Newly discovered fragment of an unpublished novel about Philadelphia by Owen Wister, author of The Virginian.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 Here, published for the first time, is the complete fragment of Romney together with two of his other unpublished Philadelphia works.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 Books - George A. Gonzalez - The Politics of Air Pollution, Ur... 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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Matthew Kennedy - Joan Blondell, A Life between Ta kes (2007).pdf

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William E. Smith - Restoring Honor to Public Schoo ls, A Teacher's Vision for American Education (200 8).jpg

Restoring Honor to Public Schools: A Teacher's Vision for American Education, draws upon its author's thirty years of experience to offer an insider's look at teaching and learning, providing thoughtful and achievable recommendations for honoring teachers and teaching and restoring civility and intelligence to our nation's discourse about education.

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William E. Smith - Restoring Honor to Public Schoo ls, A Teacher's Vision for American Education (200 8).pdf

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Jeffrey J. Noonan - The Guitar in America, Victori an Era to Jazz Age (2008).jpg

The Guitar in America offers a history of the instrument from America's late Victorian period to the jazz age. The opening chapter traces the guitar's use in this country from the Colonial era up to the 1880s. The narrative continues with America's BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and commercial movement dedicated to introducing these instruments into America's elite musical establishments.
Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement's heyday, tracing the guitar's transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments. Chapters consider the BMG movement's impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes towards women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America's musicians.
This volume opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, the book considers the BMG community within America's larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country's uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce.

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Jeffrey J. Noonan - The Guitar in America, Victori an Era to Jazz Age (2008).pdf

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David Banisar - Government Secrecy, Decisions With out Democracy (2007).jpg

Excessive secrecy is the enemy of public accountability and democratic governance. Unfortunately, it is becoming standard operating procedure for many government officials. Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent insistence that his office is not subject to secrecy regulations that apply to the executive branch is just the latest evidence of a systematic campaign to keep information about government activities out of the hands of the American public.
Freedoms of Information laws are grounded in the recognition that knowledge about the government’s actions is the necessary first step in oversight and accountability. Most Americans recognize the need to safeguard national security information from improper public disclosures that would damage the national interest. But national security has become a blanket excuse to withhold information from the public as well as from Congress, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The National Security Archive has documented widespread agency mismanagement and obstruction which lead to delays as long as 17 years in responding to public Freedom of Information Act requests. Only one in four agencies is complying with the Electronic Freedom of Information Act a decade after it passed.
Of course, the right to know is also undermined by the release of information that is inaccurate or misleading.
At the federal level, politics increasingly trumps sound science: reports on key environmental issues are altered by political appointees; information about HIV/AIDS is manipulated to promote a particular ideological viewpoint; and federal employees are muzzled from sharing their expertise.
The misuse of secrecy and the manipulation of science and other information undermine the public’s right to know and the health of our democracy. And they threaten the health of the public as well: a fire at a chemical plant situated near a neighborhood could pose a serious threat to residents’ health, but it is difficult for individuals to learn the most basic information about hazards to which their families may be exposed. The preface to this report, written by Republican Robert Barr and Democrat John Podesta, reflects that the importance of the public’s right to know is not a partisan issue; it is a fundamentally American issue.
Over the years, regardless of the political party in charge, our three organizations have challenged excessive government secrecy and offered ideas to protect the public’s right to know. For example, in 1987, People for the American Way, OMB Watch, the Benton Foundation, and the Advocacy Institute launched a public education campaign to draw attention to the ways in which government was withholding information from the public. One element of that campaign was the publication by People for the American Way of Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy, a primer on secrecy that serves as the model for this publication.

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David Banisar - Government Secrecy, Decisions With out Democracy (2007) 52p 9789998157996 9998157994.pdf

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Emma Goldman - Living My Life (2006).jpg

Anarchist, journalist, drama critic, advocate of birth control and free love, Emma Goldman was the most famous—and notorious—woman in the early twentieth century. This abridged version of her two-volume autobiography takes her from her birthplace in czarist Russia to the socialist enclaves of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Against a dramatic backdrop of political argument, show trials, imprisonment, and tempestuous romances, Goldman chronicles the epoch that she helped shape: the reform movements of the Progressive Era, the early years of and later disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolshevik experiment, and more. Sounding a call still heard today, Living My Life is a riveting account of political ferment and ideological turbulence.

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Emma Goldman - Living My Life (2006).pdf

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Emma Goldman - My Further Disillusionment In Russi a (2006).jpg

My Further Disillusionment in Russia is a 1924 non-fiction book by Emma Goldman, her continuation of My Disillusionment in Russia, the original publication of which the last twelve chapters were entirely missing, including the Afterword.

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Emma Goldman - My Further Disillusionment In Russi a (2006).pdf

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Anthony Flint - This Land, The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (2006).jpg

Despite a modest revival in city living, Americans are spreading out more than ever -- into "exurbs" and "boomburbs" miles from anywhere, in big houses in big subdivisions. We cling to the notion of safer neighborhoods and better schools, but what we get, argues Anthony Flint, is long commutes, crushing gas prices and higher taxes -- and a landscape of strip malls and office parks badly in need of a makeover.
This Land tells the untold story of development in America -- how the landscape is shaped by a furious clash of political, economic and cultural forces. It is the story of burgeoning anti-sprawl movement, a 1960s-style revolution of New Urbanism, smart growth, and green building. And it is the story of landowners fighting back on the basis of property rights, with free-market libertarians, homebuilders, road pavers, financial institutions, and even the lawn-care industry right alongside them.
The subdivisions and extra-wide roadways are encroaching into the wetlands of Florida, ranchlands in Texas, and the desert outside Phoenix and Las Vegas. But with up to 120 million more people in the country by 2050, will the spread-out pattern cave in on itself? Could Americans embrace a new approach to development if it made sense for them?
A veteran journalist who covered planning, development, and housing for the Boston Globe for sixteen years and a visiting scholar in 2005 at the Harvard Design School, Flint reveals some surprising truths about the future and how we live in This Land.

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David F. Prindle - The Paradox of Democratic Capit alism, Politics and Economics in American Thought (2006).jpg

A truly interdisciplinary enterprise, The Paradox of Democratic Capitalism examines the interplay of ideas about politics, economics, and law in American society from the pre-revolutionary era to the eve of the September 11 attacks. David F. Prindle argues that while the United States was founded on liberalism, there is constant tension between two ideals of the liberal tradition: capitalism and democracy.
Tracing the rise of natural law doctrine from neoclassical economics, Prindle examines the influence of economic development in late medieval society on the emergence of classical liberalism in early America and likens that influence to the impact of orthodox economics on contemporary American society.
Prindle also evaluates political, economic, and legal ideas through the lens of his own beliefs. He warns against the emerging extremes of liberal ideology in contemporary American politics, where the right's definition of capitalism excludes interference from democratic publics and the left's definition of democracy excludes a market-based economy.

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