This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.

Through fast-moving events and unforgettable characters, historian Thomas M. Truxes brings eighteenth-century New York and the Atlantic world to life. There are spies, street riots, exotic settings, informers, courtroom dramas, interdictions on the high seas, ruthless businessmen, political intrigues, and more. The author traces each phase of the city’s trade with the enemy and details the frustrations that affected both British officials and independent-minded New Yorkers. The first book to focus on New York City during the Seven Years’ War, Defying Empire reveals the important role the city played in hastening the colonies’ march toward revolution.

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Thomas M. Truxes - Defying Empire, Trading with th e Enemy in Colonial New York (2008).pdf

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Richard Aloysius Blake - Street Smart, The New Yor k Of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, And Lee (2005).jpg

New York has appeared in more movies than Michael Caine, and as a result of overfamiliarity, the City poses a problem for critics and casual moviegoers alike. Audiences mistake the New York image of skyscrapers and glitter for the real thing, but in fact the City is a network of small villages, each with its unique personality. Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York’s neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city’s diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impression on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee’s imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages—from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America’s most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.

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Anthony Bianco - Wal-Mart, The Bully of Bentonvill e, How the High Cost of Everyday Low Prices is Hur ting America (2007).jpg

USA Books - Anthony Bianco - Wal-Mart, The Bully of Bentonville, H...gh Cost of Everyday Low Prices is Hurting America 2007.jpg

The largest company in the world by far, Wal-Mart takes in revenues in excess of $280 billion, employs 1.4 million American workers, and controls a large share of the business done by almost every U.S. consumer-product company. More than 138 million shoppers visit one of its 5,300 stores each week. But Wal-Mart’s “everyday low prices” come at a tremendous cost to workers, suppliers, competitors, and consumers.
The Bully of Bentonville exposes the zealous, secretive, small-town mentality that rules Wal-Mart and chronicles its far-reaching consequences. In a gripping, richly textured narrative, Anthony Bianco shows how Wal-Mart has driven down retail wages throughout the country, how their substandard pay and meager health-care policy and anti-union mentality have led to a large scales exploitation of workers, why their aggressive expansion inevitably puts locally owned stores out of business, and how their pricing policies have forced suppliers to outsource work and move thousands of jobs overseas.
Based on interviews with Wal-Mart employees, managers, executives, competitors, suppliers, customers, and community leaders, The Bully of Bentonville brings the truths about Wal-Mart into sharp focus.

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Richard H. Robbins - Global Problems and the Cultu re of Capitalism, 2nd Edition (2001).jpg

This award-winning book explores one of the most successful cultures and society the world has ever seen-capitalism. From its European roots more than 500 years ago to the present, the book examines the problems of capitalism's expansion, inequality, environmental destruction, and social unrest. Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism provides the reader with the anthropological, economic, and historical framework to understand the origins of global problems, why globalization and the global expansion of the culture of capitalism has generated protest and resistance, and the steps that are necessary to solve global problems. As one reviewer said, "This is a book that will doubtless create debate and controversy, but its topic should be pondered seriously by all who consider themselves citizens of our world society today." For anyone interested in global issues and international affairs.

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Richard H. Robbins - Global Problems and the Cultu re of Capitalism, 2nd Edition (2001).pdf

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Simon Johnson, James Kwak - 13 Bankers, The Wall S treet Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (20 10).jpg

Even after the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, America is still beset by the depredations of an oligarchy that is now bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—which together control assets amounting, astonishingly, to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, these financial institutions (now more emphatically “too big to fail”) continue to hold the global economy hostage, threatening yet another financial meltdown with their excessive risk-taking and toxic “business as usual” practices. How did this come to be—and what is to be done? These are the central concerns of 13 Bankers, a brilliant, historically informed account of our troubled political economy.

In 13 Bankers, Simon Johnson—one of the most prominent and frequently cited economists in America (former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT, and author of the controversial “The Quiet Coup” in The Atlantic)—and James Kwak give a wide-ranging, meticulous, and bracing account of recent U.S. financial history within the context of previous showdowns between American democracy and Big Finance: from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They convincingly show why our future is imperiled by the ideology of finance (finance is good, unregulated finance is better, unfettered finance run amok is best) and by Wall Street’s political control of government policy pertaining to it.

As the authors insist, the choice that America faces is stark: whether Washington will accede to the vested interests of an unbridled financial sector that runs up profits in good years and dumps its losses on taxpayers in lean years, or reform through stringent regulation the banking system as first and foremost an engine of economic growth. To restore health and balance to our economy, Johnson and Kwak make a radical yet feasible and focused proposal: reconfigure the megabanks to be “small enough to fail.”

Lucid, authoritative, crucial for its timeliness, 13 Bankers is certain to be one of the most discussed and debated books of 2010.

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Jane Junn, Kerry L. Haynie - New Race Politics in America, Understanding Minority and Immigrant Poli tics (2008).jpg

USA Books - Jane Junn, Kerry L. Haynie - New Race Politics in Amer...ca, Understanding Minority and Immigrant Politics 2008.jpg

Foreign migration to the United State is dramatically altering the demographic profile of the American electorate. Nearly a third of all Americans are of non-white and non-European descent. Latinos and Hispanics have recently eclipsed African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. Between 1990 and 2000, Asians doubled the size of their population to more than 4 percent of Americans. Though immigration has altered the racial and ethnic composition of every state in the nation, surprisingly little is known about the consequences of this new heterogeneity for American politics. This book explores the impact and political consequences of immigration. After considering the organizations that mobilize new citizens to politics, the authors examine the political psychology of group consciousness for political mobilization. Finally, they consider the emerging patterns and choices of new voters.

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John Clifford Green, Mark J. Rozell, Clyde Wilcox - The Values Campaign, The Christian Right And the 2004 Elections (2006).jpg

USA Books - John Clifford Green, Mark J. Rozell, Clyde Wilcox - Th...aign, The Christian Right And the 2004 Elections 2006.jpg

The Christian Right never ceases to surprise professional observers of American politics. With the Christian coalition in disarray, many expected that the movement would play less of a role in the 2004 elections. But when exit polls reported that "moral values" were the most commonly cited reason for presidential vote choice, pundits immediately proclaimed the importance of the "values vote." Yet the role of the Christian Right, of statewide referenda on same-sex marriage, and of religious mobilization remained the subject of debate. "The Values Campaign: The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections" reaches well beyond the instant analyses of the post-election period to provide an assessment of the role of the religious right in 2004. The contributors to this volume are among the leading scholars of religion and politics in the United States, and many have contributed for over a decade to ongoing discussions of the role played by the religious right in national elections. The authors consider national mobilization and issues, and also explore the role of the Christian Right in specific states. Their evaluations contend that the "values campaign" was not an aberration but a consistent pattern of national politics, and that moral traditionalism will likely continue to be a significant factor in future elections. A timely study of the 2004 elections, this volume will appeal to scholars and observers of electoral politics, state politics, and religion and politics.

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Jonathan Zimmerman - Small Wonder, The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009).jpg

The little red schoolhouse has all but disappeared in the United States, but its importance in national memory remains unshakable. This engaging book examines the history of the one-room school and how successive generations of Americans have remembered—and just as often misremembered—this powerful national icon.

Drawing on a rich range of sources, from firsthand accounts to poems, songs, and films, Jonathan Zimmerman traces the evolution of attitudes toward the little red schoolhouse from the late nineteenth century to the present day. At times it was celebrated as a symbol of lost rural virtues or America’s democratic heritage; at others it was denounced as the epitome of inefficiency and substandard academics. And because the one-room school has been a useful emblem for liberal, conservative, and other agendas, the truth of its history has sometimes been stretched. Yet the idyllic image of the schoolhouse still unites Americans. For more than a century, it has embodied the nation’s best aspirations and—especially—its continuing faith in education itself.

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Jonathan Zimmerman - Small Wonder, The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009).pdf

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Ken Wells - The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayo us, Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina (2008).jpg

USA Books - Ken Wells - The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous, ...e a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina 2008.jpg

Author and journalist Wells, a native of Louisiana bayou country, was a Wall Street Journal reporter when Katrina struck in 2005. Arguably more horrific than the scene in New Orleans were the bayou parishes, particularly St. Bernard and Plaquemines, where the eye of Katrina came on land. After hitching a National Guard helicopter to St. Bernard Parish, Wells meets Ricky Robin, whose ancestors had been hunting, fishing, and pirating the bayous for over 250 years. Robin became Wells's guide, relating harrowing stories of the storm, as even the parish president and his staff were trapped, their emergency vehicles flooded or washed away entirely; the first outside help to reach them was not FEMA, but a squad of Canadian Mounted Police. Wells also examines the disaster's "unnatural causes," like the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal dredged from Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico, which provided an inland channel for the Category 5 storm surge driven by Katrina. Afterwards, the failed levee system prevented filthy, polluted water from draining back to the ocean, turning much of the bayou into a cesspool. Vivid prose, first-hand testimony and solid, heartbreaking reportage make this disaster debrief hard to put down, and worth the attention of every U.S. citizen.

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Ken Wells - The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayo us, Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina (2008).pdf

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Sanford Kanter, Sandra Quinn-Musgrove - America's Royalty (1995).jpg

The only book to present in any depth information on the children of our first families, this work is enjoyable as well as informative.

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Sanford Kanter, Sandra Quinn-Musgrove - America's Royalty (1995).pdf

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Kathleen M. Brown - Foul Bodies, Cleanliness in Ea rly America (2009).jpg

A nation’s standards of private cleanliness reveal much about its ideals of civilization, fears of disease, and expectations for public life, says Kathleen Brown in this unusual cultural history. Starting with the shake-up of European practices that coincided with Atlantic expansion, she traces attitudes toward “dirt” through the mid-nineteenth century, demonstrating that cleanliness—and the lack of it—had moral, religious, and often sexual implications. Brown contends that care of the body is not simply a private matter but an expression of cultural ideals that reflect the fundamental values of a society.

The book explores early America’s evolving perceptions of cleanliness, along the way analyzing the connections between changing public expectations for appearance and manners, and the backstage work of grooming, laundering, and housecleaning performed by women. Brown provides an intimate view of cleanliness practices and how such forces as urbanization, immigration, market conditions, and concerns about social mobility influenced them. Broad in historical scope and imaginative in its insights, this book expands the topic of cleanliness to encompass much larger issues, including religion, health, gender, class, and race relations.

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Kathleen M. Brown - Foul Bodies, Cleanliness in Ea rly America (2009).pdf

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Myron J. Smith - Baseball Bibliography, 4 Volume S et, 2nd edition (2005).jpg

Baseball, more than any other sport, inspires widespread research and publication. The literature of baseball is vast and continues to grow at a fantastic pace. This second edition of Myron Smith’s acclaimed Baseball Bibliography contains some 57,000 entries, bringing the 1986 book up to date with the tremendous body of baseball literature published in the last 20 years. The resulting four-volume set is the largest and most comprehensive non-electronic, non-database, print bibliography on any major American sport. Citations include books and monographs; scholarly papers; government documents; doctoral dissertations; masters’ theses; poetry and fiction; novels; pro team yearbooks; college and professional All-Star Game and World Series programs; commercially produced yearbooks; and periodical and journal articles, including the first-ever complete analysis of the major diamond-oriented contents of Baseball Magazine, Baseball Digest, Sport, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN: The Magazine, among others. Data include biographical references to 3,904 major league players, and an appendix offers a full list of the 1,712 journals, periodicals and magazines cited. The work is fully indexed by subject and name. The book is published as a set of four volumes.

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Myron J. Smith - Baseball Bibliography, 4 Volume S et, 2nd edition (2005).pdf

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Jacob Neufeld - The Development of Ballistic Missi les in the United States Air Force, 1945-1960 (199 0).jpg

Following World War II, the onset of nuclear weapons, long-range jet bombers, and ballistic missiles radically changed American foreign policy and military strategy. The United States Air Force, led by men of far-sighted vision and uncommon dedication, accepted the challenge of organizing and leading a massive research and development effort to build ballistic missiles.

In the quarter of the century since, these weapons have constituted one of the tree legs of the strategic triad, the basis of America's strategy of deterring nuclear war, yet they have received less attention from the public and within the Air Force than the more glamorous manned bombers of the Strategic Air Command or the missile-launching submarines of the U.S. Navy. This volume attempts to correct the imbalance by telling the story of development of Air Force ballistic Missiles.

It concentrates on the first generation of ballistic missiles: the intercontinental Atlas and Titan, and the intermediate range Thor. Although the effort to develop rockets has a longer history than commonly assumed, the modern history spans the relatively short era from 1945 to 1960. During this brief interval, missiles advanced from drawing board to alert status, where the next generation now remains poised to deter war.

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Jacob Neufeld - The Development of Ballistic Missi les in the United States Air Force, 1945-1960 (199 0).pdf

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William Bonner, Lila Rajiva - Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politic (2007).jpg

USA Books - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva - Mobs, Messiahs, and Mark...iving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politic 2007.jpg

Bestselling author Bill Bonner has long been a maverick observer of the financial and political world, sharpening his sardonic wit, in particular, on the vagaries of the investing public. Market booms and busts, tulip manias and dotcom bubbles, venture capitalists and vulture funds, he lets you know, are best explained not by dry statistics and obscure theories but by the metaphors and analogies of literature.

Now, in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Bonner and freelance journalist Lila Rajiva use literary economics to offer broader insights into mass behavior and its devastating effects on society. Why is it, they ask, that perfectly sane and responsible individuals can get together, and by some bizarre alchemy turn into an irrational mob? What makes them trust charlatans and demagogues who manipulate their worst instincts? Why do they abandon good sense, good behavior and good taste when an empty slogan is waved in front of them. Why is the road to hell paved with so many sterling intentions? Why is there a fool on every corner and a knave in every public office?

In attempting an answer, the authors weave a light-hearted journey through history, politics and finance to show group think at work in an improbable array of instances, from medieval crusades to the architectural follies of hedge-fund managers. Their journey takes them ultimately to the desk of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and to a cautionary tale of the current bubble economy. They warn that the gush of credit let loose by Alan Greenspan and multiplied by the sophisticated number games of Wall Street whizzes is fraught with perils for the unwary. Boom without end, pronounces The Street. But Bonner and Rajiva are more cynical. When the higher math and the greater greed come together, watch out below!

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets ends by giving concrete advice on how readers can avoid what the authors call the public spectacle of modern finance, and become, instead, private investors - knowing their own mind and following their own intuitions. The authors have no gimmicks to offer here - but instead give a better understanding of the dynamics of market behavior, allowing prudent investors to protect themselves from the fads and follies of the investment markets.

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William Bonner, Lila Rajiva - Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politic (2007).pdf

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Barry D. Watts - The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctr ine, The Problem of Friction in War (2001).jpg

The fundamental thinking of US aviators about the air weapon, be it airplane or nuclear missile, has long been beset by certain shortcomings . First and foremost, as professional soldiers we have failed to nurture a comprehensive understanding of war as a total phenomenon. A century and a half after his death, Clausewitz remains virtually unique in having tried to construct an overarching theory of war based on evidence, and few American soldiers have studied Clausewitz deeply enough to appreciate the motivation for this endeavor, much less the premises from which it proceeded . Second, as professional airmen we continue to rely upon air power ideas that were conceived in circumstances vastly different from those we face today. Not only were our basic ideas about the air weapon developed during an era in which air power and the quest for autonomy from the US Army had become crusades, but they have gone virtually unchanged right down to the present day.

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Barry D. Watts - The Foundations of U.S. Air Doctr ine, The Problem of Friction in War (2001).pdf

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David Farber - Taken Hostage, The Iran Hostage Cri sis and America's First Encounter with Radical Isl am (2004).jpg

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans captive. Thus began the Iran Hostage Crisis, an affair that captivated the American public for 444 days and marked America's first confrontation with the forces of radical Islam. Using hundreds of recently declassified government documents, historian David Farber takes the first in-depth look at the Hostage Crisis, examining its lessons for America's contemporary war on terrorism.
Unlike other histories of the subject, Farber's vivid and fast-paced narrative looks beyond the day-to-day circumstances of the crisis, using the events leading up to the ordeal as a means for understanding it. The book paints a portrait of the 1970s in the United States as an era of failed expectations in a nation plagued by uncertainty and anxiety. It reveals an American government ill prepared for the fall of the Shah of Iran and unable to reckon with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his militant Islamic followers.
Farber's account is filled with fresh insights regarding the central players in the crisis: Khomeini emerges as an astute strategist, single-mindedly dedicated to creating an Islamic state. The Americans' student-captors appear as less-than-organized youths, having prepared for only a symbolic sit-in with just a three-day supply of food. ABC news chief Roone Arledge, newly installed and eager for ratings, is cited as a critical catalyst in elevating the hostages to cause célèbre status.
Throughout the book there emerge eerie parallels to the current terrorism crisis. Then as now, Farber demonstrates, politicians failed to grasp the depth of anger that Islamic fundamentalists harbored toward the United States, and Americans dismissed threats from terrorist groups as the crusades of ineffectual madmen.
Taken Hostage is a timely and revealing history of America's first engagement with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, one that provides a chilling reminder that the past is only prologue.

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Leroy Thompson - U.S. Special Operations Forces in the Cold War (2006).jpg

This valuable addition to the G.I. Series traces the evolution of Special Operations forces during the chilliest aspects of the Cold War, from Korea to the dissolution of the USSR. Leroy Thompson documents the various airborne, infantry, recon, and amphibious sectors as they grow in response to conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Latin America, and to the increasing threat of terrorism on the home front. More than 100 rare and unusual photographs cover the uniforms, equipment, and insignia of formations such as Ranger battalions, LRRP units, Special Forces groups (airborne), USAF combat control teams, pararescuemen and PJs, Navy Seals, Marine Recons, and Delta.

About the Author
Leroy Thompson is a respected author and has a number of publications to his credit, including "The Hostage Rescue Manual" (1853674729) and "America's Commandos" (1853674583) in the G.I. Series. He lives in Manchester, Miss

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Leroy Thompson - U.S. Special Operations Forces in the Cold War (2006).pdf

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Nick Ritchie - US Nuclear Weapons Policy since the Cold War, Russians, 'Rogues' and Domestic Divisio n (2008).jpg

This book offers an in-depth examination of America's nuclear weapons policy since the end of the Cold War. Exploring nuclear forces structure, arms control, regional planning and the weapons production complex, this volume identifies competing sets of ideas about nuclear weapons and domestic political constraints on major shifts in policy. It provides a detailed analysis of the complex evolution of policy, the factors affecting policy formulation, competing understandings of the role of nuclear weapons in US national security discourse, and the likely future direction of policy.This book argues that US policy has not proceeded in a linear, rational and internally consistent direction, and that it entered a second post-Cold War phase under President George W. Bush. However, domestic political processes and lack of political and military interest in America's nuclear forces have constrained major shifts in nuclear weapons policy. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, strategic studies and IR in general.

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