David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America’s working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals.
Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency—crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.

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David Obey - Raising Hell for Justice, The Washing ton Battles of a Heartland Progressive (2007).pdf

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James P. Leary - Polkabilly (2006).jpg

A freewheeling blend of continental European folk music and the songs, tunes, and dances of Anglo and Celtic immigrants, polkabilly has enthralled American musicians and dancers since the mid-19th century. From West Virginia coal camps and east Texas farms to the Canadian prairies and America's Upper Midwest, scores of groups have wed squeezeboxes with string bands, hoe downs with hambos, and sentimental Southern balladry with comic "up north" broken-English comedy, to create a new and uniquely American sound.
The Goose Island Ramblers played as a house band for a local tavern in Madison, Wisconsin from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. The group epitomized the polkabilly sound with their wild mixture of Norwegian fiddle tunes, Irish jigs, Slovenian polkas, Swiss yodels, old time hillbilly songs, "Scandihoovian" and "Dutchman" dialect ditties, frost-bitten Hawaiian marches, and novelty numbers on the electric toilet plunger. In this original study, James P. Leary illustrates how the Ramblers' multiethnic music combined both local and popular traditions, and how their eclectic repertoire challenges prevailing definitions of American folk music. He thus offers the first comprehensive examination of the Upper Midwest's folk musical traditions within the larger context of American life and culture.
Impeccably researched, richly detailed and illustrated, and accompanied by a compact disc of interviews and performances, James P. Leary's Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music creates an unforgettable portrait of a polkabilly band and its world.

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James P. Leary - Polkabilly (2006).pdf

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Jim Tomlinson - Nothing Like an Ocean, Stories (20 09).jpg

Jim Tomlinson’s previous book of short stories, Things Kept, Things Left Behind, won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award and received enthusiastic reviews. The New York Times compared the strong sense of place in Tomlinson’s writing to that found in the works of Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro. The stories in his new collection, Nothing Like An Ocean, also reflect Tomlinson’s awareness of place, revisiting the fictional town of Spivey, a community in rural Appalachia where the characters confront difficult circumstances and, with quiet dignity, try to do what is right.
In the title story, Tomlinson explores themes of forgiveness and acceptance in the lives of two characters, Alton Wood, a high school math teacher isolated by grief, and his sister Fran, who is emotionally paralyzed by her part in a tragic death. The two take halting steps back into the world after Alton receives an anonymous invitation to a church singles dance. These themes also underlie “Angel, His Rabbit, and Kyle McKell,” which tells of Dempsie’s evening with two men—her volatile boyfriend and the recently returned Iraq War amputee whose secret she has been keeping.
Loss and the inevitability of change recur in Tomlinson’s stories. In “Overburden,” Ben, a man simultaneously contemplating AARP membership and impending fatherhood, travels with his wife, Sarah, back to eastern Kentucky to visit the oak tree that was essential to their courtship, only to find the site as barren and featureless as the moon, a casualty of mountaintop removal mining. “So Exotic” draws us into the worn environs of Rita’s Huddle In Café, where the owner becomes the confidant of Quilla, a mousy bank teller who blossoms as the muse of an eccentric artist from Belarus.
The eleven stories in Nothing Like An Ocean evoke a strong sense of small-town Kentucky life, finding humor in the residents’ foibles while never diminishing their inner lives. Tomlinson’s masterful fiction captures light and dark moments, moments that are foreign yet deeply familiar, as his characters seek redemption and sometimes find unexpected grace.

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John Stopford - The Skillful Self, Liberalism, Cul ture, and the Politics of Skill (2009).jpg

This is a book or remarkable breadth and depth. It sets out an examination of political philosophy that spans the North Atlantic, and it shows that in the depths of the common conception of government there is an unattended area that gets filled badly if it isn't filled well. Generically it's called culture, and what John Stopford specifically pleads for is a culture of skill. It's all done in a style that is both brisk and incisive.

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John Stopford - The Skillful Self, Liberalism, Cul ture, and the Politics of Skill (2009).pdf

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Michael J. Gerhardt - The Power of Precedent (2008 ).jpg

Law and American politics. The debate rages over both empirical and normative aspects of the issue: To what extent are the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive branch constrained by precedent? To what extent should they be? Taking up a topic long overdue for comprehensive treatment, Michael Gerhardt connects the vast social science data and legal scholarship to provide the most wide-ranging assessment of precedent in several decades.
The Power of Precedent clearly outlines the major issues in the continuing debates on the significance of precedent and evenly considers all sides. For the Supreme Court, precedents take many forms, including not only the Court's past opinions, but also norms, historical practices, and traditions that the justices have deliberately chosen to follow. In these forms, precedent exerts more force than is commonly acknowledged. This force is encapsulated in the implementation and recognition of what Gerhardt calls the "golden rule of precedent," a major dynamic in constitutional law. The rule calls upon justices and other public authorities to recognize that since they expect others to respect their own precedents, they must provide the same respect to others' precedents. Gerhardt's extensive exploration of precedent leads him to formulate a more expansive definition of it, one that encompasses not only the prior constitutional decisions of courts but also the constitutional judgments of other public authorities. Gerhardt concludes his study by looking at what the future holds for the concept, as he examines the decisions and attitudes toward precedent exhibited by the shift from the Rehnquist to the Roberts Court.
Authoritative and incisive, Gerhardt presents an in-depth look at this central yet understudied phenomenon at the core of all constitutional conflicts and one of undeniable importance to American law and politics. Ultimately, The Power of Precedent vividly illustrates how constitutional law is made and evolves both in and outside of the courts.

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Michael J. Gerhardt - The Power of Precedent (2008 ).pdf

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Michael Otsuka - Libertarianism without Inequality (2003).jpg

Michael Otsuka's ingenious and exciting book vindicates left-libertarianism, a political philosophy which combines stringent rights of control over one's own mind, body, and life with egalitarian rights of ownership of the world. He reclaims the ideas of John Locke from the libertarian right, and defends a view which is both more libertarian and more egalitarian than the Kantian liberalism of John Rawls. Otsuka endorses a fully egalitarian principle of equal opportunity for welfare and defends a pluralistic, decentralized ideal of political society. Libertarianism without Inequality is a book which everyone interested in political theory should read.

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Michael Otsuka - Libertarianism without Inequality (2003).pdf

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Nikki Giovanni - The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovann i (2008).jpg

For the first time, the collected prose of national treasure Nikki Giovanni
Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet
Nominated for the National Book Award, this is a journey -- both private and public -- through the trials and triumphs of 1960s America.
Sacred Cows ... And Other Edibles
Winner of the Ohioana Library Award, these fresh and wryly humorous essays explore some of America's lofty institutions and the poet's pivotal life experiences.

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Owen Wister, James A. Butler - Romney, And Other N ew Works About Philadelphia (2001).jpg

Newly discovered fragment of an unpublished novel about Philadelphia by Owen Wister, author of The Virginian.
Owen Wister is known to most Americans as the creator of the heroic cowboy in The Virginian (1902). Despite his success as a Western novelist, Wister’s failure to write about his native city of Philadelphia has been lamented by many for the loss of a literary "might-have-been." If only, sighed Wister’s contemporary Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1914, the novelist could understand that Philadelphia was as good a subject as the Wild West. Hence the surprise when James Butler uncovered a substantial fragment of a Philadelphia novel, which Wister intended to call Romney. Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.
Even in its incomplete state—nearly fifty thousand words—Romney is Wister’s longest piece of fiction after The Virginian and Lady Baltimore. Writing at the express command of his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister set Romney in Philadelphia (called Monopolis in the novel) during the 1880s, when, as he saw it, the city was passing from the old to a new order. The hero of the story, Romney, is a man of "no social position" who nonetheless rises to the top because he has superior ability. It is thus a novel about the possibilities for meaningful social change in a democracy. Although, alas, the story breaks off before the birth of Romney, Wister gives us much to savor in the existing thirteen chapters. We are treated to delightful scenes at the Bryn Mawr train station, the Bellevue Hotel, and Independence Square, which yield brilliant insights into life on the Main Line, the power of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the insidious effects of political corruption.
Wister’s acute analysis in Romney of what differentiates Philadelphia and Boston upper classes is remarkably similar to, but anticipates by more than half a century, the classic study by E. Digby Baltzell in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979). Like Baltzell, Wister analyzes the urban aristocracy of Boston and Philadelphia, finding in Boston a Puritan drive for achievement and civic service but in Philadelphia a Quaker preference for toleration and moderation, all too often leading to acquiescence and stagnation.
Romney is undoubtedly the best fictional portrayal of "Gilded Age" Philadelphia, brilliantly capturing Wister’s vision of old-money, aristocratic society gasping its last before the onrushing vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. It is a novel of manners that does for Philadelphia what Edith Wharton and John Marquand have done for New York and Boston.

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Owen Wister, James A. Butler - Romney, And Other N ew Works About Philadelphia (2001).pdf

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Rick Huhn - The Sizzler, George Sisler, Baseball's Forgotten Great (2004).jpg

"Gorgeous George" Sisler, a left-handed first baseman, began his major-league baseball career in 1915 with the St. Louis Browns. During his sixteen years in the majors, he played with such baseball luminaries as Ty Cobb (who once called Sisler "the nearest thing to a perfect ballplayer"), Babe Ruth, and Rogers Hornsby. During his illustrious career he was a .340 hitter, twice achieving the rare feat of hitting more than .400. His 257 hits in 1920 is still the record for the "modern" era. Now in The Sizzler, this "legendary player without a legend" gets the treatment he deserves. Rick Huhn presents the story of one of baseball's least appreciated players and studies why his status became so diminished. Huhn argues that the answer lies somewhere amid the tenor of Sisler's times, his own character and demeanor, the kinds of individuals who are chosen as our sports heroes, and the complex definition of fame itself.

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Rick Huhn - The Sizzler, George Sisler, Baseball's Forgotten Great (2004).pdf

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Ulrich Boser - The Gardner Heist, The True Story o f the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft (2009).jpg

One museum, two thieves, and the Boston underworld—the story behind the lost Gardner masterpieces and the art detective who swore to get them back
Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads, hundreds of interviews, and a $5-million reward, not a single painting has been recovered. Worth a total of $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become the Holy Grail of the art world and one of the nation's most extraordinary unsolved mysteries.
Art detective Harold Smith worked on the theft for years, and after his death, reporter Ulrich Boser inherited his case files. Traveling deep into the art underworld, Boser explores Smith's unfinished leads and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including the brilliant rock 'n' roll art thief; the golden-boy gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse; the deadly mobster James "Whitey" Bulger; and the Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, who stipulated in her will that nothing should ever be changed in her museum, a provision followed so closely that the empty frames of the stolen works still hang on the walls. Boser eventually cracks one of the biggest mysteries of the case and uncovers the identities of the men who robbed the museum nearly two decades ago. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves.

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David Womersley - Liberty And American Experience In The Eighteenth Century (2006).jpg

Written by some of today's premiere scholars of American history, "Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century" examines some of the central themes and ideologies central to the formation of the United States. David Womersley's introduction includes a discussion of Edmund Burke's theories on property rights and government, setting the foundation for the various themes of liberty found in this volume. In "Of Liberty and the Colonies: A Case Study of Constitutional Conflict in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British American Empire", Jack Greene examines other forms of government and uses those examples to argue that the founding was not the conservative process that many have previously supported. Robert Ferguson explores the roles of law and religion in the formation of a free and liberal society in "The Dialectic of Liberty: Law and Religion in Revolutionary America". In "Religious Conscience and Original Sin: An Exploration of America's Protestant Foundations", Barry Shain supports Ferguson's contention that religion had a profound impact on the outlook of the colonists. John Danford, in "Riches Valuable at All Times and to All Men: Hume and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Commerce and Liberty", examines the spiritual context of the Founders in regard to the Enlightenment, arguing that the Founders preferred known ways of governance and economics to untried and untested theory. "Moral Sense Theory and the Appeal to Natural Rights in the American Founding" by R G Frey suggests that there are conflicting viewpoints between moral sense theory and the idea of natural rights in the founding period. David Wootton presents an opposing view of the Founders in "Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: Checks and Balances and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism". He suggests that the ideas formed in the Enlightenment were seized upon by the Founders and that the result was a much more progressive system than could have been predicted. In "Scottish Thought and the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson's Response to Richard Price", Ronald Hamowy discusses the consequences of the colonial conflict and pays tribute to the intellectual force of American affairs. Lance Banning examines the divisions in thought among the revolutionaries regarding the nature of liberty and the manner in which liberty was to be preserved in "Federalism, Constitutionalism, and Republican Liberty: The First Constructions of the Constitution". In "Is There a James Madison Problem?", Gordon Wood presents the disparity in Madison's political thought from the 1780s to the 1790s. "Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century" provides an examination of various facets of the Founders' lives and thoughts, as well as their times, to help readers understand the events that went into their country's creation.

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David Womersley - Liberty And American Experience In The Eighteenth Century (2006).pdf

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Steve Mannheim - Walt Disney and the Quest for Com munity (2993).jpg

During the final months of his life, Walt Disney was consumed with the world-wide problems of cities. His development concept at the time of his death on December 15th, 1966 would be his team’s conceptual response to the ills of the inner cities and the sprawl of the megalopolis: the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" or, as it became known, EPCOT.
This beautifully written, instantly engrossing volume focuses on the original concept of EPCOT, which was conceived by Disney as an experimental community of about 20,000 people on the Disney World property in central Florida. With its radial plan, 50-acre town center enclosed by a dome, themed international shopping area, greenbelt, high-density apartments, satellite communities, monorail and underground roads, the original EPCOT plan is reminiscent of post-war Stockholm and the British New Towns, as well as today's transit-oriented development theory.
Unfortunately, Disney himself did not live long enough to witness the realization of his "model city." However, EPCOT's evolution into projects such as the EPCOT Center and the town of Celebration displays a remarkable commitment by the Disney organization to the original EPCOT philosophy, one which continues to have relevance in the fields of planning and development.

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George A. Gonzalez - The Politics of Air Pollution , Urban Growth, Ecological Modernization, and Symb olic Inclusion (2005).jpg

USA Books1 - George A. Gonzalez - The Politics of Air Pollution, U...Ecological Modernization, and Symbolic Inclusion 2005.jpg

Who has been at the political forefront of clean air policy development in the United States? In The Politics of Air Pollution, George A. Gonzalez argues that the answer is neither the federal government, nor environmental groups, but rather locally oriented economic elites in conjunction with state and local governments. These local growth coalitions, composed of mostly large landholders, land developers, and the owners of regional media and utility firms, support clean air policies insofar as they contribute to the creation of a positive investment climate and, in turn, bring about greater profits through increased land values and an expanded local consumer base.

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George A. Gonzalez - The Politics of Air Pollution , Urban Growth, Ecological Modernization, and Symb olic Inclusion (2005).pdf

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Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock - Taking South Park Serio usly (2008).jpg

Collection of scholarly essays on the wildly popular Comedy Central show.

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Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock - Taking South Park Serio usly (2008).pdf

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Sabine Haenni - The Immigrant Scene, Ethnic Amusem ents in New York, 1880-1920 (2008).jpg

Yiddish melodramas about the tribulations of immigration. German plays about alpine tourism. Italian vaudeville performances. Rubbernecking tours of Chinatown. In the New York City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these seemingly disparate leisure activities played similar roles: mediating the vast cultural, demographic, and social changes that were sweeping the nation’s largest city.
In The Immigrant Scene, Sabine Haenni reveals how theaters in New York created ethnic entertainment that shaped the culture of the United States in the early twentieth century. Considering the relationship between leisure and mass culture, The Immigrant Scene develops a new picture of the metropolis in which the movement of people, objects, and images on-screen and in the street helped residents negotiate the complexities of modern times.
In analyzing how communities engaged with immigrant theaters and the nascent film culture in New York City, Haenni traces the ways in which performance and cinema provided virtual mobility—ways of navigating the socially complex metropolis—and influenced national ideas of immigration, culture, and diversity in surprising and lasting ways.

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Sabine Haenni - The Immigrant Scene, Ethnic Amusem ents in New York, 1880-1920 (2008).pdf

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Davis W. Houck, Matthew A. Grindy - Emmett Till an d the Mississippi Press (2008).jpg

Employing never-before-used historical materials, the authors of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press reveal how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journalists reacted.
Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editorialized on its protagonists. Within days the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such complex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence.
Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press provides a careful examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial s conclusion as reported by the state s newspapers. The book closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta.

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Davis W. Houck, Matthew A. Grindy - Emmett Till an d the Mississippi Press (2008).pdf

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Matthew Kennedy - Joan Blondell, A Life between Ta kes ( 2007).jpg

Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes is the first major biography of the effervescent, scene-stealing actress (1906-1979) who conquered motion pictures, vaudeville, Broadway, summer stock, television, and radio.
Born the child of itinerant vaudevillians, she was on stage by age three. With her casual sex appeal, distinctive cello voice, megawatt smile, luminous saucer eyes, and flawless timing, she came into widespread fame in Warner Bros. musicals and comedies of the 1930s, including Blonde Crazy, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade.
Frequent co-star to James Cagney, Clark Gable, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart, friend to Judy Garland, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis, and wife of Dick Powell and Mike Todd, Joan Blondell was a true Hollywood insider. By the time of her death, she had made nearly 100 films in a career that spanned over fifty years.
Privately, she was unerringly loving and generous, while her life was touched by financial, medical, and emotional upheavals. Meticulously researched, expertly weaving the public and private, and featuring numerous interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes traces the changing face of Twentieth Century American entertainment through the career of this extraordinary actress.

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