This diary is one of the most unusual produced during the Civil War because it contains very little about military life. Early in the war Van Buskirk abandoned his regiment, working as a schoolmaster, farm hand, and casual laborer. He wrote of the suffering civilians endured at the hands of contending armies. But he also found time to chronicle his fascination with handsome young lads he encountered during his life as a deserter--unwittingly providing modern readers an illuminating glimpse of class differences and sexual mores. Naval, social and sexual historians, in particular, will find much valuable source material.

About the Author
B.R. Burg is a professor of history at Arizona State University and has written extensively on the sexuality among seafarers and the sexual abuse of children.

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Philip Van Buskirk, B. R. Burg - Rebel at Large - The Diary of Confederate Deserter Philip Van Buski rk (2009).pdf

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Greg H. Williams - The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793-1813, A History and Comprehensive R ecord of Merchant Marine Losses (2005).jpg

USA Books - Greg H. Williams - The French Assault on American Ship...d Comprehensive Record of Merchant Marine Losses 2005.jpg

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, France was plagued by war and crop failures and was desperately in need of supplies. Legally and illegally, French privateers and cruisers took cargo from merchant vessels of every nation, perhaps the United States more than any other. At least 6,479 U.S. claims involving more than 2,300 vessels were filed and these claims give a close approximation of American goods lost to the French. The three main sections of this reference book present a comprehensive accounting of the losses (arranged by ship), descriptions of court cases involving important questions of law, and the disposition of claims. Also included are a glossary, a list of geographical locations mentioned in the text, and an overview of relevant acts of Congress, proclamations, treaties, and foreign decrees.

About the Author
Greg H. Williams served four years in the Navy, two of them at sea, and was one of 27 volunteer crew members in 1994 who sailed the SS Jeremiah O'Brien from San Francisco to Europe for the 50th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion. He lives near Noti, Oregon.

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Greg H. Williams - The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793-1813, A History and Comprehensive R ecord of Merchant Marine Losses (2005).pdf

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Donald J. Young - The Battle of Bataa, A Complete History (2009).jpg

Fought with obsolete and discarded equipment by an army made up of mostly untrained Filipinos, the Battle of Bataan has truly become the "forgotten battle" of World War II despite the fact that it represents the single largest surrender in American and Filipino military history. This book provides a complete history of the battle by also looking at the events which led up to the fall of Bataan. It begins with an overview of the Philippine, American, and Japanese forces which fought on Bataan, followed by chapters looking at the military buildup, the counterattack in the II Corps and the withdrawal from Abucay, the Japanese invasion, the Battle for the Points, the Battle of the Pockets, and, finally, the surrender and death march. The book contains dozens of period and modern photographs and several maps.

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Donald J. Young - The Battle of Bataa, A Complete History (2009).pdf

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David Schoenbrod - Saving Our Environment from Wa shington, How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Respons ibility, and Shortchanges the People (2005).jpg

USA Books - David Schoenbrod - Saving Our Environment from Washin...hirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People 2005.jpg

Congress empowered the Environmental Protection Agency on the theory that only a national agency that is insulated from accountability to voters could produce the scientifically grounded pollution rules needed to save a careless public from its own filth. In this provocative book, David Schoenbrod explains how his experience as an environmental advocate brought him to this startling realization: letting EPA dictate to the nation is a mistake. Through a series of gripping and illuminating anecdotes from his own career, the author reveals the EPA to be an agency that, under Democrats and Republicans alike, delays good rules, imposes bad ones, and is so big, muscle-bound, and remote that it does unnecessary damage to our society. EPA stays in power, he says, because it enables elected legislators to evade responsibility by hiding behind appointed bureaucrats. The best environmental rules—those that have done the most good—have come when Congress had to take responsibility or from states and localities rather than the EPA. With the passion of an authentic environmentalist, Schoenbrod makes a sensible plea for “bottom-up” environmental protection now. The responsibility for pollution control belongs not in agencies but in legislatures, and usually not at the federal level but rather closer to home.

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David Schoenbrod - Saving Our Environment from Wa shington, How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Respons ibility, and Shortchanges the People (2005).pdf

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Peter J. Kastor - The Nation's Crucible, The Louis iana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004).jpg

In 1803 the United States purchased Louisiana from France. This seemingly simple acquisition brought with it an enormous new territory as well as the country's first large population of nonnaturalized Americans--Native Americans, African Americans, and Francophone residents. What would become of those people dominated national affairs in the years that followed. This book chronicles that contentious period from 1803 to 1821, years during which people proposed numerous visions of the future for Louisiana and the United States. The Louisiana Purchase proved to be the crucible of American nationhood, Peter Kastor argues. The incorporation of Louisiana was among the most important tasks for a generation of federal policymakers. It also transformed the way people defined what it meant to be an American.

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Peter J. Kastor - The Nation's Crucible, The Louis iana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004).pdf

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Jim Taylor Ph.D. - Your Children Are Under Attack (2005).jpg

Your children are under attack. This assault is not coming from terrorists within or outside our borders. It is not coming from disturbed people in our communities.
This onslaught is coming from our own American popular culture: * Media violence and sexuality (e.g., video games, television, movies) instead of compassion * Bad behavior by professional athletes (e.g., Kobe Bryant, Terrell Owens) instead of respect * Celebrity-driven media (e.g., E!, the Osbournes) instead of substance * Physical attractiveness (e.g., cosmetics, plastic surgery) instead of character * Corporate corruption and greed (e.g., Enron, Adelphia) instead of integrity * Materialism (e.g., advertising, fashion, electronics) instead of meaning * Childhood obesity (e.g., fast food, soft drinks, candy) instead of health * Pressure to win in youth sports (e.g., over-involved parents, traveling teams) instead of fun.
Popular culture used to reflect the values of America. Now it has become a voracious beast of materialism, celebrity and excess that shapes those values to meet its own greedy needs. Popular culture can no longer be trusted to act in your children’s best interests and communicate healthy, life-affirming values.
With the information and tools you learn from Your Children Are Under Attack, you will again have the power to protect your children from American popular culture and ensure that your children grow up to become positive, strong, safe and caring people.

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Jim Taylor Ph.D. - Your Children Are Under Attack (2005).pdf

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Mary Ann Hallenborg - New York Tenants' Rights (20 03).jpg

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Mary Ann Hallenborg - New York Tenants' Rights (20 03).pdf

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Ronald G. Ehrenberg - Tuition Rising, Why College Costs So Much (2000).jpg

What makes Tuition Rising so valuable and so much fun is its combination of facts, analysis, and administrative war stories. So, for instance, the importance to a college of national rankings, like U.S. News and World Report, is supported by careful econometric analysis (kept in the background, as are all technical jargon and argument), put under a microscope to understand the reasons for their often-quirky rankings, and then followed into Cornell's business school to see how 'managing to the rankings'--the collegiate version of 'teaching to the test'--can make sensible university-wide administration very difficult.
--Gordon Winston, Professor of Economics, Williams College

Why is college so expensive? Ronald Ehrenberg has an answer. The short version: Elite universities want to excel at everything they do, and excellence is expensive. The complete answer would fill a book. In fact, it has. Ehrenberg's Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much exposes the forces that drive up tuition and reveals how hard it is for administrators to slow the ascent. (Cornell Magazine )

[Ehrenberg] argues that colleges are risk-averse and slow to react to market pressures, traits that serve to keep tuition high. Another factor affecting tuition in recent years, Ehrenberg writes, is that colleges have felt pressure to follow other professions in which salaries are rising in return for greater productivity. 'Faculty productivity tends not to increase over time,' he says. 'If you want to give faculty salary increases, you have to generate outside revenue or raise tuition. And universities have not been good at generating outside revenue.'
--Andrew Brownstein (Chronicle of Higher Education )

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Ronald G. Ehrenberg - Tuition Rising, Why College Costs So Much (2000).pdf

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Kelly Gallagher - Readicide, How Schools Are Killi ng Reading and What You Can Do About It (2009).jpg

The systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools. Reading is dying in our schools. Educators are familiar with many of the factors that have contributed to the decline—poverty, second-language issues, and the ever-expanding choices of electronic entertainment. In this provocative new book, Kelly Gallagher suggests, however, that it is time to recognize a new and significant contributor to the death of reading: our schools. In Readicide, Kelly argues that American schools are actively (though unwittingly) furthering the decline of reading. Specifically, he contends that the standard instructional practices used in most schools are killing reading by:
· valuing the development of test-takers over the development of lifelong readers;
· mandating breadth over depth in instruction;
· requiring students to read difficult texts without proper instructional support;
· insisting that students focus solely on academic texts;
· drowning great books with sticky notes, double-entry journals, and marginalia;
· ignoring the importance of developing recreational reading; and
· losing sight of authentic instruction in the shadow of political pressures. Kelly doesn’t settle for only identifying the problems. Readicide provides teachers, literacy coaches, and administrators with specific steps to reverse the downward spiral in reading—steps that will help prevent the loss of another generation of readers.

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Kelly Gallagher - Readicide, How Schools Are Killi ng Reading and What You Can Do About It (2009).pdf

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Frances Larson - An Infinity of Things, How Sir He nry Wellcome Collected the World (2009).jpg

Richly illustrated throughout, including 8 pages of color plates, An Infinity of Things tells the story of the greatest private collection ever made, and the life of the man behind it. American-born Henry Wellcome made his millions as one of the world's first pharmaceutical entrepreneurs. Drawing on his massive wealth, he planned a great museum filled with treasures from all corners of the globe, charting the history of human health from prehistory to the present day. Demonstrating what can happen when a collector's aspirations are left unconstrained by wealth, Frances Larson explores Wellcome's life through his possessions, revealing the many tensions in his character: between his talents as a businessman and his desire for scholarly recognition; his curiosity and his perfectionism; and his philanthropic aspirations and his drive for personal glory. During the opening decades of the twentieth century he acquired a collection so large that later generations of staff took to describing its contents by the ton. But Wellcome's museum was never finished, and his collection was still stored in vast warehouses when he died, unseen and incomplete.

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A. G. Roebel - Ethnographies and Exchanges, Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early Nort h America (2008).jpg

USA Books - A. G. Roebel - Ethnographies and Exchanges, Native Ame... Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America 2008.jpg

Early Europeans settling in America would never have survived without the help of Native American groups. Though histories of early America acknowledge this today, that has not always been the case, and even today much work needs to be done to appreciate more fully the nature of the interactions between the settlers and the First Peoples and to hear the impressions of, and exchanges between, these two groups. We also have much to learn about Native Americans as people their cultures, their languages, their views of the world, and their religious beliefs and about their impressions of the early settlers. One avenue to recovering the history of these relations examines early records that sought to understand the First Peoples scientifically. Missionaries were among those who chronicled the exchange between early settlers and Native Americans.

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A. G. Roebel - Ethnographies and Exchanges, Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early Nort h America (2008).pdf

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Andrew Delbanco - The Real American Dream, A Medit ation on Hope (1999).jpg

A close and passionate reader of American literature, Delbanco (The Death of Satan, etc.) believes that contemporary American culture has lost its once vital sense of the transcendent. This book is, with very little alteration, a transcript of Delbanco's William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, which he delivered at Harvard in 1998. "We live in an age of unprecedented wealth," he writes, "but in the realm of narrative and symbol, we are deprived." In three sectionsA"God," "Nation" and "Self"ADelbanco sketches a broad history of American narrative and symbolic meaning, the nexus of ideas and stories "by which Americans have tried to save themselves from the melancholy that threatens all reflective beings." According to this scheme, from Puritan times through the early 19th century, the dominant idea was God. Sometime around the Civil War, the idea of the nation became the transcendent value. The third part of the book becomes a lament as Delbanco posits that, since roughly the 1960s, "hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone." Delbanco acknowledges that his conceit presents a "too neat division of American history into two phases of coherent belief followed by a third phase of incoherent and nervous waiting." But his profoundly insightful readings of William Bradford, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln and other American writers, stretching from early colonial times to the present, should succeed in prodding readers to think deeply about how the idea of the nation

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Andrew Delbanco - The Real American Dream, A Medit ation on Hope (1999).pdf

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Roger Bootle - The Trouble with Markets, Saving Ca pitalism from Itself (2009).jpg

In the spirit of John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Krugman, Roger Bootle challenges readers to look at the deep causes of the current financial crisis, what went wrong and how to fix it. Bootle blames the crisis not on bankers and regulators, but on the idea that financial markets can be left alone. The book examines a host of critical questions, including what investors should do with their money in turbulent times.

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Margret Kentgens-Craig - The Bauhaus and America, First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999).jpg

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.
After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America's early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.

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Margret Kentgens-Craig - The Bauhaus and America, First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999).pdf

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Julian Ashe - The All American Book of Lists, A un ique compendium of bizarre and fascinating facts f rom Alabama to Wyoming (2009).jpg

USA Books - Julian Ashe - The All American Book of Lists, A unique...rre and fascinating facts from Alabama to Wyoming 2009.jpg

The marvellous, extraordinary and bizarre facts behind our great country are laid out in this captivating book, guaranteed to delight all Americans and everyone with an interest in the United States. Thought-provoking, funny, and thoroughly fascinating, The American Book of Lists takes readers through the wonderful world that stretches from the East coast to the West. It is the perfect memento, souvenir and tribute to this varied and fascinating country.

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Julian Ashe - The All American Book of Lists, A un ique compendium of bizarre and fascinating facts f rom Alabama to Wyoming (2009).pdf

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Marilyn Hegarty - Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, an d Patriotutes, The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (2007).jpg

USA Books - Marilyn Hegarty - Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Pa...gulation of Female Sexuality during World War II 2007.jpg

Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes offers a counter-narrative to the story of Rosie the Riveter, the icon of female patriotism during World War II. With her fist defiantly raised and her shirtsleeves rolled up, Rosie was an asexual warrior on the homefront. But thousands of women supported the war effort not by working in heavy war industries, but by providing morale-boosting services to soldiers, ranging from dances at officers’ clubs to more blatant forms of sexual services, such as prostitution. While the de-sexualized Rosie was celebrated, women who used their sexuality — either intentionally or inadvertently — to serve their country encountered a contradictory morals campaign launched by government and social agencies, which shunned female sexuality while valorizing masculine sexuality. This double-standard was accurately summed up by a government official who dubbed these women “patriotutes”: part patriot, part prostitute. Marilyn E. Hegarty explores the dual discourse on female sexual mobilization that emerged during the war, in which agencies of the state both required and feared women’s support for, and participation in, wartime services. The equation of female desire with deviance simultaneously over-sexualized and desexualized many women, who nonetheless made choices that not only challenged gender ideology but defended their right to remain in public spaces.

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