to the 1990s.-- Richard C. Schiming, Mankato State Univ., Minn.

Booknews

Targets human factors and how they affect the implementation of any kind of automation in the information system environment. Includes discussion of: accurately portraying the apparent whimsy of upper management; tactics, strategy negotiation, and politics; reorganization, new employers, and new management. A rare, non-technical, non-apocalyptic account of the economy. Krugman (economics, MIT) describes more than predicts, but does think there will be no bust, no boom, a few whimpers, a sigh or two: things could be better, but they could be worse, and we don't expect much anymore. Originally published as a Washington Post Company Briefing Book. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
	Introduction	1
I	The Roots of Economic Welfare	9
1	Productivity Growth	13
2	Income Distribution	23
3	Employment and Unemployment	31
II	Chronic Aches and Pains	39
4	The Trade Deficit	43
5	Inflation	59
III	Policy Problems	69
6	Health Care	73
7	The Budget Deficit	85
8	The Embattled Fed	101
9	The Dollar	111
10	Free Trade and Protectionism	123
11	Japan	137
IV	Financial Follies	155
12	The Savings and Loan Scandal	159
13	Corporate Finance	169
14	Global Finance	185
V	American Prospects	203
15	Happy Ending	207
16	Hard Landing	213
17	Drift	225
	Index	233

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Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1

Author: Timothy Phillips

On the morning of September 1, 2004, the children of Beslan were excited about the start of a new school year. But as traditional festivities got underway, heavily armed terrorists stormed the school playground, changing ordinary lives in the southern Russian town forever. At least 330 parents and children were killed, some in the massive explosions that tore through the gymnasium, some caught in the crossfire of a three-hour gun battle between the Russian forces and the terrorists. This riveting account not only covers the three days of unimaginable terror and suffering that followed, but includes the people of Beslan speaking in their own words about their ordeal and about their lives in this deeply fractured region. The human story of the siege is here—including the terrible toll that thirst, hunger, and sleeplessness took on the hostages, and the bravery of those who dealt with the terrorists, such as the elderly headmistress of the school and the doctor who tried to relieve the children's suffering. This account also examines the authorities’ response to the siege, finding it wanting, and ultimately places the events of September 2004 in their wider context of centuries of conflict and enmity in the Caucasus.

Scotsman

Timothy Phillips [is] a brave and sensitive writer whose book alternates between a minute-by-minute account of the Chechen separatists' three-day siege and a decade-by-decade summary of its causes-incompetence, arrogance, social decay and corruption.

Prescription for Survival or American Gunfight

Prescription for Survival: A Doctor's Journey to End Nuclear Madness

Author: Bernard Lown

About the Author:
Bernard Lown, M.D. Cofounder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize

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American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman--and the Shoot-out That Stopped It

Author: Stephen Hunter

American Gunfight is the fast-paced, definitive, and breathtakingly suspenseful account of an extraordinary historical event -- the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman in 1950 by two Puerto Rican Nationalists and the bloody shoot-out in the streets of Washington, D.C., that saved the president's life.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Hunter, the widely admired and bestselling novelist and author of such books as Havana, Hot Springs, and Dirty White Boys, and John Bainbridge, Jr., an experienced journalist and lawyer, American Gunfight is at once a groundbreaking work of meticulous historical research and the vivid and dramatically told story of an act of terrorism that almost succeeded. They have pieced together, at last, the story of the conspiracy that nearly doomed the president and how a few good men -- ordinary guys who were willing to risk their lives in the line of duty -- stopped it.

It is a book about courage -- on both sides -- and about what politics and devotion to a cause can lead men to do, and about what actually happens, second by second, when a gunfight explodes.

It begins on November 1, 1950, an unseasonably hot afternoon in the sleepy capital. At 2:00 P.M. in his temporary residence at Blair House, the president of the United States takes a nap. At 2:20 P.M., two men approach Blair House from different directions. Oscar Collazo, a respected metal polisher and family man, and Griselio Torresola, an unemployed salesman, don't look dangerous, not in their new suits and hats, not in their calm, purposeful demeanor, not in their slow, unexcited approach. What the three White House policemen and one Secret Service agent cannot guess is that under each man's coat is a 9mm German automatic pistol and in each head, a dream of assassin's glory.

At point-blank range, Collazo and then Torresola draw and fire and move toward the president of the United States.

Hunter and Bainbridge tell the story of that November day with narrative power and careful attention to detail. They are the first to report on the inner workings of this conspiracy; they examine the forces that led the perpetrators to conceive the plot. The authors also tell the story of the men themselves, from their youth and the worlds in which they grew up to the women they loved and who loved them to the moment the gunfire erupted. Their telling commemorates heroism -- the quiet commitment to duty that in some moments of crisis sees some people through an ordeal, even at the expense of their lives.

The Washington Post - Ted Widmer

The definitive history of this attempted murder has now been written by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr. True to their topic, theirs is an unlikely conspiracy: Hunter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for this newspaper and Bainbridge a journalist and former legal writer in Baltimore. It's a bit unclear what drew them to each other or to this topic, but they attack it with verve.

Publishers Weekly

On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, engaged in a sustained gun battle with Secret Service agents at Blair House. Their goal was to assassinate President Harry Truman. It's curious that the two men haven't found a place in popular memory like other presidential assailants. But this attempt deserves attention because it was explicitly political and because it permanently altered Secret Service practices. Hunter, esteemed for his film criticism and macho adventure novels, teams up with former Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge for this richly detailed account of the motives and destinies of virtually everyone connected to the skirmish. This is an ambitious attempt to achieve time-lapse history. The actual confrontation took less than a minute; rather than save it up for the end, the authors spread it across much of the book, interspersed with background material on the participants. The book reads like the product of a film lover/action novelist and a journalist rather than a work of history, with the shootout described in stream-of-consciousness, and melodramatic, cliff-hanging chapter endings. To the authors' credit, though, interpretations are presented as such, and their handling of the recorded events is not only convincing but compelling. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Novelist/film critic Hunter, along with Baltimore Sun journalist Bainbridge, brings cinematic flair to this investigation of the 1950 attempt by Puerto Rican nationalists to assassinate Truman. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Journalists Hunter and Bainbridge reconstruct an attempt on Harry Truman's life, an event that "was of course gigantic news-for about a week."The principal actors in the November 1950 attempt were two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, devotees of a lawyer-revolutionary named Pedro Albizu Campos. The extent of their connection to Campos was not known until long after the attack, yet the operative principle was simple: If any attempt were made on Campos's life in Puerto Rico, then cells would activate in the U.S. and kill Truman. The witness may not have been entirely reliable, and in all events of the assassination effort, there was a certain amount of dumb luck: Truman was staying across the street from the White House, which was being renovated, a fact that a helpful cab driver had to point out to Collazo and Torresola; Collazo had few qualifications apart from a commitment to the cause; much of the attack was concocted on the spot. Yet Torresola was able to shoot several guards and get within ten yards of Truman before being taken down. It all makes for an intrinsically interesting story, but the authors tend to tell everything they can about any particular point of play, layering on incidental details about the lives of D.C. cops and expounding on the history and geography of Puerto Rico while drifting much too often into breathless Dragnet-speak: "The president is in the window he is thirty feet from Griselio who stands unnoticed at the stairway to Lee House the men on the other side haven't noticed him yet he's shot at three men and downed them all the president is thirty feet away and he has a straight line-of-sight picture to that window and therestands the president of the United States so he is very much in the kill zone."Those with patience for run-on sentences may enjoy this long footnote to history.

Table of Contents:

Authors' Note     1
Introduction     3
A Drive Around Washington     5
Griselio Agonistes     12
Revolution     18
The Odd Couple     36
Mr. Gonzales and Mr. De Silva Go to Washington     40
Early Morning     50
Baby Starches the Shirts     54
Toad     62
The New Guy     74
The Buick Guy     83
The Guns     86
The Ceremony     100
Indian Summer     104
The Big Walk     109
Oscar     113
"It Did Not Go Off"     128
Pappy     133
The Next Ten Seconds     138
Resurrection Man     141
So Loud, So Fast     152
Upstairs at Blair     156
Downstairs at Blair     161
Borinquen     167
Oscar Alone     181
The End's Run     184
Good Hands     186
The Colossus Rhoads     194
Oscar Goes Down     200
The Second Assault     203
Pimienta     206
Point-Blank     223
The Man Who Loved Guns     228
The Dark Visitors     236
Mortal Danger     240
The Neighbor     243
American Gunfight     244
The Good Samaritan     252
The Policemen's Wives     258
The Scene     260
Inside the Soccer Shoe     267
Who Shot Oscar?     273
The Roundup     278
Taps     286
Oscar on Trial     289
Deep Conspiracy     298
Cressie Does Her Duty     308
Oscar Speaks     310
- R - I -     317
Epilogue: Destinies     323
Source Notes     327
Bibliography     339
Acknowledgments     349
Index     355

Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity or A House Built on Sand

Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity

Author: Gregory Cran

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is the earliest surviving realist text in the European tradition. As an account of the Peloponnesian War, it is famous both as an analysis of power politics and as a classic of political realism. From the opening speeches, Thucydides' Athenians emerge as a new and frightening source of power, motivated by self-interest and oblivious to the rules and shared values under which the Greeks had operated for centuries. Gregory Crane demonstrates how Thucydides' history brilliantly analyzes both the power and the dramatic weaknesses of realist thought.
The tragedy of Thucydides' history emerges from the ultimate failure of the Athenian project. The new morality of the imperialists proved as conflicted as the old; history shows that their values were unstable and self-destructive. Thucydides' history ends with the recounting of an intellectual stalemate that, a century later, motivated Plato's greatest work.
Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity includes a thought-provoking discussion questioning currently held ideas of political realism and its limits. Crane's sophisticated claim for the continuing usefulness of the political examples of the classical past will appeal to anyone interested in the conflict between the exercise of political power and the preservation of human freedom and dignity.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Sherman at Melos: Realpolitik Ancient and Modern	21
2	Truest Causes and Thucydidean Realisms	36
3	Representations of Power before and after Thucydides	72
4	Power, Prestige, and the Corcyraean Affair	93
5	Archaeology I: The Analytical Program of the History	125
6	Archaeology II: From Wealth to Capital: The Changing Politics of Accumulation	148
7	The Rule of the Strong and the Limits of Friendship	172
8	Archidamos and Sthenelaidas: The Dilemma of Spartan Authority	196
9	The Melian Dialogue: From Herodotus's Freedom Fighters to Thucydides' Imperialists	237
10	Athenian Theses: Realism as the Modern Simplicity	258
11	Conclusion: Thucydidean Realism and the Price of Objectivity	294
	Bibliography	327
	Index	343

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A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science

Author: Noretta Koertg

Cultural critics say that "science is politics by other means," arguing that the results of scientific inquiry are profoundly shaped by the ideological agendas of powerful elites. They base their claims on historical case studies purporting to show the systematic intrusion of sexist, racist, capitalist, colonialist, and/or professional interests into the very content of science. In this hard-hitting collection of essays, contributors offer crisp and detailed critiques of case studies offered by the cultural critics as evidence that scientific results tell us more about social context than they do about the natural world. Pulling no punches, they identify numerous crude factual blunders (e.g. that Newton never performed any experiments) and egregious errors of omission, such as the attempt to explain the slow development of fluid dynamics solely in terms of gender bias. Where there are positive aspects of a flawed account, or something to be learned from it, they do not hesitate to say so. Their target is shoddy scholarship.
Comprising new essays by distinguished scholars of history, philosophy, and science, this book raises a lively debate to a new level of seriousness.

Library Journal

This book is the latest and most explosive bomb to be launched in the "science wars." Recently, a cadre of historians and philosophers of science have attempted to deconstruct the scientific process by examining its underlying social metaphors. Many scholars, especially practicing scientists, view these efforts with undisguised disdain. The essays here, which are by scientists and philosophers, debunk postmodernist science studies by exposing their purported biases, errors, and fallacies. Essentially, they deconstruct the deconstructionists. For example, Michael Ruse asks, "Is Darwinism Sexist?" while Alan Sokal tackles "What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Approve." Although some olive branches are extended, the overall tone is aggressive. Academics on both sides of the debate will need this book. Expect a counterattack.--Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral Gables, FL

Cannibal Island or Inclusion

Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag

Author: Nicolas Werth

During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate.

These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the "kulaks" and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin's system of "special villages" worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels.

Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin's punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia, but about every generation's capacity for brutality--including our own.

Foreign Affairs

Often the details in a single instance sear more deeply than the most gruesome tally of large numbers. Werth, part of the team that prepared the 2004 seven-volume documentary history of the Soviet gulag, here describes the unimaginable inhumanity of the 1933 deportation of 10,000 "dйclassй" and "socially harmful elements" to a small uninhabitable island on the river Ob, deep in the wilds of western Siberia. Although the unspeakable suffering of these thousands -- including the starvation that led to the acts that gave the nameless island a name -- is his centerpiece, Werth describes in rich detail the transformation of the vast western Siberian wilderness into the dumping ground for millions of "de-kulakized" peasants, minority groups from the borderlands, the socially marginal, criminals, and the utterly innocent. Meant in a grotesquely misconceived fashion to rid the cities of undesirables while producing economic development in the harshest of locales, these "special settlements" are a part of the gulag's least-known history. Werth corrects that in plain and clear language, leaving the story to convey its own excruciating eloquence.<

Table of Contents:

Foreword   Jan T. Gross     ix
Preface     xiii
Glossary     xxi
A "grandiose plan"     1
Western Siberia, a Land of Deportation     23
Negotiations and Preparations     59
In the Tomsk Transit Camp     86
Nazino     121
Conclusion     171
Epilogue, 1933-37     181
Acknowledgments     194
Notes     195

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Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research

Author: Steven Epstein

As a society, we have learned to value diversity. But can some strategies to achieve diversity mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions? With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that in the field of medical research, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Formal concern with diversity in American medical research, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, few paid close attention to who was included in research subject pools. Not uncommonly, scientists studied groups of mostly white, middle-aged men—and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers and pharmaceutical companies to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. That change has gone hand in hand with bold assertions that group differences in society are encoded in our biology—for example, that there are important biological differences in the ways that people of different races and sexes respond to drugs and other treatments.

While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues forcefully that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society. There is, for instance, a direct relationship between social class and health status—and Epstein believes that a focus on bodily differences can obscure the importance of this factor. Only when connected to a broad-based effort to address health disparities, Epstein explains, can amedical policy of inclusion achieve its intended effects.

A fascinating history, powerful analysis, and call to action, Inclusion will be essential reading for medical professionals, policymakers, and any concerned citizen.