Search results for ""university press of kansas""

The Jayhawk, the University of Kansas’s legendary and unique mascot, has represented the university for more than one hundred years and is recognizable around the world. In The Jayhawk, Rebecca Ozier Schulte tells the story of the beloved mythical bird’s origins and historical significance, role as mascot, relationship with student life and representation in campus publications, popularity in advertising and as merchandise, and much more. Multiple students and artists drew the Jayhawk in the twentieth century, including the long-legged Jayhawk drawn by Daniel Henry “Hank” Maloy in 1912 and the militaristic, fighting Jayhawk of 1941 created by Dr. Eugene “Yogi” Williams. Six different Jayhawks from 1912 to 1946 have been identified by the university as the most historically significant, but there are many, many more that have been discovered in hundreds of pieces of ephemera, newspaper accounts, student scrapbooks, and university publications, all housed in the University Archives.No other source brings the Jayhawk’s fascinating history together. This stunning book is highlighted by more than 300 photographs, most of them in color and many of items rarely seen by the public. The Jayhawk is sure to delight fans, alumni, and anyone who’s ever chanted “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU!”

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Lawrence Goldstone’s Not White Enough is a comprehensive examination of a century of bigotry against Chinese and Japanese Americans that culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. United States: the landmark ruling that upheld the illegal imprisonment of more than 100,000 innocent men, women, and children who were falsely accused of endangering national security during World War II. This book is the first to trace the full arc of prejudice against Asian Americans that made internment inevitable and serves as a legal and political history of anti-Asian racism, beginning with the California gold rush and ending with the infamous Korematsu decision.Not White Enough demonstrates how the lines between law and politics blurred for decades to enable a two-tiered system of justice where constitutional guarantees of equality under law were no longer upheld for all people. Goldstone examines each of the key Supreme Court decisions—including Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa, and Thind—as not simply jurisprudence but as expressions of political will. He chronicles the political history of racism that made Japanese internment almost inevitable, highlighting the key roles San Francisco mayors James D. Phelan and Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, California attorney general Ulysses Webb, and future Chief Justice Earl Warren played in instigating some of the most egregious anti-Asian legislation, all for political convenience and gain. Goldstone also illustrates Chinese and Japanese immigrants’ courage and determination to carve out a place for themselves in a country that did everything it could to reject them.

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For more than half a century, James Hamilton has been an active participant and an inside observer of some of the most consequential moments in modern US history. He has been involved in investigations concerning Watergate, the Kennedy assassination, “Debategate,” the Keating Five, the Clinton impeachment, Vince Foster’s suicide, the Valerie Plame affair, Benghazi, and the Major League Baseball steroids scandal. He argued against Brett Kavanaugh in front of the Supreme Court and won. He has tales to tell of power brokers, players, and politicians who helped steer the course of the country.Written in clear, incisive prose with self-deprecating humor, Advocate discusses the travails of prominent politicians and other well-known individuals, focusing particularly on high-profile congressional and other investigations. Credited with developing the modern system for vetting Democratic vice-presidential candidates, Hamilton recounts his extensive vetting of vice-presidential, cabinet, and Supreme Court candidates—including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This book concludes with practical, sage advice for young lawyers entering the profession.Much more than a memoir from a seasoned lawyer, Advocate is a richly detailed history of some of the most sensational and controversial events in Washington politics over the past fifty years. By sharing information and insights known only to him, Hamilton fills in the gaps of historical events while advising the public on lessons that can be learned from the past. Anyone interested in the uniquely American intermingling of law and politics will find this an engaging read.

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On June 14, 1863, US Major General John Adams Dix received the following directive from General-in-Chief Henry Halleck: “All your available force should be concentrated to threaten Richmond, by seizing and destroying their railroad bridges over the South and North Anna Rivers, and do them all the damage possible.” With General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia marching toward Gettysburg and only a limited Confederate force guarding Richmond, Halleck sensed a rare opportunity for the Union cause.In response, Dix, who had lived a life of considerable public service but possessed limited military experience, gathered his men and began a slow advance. During the ensuing operation, 20,000 US troops would threaten the Confederate capital and seek to cut the railroads supplying Lee’s army in Pennsylvania. To some, Dix’s campaign presented a tremendous chance for US forces to strike hard at Richmond while Lee was off in Pennsylvania. To others, it was an unnecessary lark that tied up units deployed more effectively in protecting Washington and confronting Lee's men on Northern soil.In this study, Newsome offers an in-depth look into this little-known Federal advance against Richmond during the Gettysburg Campaign. The first full-length examination of Dix’s venture, this volume not only delves into the military operations at the time, but also addresses concurrent issues related to diplomacy, US war policy, and the involvement of enslaved people in the Federal offensive.Gettysburg’s Southern Front also points to the often-unrecognized value in examining events of the US Civil War beyond the larger famous battles and campaigns. At the time, political and military leaders on both sides carefully weighed Dix’s efforts at Richmond and understood that the offensive had the potential to generate dramatic results. In fact, this piece of the Gettysburg Campaign may rank as one of the Union war effort’s more compelling lost opportunities in the East, one that could have changed the course of the conflict.

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Upon the 2018 death of George H. W. Bush, pundits and politicians mourned the passing of an exemplar of the statesmanship and bipartisan ethos of an earlier day. The judgment, though sound, would have shocked observers of the 1988 election that put Bush in the White House. From a scholar who played a small role in that long-ago election, After Reagan provides an eye-opening look at a presidential campaign that few suspected marked the end of an era—or the rise of forces roiling our political landscape today.Willie Horton. “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Michael Dukakis in a helmet, in a tank. Though these are remembered as pivotal moments in a presidential campaign recalled as whisker-close, in his book John J. Pitney Jr. reminds us how large Bush’s victory actually was, and how much it depended on social conditions and political dynamics that would change dramatically in the coming years. A turning point toward the post-Cold War, hyper-partisan, culturally divided politics of our time, the election of 1988 took place in a very different world. After Reagan captures a moment when campaigns were funded from the federal Treasury; when Republicans had a lock on the presidency and Democrats controlled Congress; when the electorate was considerably whiter and less educated than today’s; and when the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union—and the subsequent rise of globalization—were virtually unimaginable.Many books tell us that elections have consequences. Pitney’s explains how campaigns are consequential—the 1988 campaign more than most. From the perspective of the last thirty years, After Reagan shows us the 1988 election in a truly new light—one that, in turn, reveals the links between the campaign of 1988 and the politics of the twenty-first century.

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It was the third week of May 1863, and after seven months and six attempts, Ulysses S. Grant was finally at the doorstep of Vicksburg. What followed was a series of attacks and maneuvers against the last major section of the Mississippi River controlled by the Confederacy - and one of the most important operations of the Civil War. Grant intended to end the campaign quickly by assault, but the stalwart defense of Vicksburg's garrison changed his plans. The Union Assaults at Vicksburg is the first comprehensive account of this quick attempt to capture Vicksburg, which proved critical to the Union's ultimate success and Grant's eventual solidification as one of the most significant military commanders in American history.Establishing a day-to-day - and occasionally minute-to-minute - timeline for this crucial week, military historian Timothy B. Smith invites readers to follow the Vicksburg assaults as they unfold. His finely detailed account reaches from the offices of statesmen and politicians to the field of battle, with exacting analysis and insight that ranges from the highest level of planning and command to the combat experience of the common soldier. As closely observed and vividly described as each assault is, Smith's book also puts the sum of these battles into the larger context of the Vicksburg campaign, as well as the entire war. His deeply informed, in-depth work thus provides the first full view of a key but little-studied turning point in the fortunes of the Union army in the West, Ulysses S. Grant, and the United States of America.

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On 1 January 1943, with German Sixth Army about to be destroyed in the Stalingrad pocket, the Stavka (Soviet High Command) launched Operation Don, a strategic offensive conducted by the Red Army’s Southern, Southwestern, and Trans-Caucasus Fronts aimed at demolishing German defenses in the southern Soviet Union and decisively turning the war’s tide. Critical to this ambitious operation was the mission assigned to the Trans-Caucasus Front—to isolate and destroy German Army Group A in the northern Caucasus region in cooperation with the Southern Front. Operation Don’s Left Wing is the first detailed study of this crucial but virtually overlooked Soviet military operation.Because of the priority given to the assault on German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Red Army Southwestern, Southern, and Trans-Caucasus Fronts were compelled to execute their missions with scant resources—inadequate logistical support, personnel replacements, and reinforcing equipment. Based on newly released Red Army archival operational documents, David M. Glantz constructs a clear, comprehensive account of how, despite such constraints, the Trans-Caucasus Front nonetheless pursued and severely damaged German First Panzer Army—although it failed to encircle and destroy the panzer army as hoped. These documents include candid daily orders and reports, periodic situation maps, a full array of ever-changing operational plans, and strength and casualty reports prepared by Soviet formations and units throughout the offensive. With unprecedented access to these documents, Glantz delves into previously forbidden topics such as unit strengths and losses and the foibles and attitudes of commanders at every level.Following Glantz’s Operation Don’s Main Attack, this documentary study expands our understanding of a pivotal operation in the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany and a decisive moment in the history of World War II on the Eastern Front.

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With its high plains, rolling hills, and river valleys, Kansas is home to a surprisingly diverse flora, and among these riches are the 166 species of trees, shrubs, and woody vines identified, described, and pictured in this handy guide. Expanding and updating H. A. Stephens's 1969 classic, this handbook offers full descriptions of woody plant species found in the wild in Kansas, 138 of them native. County-level distribution maps show where species have been documented, and nearly 1,000 color photographs highlight morphological features—habit, bark, leaves, flowers, and fruit.Updated scientific nomenclature reflects our current understanding of the taxonomy of woody species, as well as the most recent findings in studies of DNA, macro- and micromorphology, cytology, ecology, and phenology. With keys for identification, additional notes about nearly 100 other native and nonnative woody plants found in the state, and a comprehensive glossary defining all technical botanical terms, this user-friendly handbook should be the go-to guide for plant enthusiasts and professionals alike.

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The mythmakers of US expansion have expressed “manifest destiny” in many different ways—and so have its many discontents. A multidisciplinary study that delves into these contrasts and contradictions, Inventing Destiny offers a broad yet penetrating cultural history of nineteenth-century US territorial acquisition—a history that gives voice to the underrepresented actors who significantly complicated US narratives of empire, from Native Americans and Anglo-American women to anti- and non-national expansionists.The Contributors—established and emerging scholars from history, American studies, literary studies, art history, and religious studies—make use of source materials and techniques as various as artwork, religion, geospatial analysis, interior colonialism, and storytelling alongside fresh readings of traditional historical texts. In doing so, they seek to illuminate the complexities rather than simplify, to transgress borders rather than redraw them, and to amplify the under-told stories rather than repeat the old ones. Their work identifies and explores the obscure—or obscured—fictions of expansion, seeking a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of culture creation and recognizing those who resisted US territorial aggrandizement.In sum, Inventing Destiny demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of the multiple rationales, critiques, interventions, and contingencies of nineteenth-century US expansion.

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Federal judges, legal scholars, pundits, and reporters frequently describe the Supreme Court as the final word on the meaning of the Constitution. The historical record presents an entirely different picture. A close and revealing reading of that record, from 1789 to the present day, Reconsidering Judicial Finality reminds us of the “unalterable fact,” as Chief Justice Rehnquist once remarked, “that our judicial system, like the human beings who administer it, is fallible.” And a Court inevitably prone to miscalculation and error, as this book clearly demonstrates, cannot have the incontrovertible last word on constitutional questions.In this deeply researched, sharply reasoned work of legal myth-busting, constitutional scholar Louis Fisher explains how constitutional disputes are Settled by all three branches of government, and by the general public, with the Supreme Court often playing a secondary role. The Court’s decisions have, of course, been challenged and reversed in numerous cases—involving slavery, civil rights, child labor legislation, Japanese internment during World War II, abortion, and religious liberty. What Fisher shows us on a case-by-case basis is how the elected branches, scholars, and American public regularly press policies contrary to Court rulings—and regularly prevail, although the process might sometimes take decades. From the common misreading of Marbury v. Madison, to the mistaken understanding of the Supreme Court as the trusted guardian of individual rights, to the questionable assumptions of the Court's decision in Citizens United, Fisher’s work charts the distance and the difference between the Court as the ultimate arbiter in constitutional matters and the judgment of history.The verdict of Reconsidering Judicial Finality is clear: to treat the Supreme Court’s nine justices as democracy’s last hope or as dangerous activists undermining democracy is to vest them with undue significance. The Constitution belongs to all three branches of government—and, finally, to the American people.

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Does the president represent the entire nation? Or does he speak for core partisans and narrow constituencies? The Federalist Papers, the electoral college, history and circumstance from the founders’ time to our own: all factor in theories of presidential representation, again and again lending themselves to different interpretations. This back-and-forth, Jeremy D. Bailey contends, is a critical feature, not a flaw, in American politics. Arriving at a moment of great debate over the nature and exercise of executive power, Bailey’s history offers an invaluable, remarkably relevant analysis of the intellectual underpinnings, political usefulness, and practical merits of contending ideas of presidential representation over time.Among scholars, a common reading of political history holds that the founders, aware of the dangers of demagogy, created a singularly powerful presidency that would serve as a check on the people’s representatives in Congress; then, this theory goes, the Progressives, impatient with such a counter-majoritarian approach, reformed the presidency to better reflect the people’s will—and, they reasoned, advance the public good. The Idea of Presidential Representation challenges this consensus, offering a more nuanced view of the shifting relationship between the president and the American people. Implicit in this pattern, Bailey tells us, is another equivocal relationship—that between law and public opinion as the basis for executive power in republican constitutionalism. Tracing these contending ideas from the framers time to our own, his book provides both a history and a much-needed context for our understanding of presidential representation in light of the modern presidency. In The Idea of Presidential Representation Bailey gives us a new and useful sense of an enduring and necessary feature of our politics.

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In 1980, an antique print dealer was going broke from competition and lack of supply. Then he discovered all the high-quality antique prints he could ever want—for free—on the shelves of American university libraries.Torn from Their Bindings tells the story of Robert Kindred’s brazen theft of irreplaceable antique illustrations and maps from academic libraries across the country—a crime spree that left the irredeemable wreck of countless rare books in its wake. Travis McDade’s account of Kindred’s pillaging and the paper trail that led to his capture unfolds with the drama of a true crime page-turner—whose pages are replete with the particulars of archival treasures, library science, print preservation, and the history bound up in the cultural heritage plundered by Kindred. Along the way we observe the nature and methods of the book thief, defacer of priceless volumes and purveyor of purloined pages, and acquire a wealth of knowledge about the antique prints he favored.Told by an author devoted to the preservation of books, the story is propelled by an informed curiosity and just outrage from its suspenseful opening to its ironic conclusion—the ultimate fate of Kindred’s spoils.

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Winner of the Arthur Goodzeit AwardThroughout 1943, the German army, heirs to a military tradition that demanded and perfected relentless offensive operations, succumbed to the realities of its own overreach and the demands of twentieth-century industrialized warfare. In his new study, prizewinning author Robert Citino chronicles this weakening Wehrmacht, now fighting desperately on the defensive but still remarkably dangerous and lethal. Drawing on his impeccable command of German-language sources, Citino offers fresh, vivid, and detailed treatments of key campaigns during this fateful year: the Allied landings in North Africa, General von Manstein's great counterstroke in front of Kharkov, the German attack at Kasserine Pass, the titanic engagement of tanks and men at Kursk, the Soviet counteroffensives at Orel and Belgorod, and the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy. Through these events, he reveals how a military establishment historically configured for violent aggression reacted when the tables were turned; how German commanders viewed their newest enemy, the U.S. Army, after brutal fighting against the British and Soviets; and why, despite their superiority in materiel and manpower, the Allies were unable to turn 1943 into a much more decisive year. Applying the keen operational analysis for which he is so highly regarded, Citino contends that virtually every flawed German decision-to defend Tunis, to attack at Kursk and then call off the offensive, to abandon Sicily, to defend Italy high up the boot and then down much closer to the toe-had strong supporters among the army's officer corps. He looks at all of these engagements from the perspective of each combatant nation and also establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt the synergistic interplay between the fronts. Ultimately, Citino produces a grim portrait of the German officer corps, dispelling the longstanding tendency to blame every bad decision on Hitler. Filled with telling vignettes and sharp portraits and copiously documented, The Wehrmacht Retreats is a dramatic and fast-paced narrative that will engage military historians and general readers alike.

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When I became secretary of defense,"" Ashton B. Carter said when announcing that the Pentagon would open all combat jobs to women, ""I made a commitment to building America's force of the future. In the twenty-first century, that requires drawing strength from the broadest possible pool of talent.""That ""pool of talent""-and how our nation's civilian and military leaders have tried to fill it-is what Military Service and American Democracy is all about. William Taylor chronicles and analyzes the long and ever-changing history of that often contentious and controversial effort, from the initiation of America's first peacetime draft just before our entry into World War II up to present-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A history that runs from the selective service era of 1940-1973 through the era of the All-Volunteer Force of 1973 to the present, his book details the many personnel policies that have shaped, controlled, and defined American military service over the last eight decades. Exploring the individual and group identities excluded from official personnel policy over time-African Americans, women, and gays among others-Taylor shows how military service has been an arena of contested citizenship, one in which American values have been tested, questioned, and ultimately redefined. Yet, we see how this process has resulted in greater inclusiveness and expanded opportunities in military service while encouraging and shaping similar changes in broader society.In the distinction between compulsory and voluntary military service, Taylor also examines the dichotomy between national security and individual liberty-two competing ideals that have existed in constant tension throughout the history of American democracy.

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Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the greatest commentators on the American political tradition, viewed it through the lens of two related ideas: liberty and equality. These ideas, so eloquently framed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, have remained inextricably and uniquely conjoined in American political thought: equality isunderstood as the equal possession of natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By considering American reflections on these core ideas over time—in relation to constitutional principles, religion, and race—this volume provides an especially insightful perspective for understanding our political tradition. The book is at once a summary of American history told through ideas and an inquiry into the ideas of liberty and equality through the lens of American history. To a remarkable extent, American politics has always been thoughtful and American thought has always been political. In these pages, we see how some of our greatest minds have grappled with the issues of liberty and equality: Tocqueville and Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton as Publius in The Federalist, James Madison, George Washington, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln debating Stephen Douglas, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In essays responding to these primary sources, some of today’s finest scholars take up topics critical to the American experiment in liberal democracy—political inequality, federalism, the separation of powers, the relationship between religion and politics, the history of slavery and the legacy of racism. Together these essays and sources help to clarify the character, content, and significance of American political thought taken as awhole. They illuminate and continue the conversation that has animated and distinguished the American political tradition from the beginning—and, hopefully, better equip readers to contribute to that conversation.

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One could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese,"" said Winston Churchill of North Burma, deeming it ""the most forbidding fighting country imaginable."" But it was here that the fledgling Office of Strategic Services conducted its most successful combat operations of World War II. Troy Sacquety takes readers into Burma's steaming jungles in the first book to fully cover the exploits and contributions of the OSS's Detachment 101 against the Japanese Imperial Army. Functioning independently of both the U.S. Army and OSS headquarters-and with no operational or organizational model to follow-Detachment 101 was given enormous latitude in terms of developing its mission and methods. It grew from an inexperienced and poorly supported group of 21 agents training on the job in a lethal environment to a powerful force encompassing 10,000 guerrillas (spread across as many as 8 battalions), 60 long-range agents, and 400 short-range agents. By April 1945, it remained the only American ground force in North Burma while simultaneously conducting daring amphibious operations that contributed to the liberation of Rangoon. With unrivaled access to OSS archives, Sacquety vividly recounts the 101's story with a depth of detail that makes the disease-plagued and monsoon-drenched Burmese theater come unnervingly alive. He describes the organizational evolution of Detachment 101 and shows how the unit's flexibility allowed it to evolve to meet the changing battlefield environment. He depicts the Detachment's two sharply contrasting field commanders: headstrong Colonel Carl Eifler, who pushed the unit beyond its capabilities, and the more measured Colonel William Peers, who molded it into a model special operations force. He also highlights the heroic Kachin tribesmen, fierce fighters defending their tribal homeland and instrumental in acclimating the Americans to terrain, weather, and cultures in ways that were vital to the success of the Detachment's operations. While veterans' memoirs have discussed OSS activities in Burma, this is the first book to describe in detail how it achieved its success-portraying an operational unit that can be seen as a prototype for today's Special Forces. Featuring dozens of illustrations, The OSS in Burma rescues from oblivion the daring exploits of a key intelligence and military unit in Japan's defeat in World War II and tells a gripping story that will satisfy scholars and buffs alike.

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George C. Marshall once called him “the brains of the army.” And yet General Lesley J. McNair (1883-1944), a man so instrumental to America’s military preparedness and Army modernization, remains little known today, his papers purportedly lost, destroyed by his wife in her grief at his death in Normandy. This book, the product of an abiding interest and painstaking research, restores the general Army Magazine calls one of “Marshall’s forgotten men” to his rightful place in American military history. Because McNair contributed so substantially to America’s war preparedness, this first complete account of his extensive and varied career also leads to a reevaluation of U.S. Army effectiveness during WWII.Born halfway between the Civil War and the dawn of the 20th century, Lesley McNair—“Whitey” by his classmates for his blond hair–graduated 11th of 124 in West Point’s class of 1904 and rose slowly through the ranks like all officers in the early twentieth century. He was 31 when World War I erupted, 34 and a junior officer when American troops prepared to join the fight. It was during this time, and in the interwar period that followed the end of the First World War, that McNair’s considerable influence on Army doctrine and training, equipment development, unit organization, and combined arms fighting methods developed. By looking at the whole of McNair’s career–not just his service in WWII as chief of staff, General Headquarters, 1940-1942, and then as commander, Army Ground Forces, 1942-1944–Calhoun reassesses the evolution and extent of that influence during the war, as well as McNair’s, and the Army’s, wartime performance. This in-depth study tracks the significantly positive impact of McNair’s efforts in several critical areas: advanced officer education; modernization, military innovation, and technological development; the field-testing of doctrine; streamlining and pooling of assets for necessary efficiency; arduous and realistic combat training; combined arms tactics; and an increasingly mechanized and mobile force.Because McNair served primarily in staff roles throughout his career and did not command combat formations during WWII, his contribution has never received the attention given to more public—and publicized—military exploits. In its detail and scope, this first full military biography reveals the unique and valuable perspective McNair’s generalship offers for the serious student of military history and leadership.

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In 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, two young lovers from Caroline County, Virginia, got married. Soon they were hauled out of their bedroom in the middle of the night and taken to jail. Their crime? Loving was white, Jeter was not, and in Virginia--as in twenty-three other states then--interracial marriage was illegal. Their experience reflected that of countless couples across America since colonial times. And in challenging the laws against their marriage, the Lovings closed the book on that very long chapter in the nation's history. Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry tells the story of this couple and the case that forever changed the law of race and marriage in America.The story of the Lovings and the case they took to the Supreme Court involved a community, an extended family, and in particular five main characters--the couple, two young attorneys, and a crusty local judge who twice presided over their case--as well as such key dimensions of political and cultural life as race, gender, religion, law, identity, and family. In Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry, Peter Wallenstein brings these characters and their legal travails to life, and situates them within the wider context--even at the center--of American history. Along the way, he untangles the arbitrary distinctions that long sorted out Americans by racial identity--distinctions that changed over time, varied across space, and could extend the reach of criminal law into the most remote community. In light of the related legal arguments and historical development, moreover, Wallenstein compares interracial and same-sex marriage. A fair amount is known about the saga of the Lovings and the historic court decision that permitted them to be married and remain free. And some of what is known, Wallenstein tells us, is actually true. A detailed, in-depth account of the case, as compelling for its legal and historical insights as for its human drama, this book at long last clarifies the events and the personalities that reconfigured race, marriage, and law in America.

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When George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon's landslide victory buried more than an insurgent campaign. By tracing the transformation of American liberalism and sixties idealism from their political crash in 1972 to muddled centrism of twenty-first century, this book shows what the McGovern insurgency has to teach us.

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When the Cleveland suburb of Euclid first zoned its land in 1922, the Ambler Realty Company was left with a sizable tract it could no longer sell for industrial use - and so the company sued. What emerged was the seminal zoning case in American history, pitting reformers against private property advocates in the Supreme Court and raising the question of whether a municipality could deny property owners the right to use their land however they chose.Reconstructing the case that made zoning a central element in urban planning for cities and towns throughout America, Michael Allan Wolf provides the first book-length study of the Supreme Court's landmark Euclid v. Ambler decision. Wolf describes how the ordinance, and the defense of it, burst onto the national stage and became the focus of litigation before moving all the way to the nation's highest court. He subsequently reveals how and why Justice George Sutherland broke from the Court's conservative bloc to support the urban reform movement eager to protect residential neighborhoods from disturbances created by rapidly expanding commercial, industrial, or multifamily uses of land. Following that decision, America saw the rapid proliferation of zoning ordinances, which greatly increased the power of local government to control and rationalize urban planning.As Wolf attests, many of today's environmental and land use laws might not have been deemed legal had Euclid v. Ambler been decided differently. But he also points out the potential dangers that emerged from the decision, such as its anticompetitive impact on the real estate market, its catalyzing effect on suburban sprawl, and its establishment of a legal basis for excluding minority groups from neighborhoods.Wolf's compelling account makes it clear that Euclid v. Ambler fundamentally altered how we think about the urban landscape, changed the way our cities and suburbs are organized, and left a long shadow over subsequent cases such as the controversial Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London (2005).

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When Grace Anna Goodhue wed Calvin Coolidge in 1905, she thought then that marriage ""has seldom united two people of more vastly different temperaments and tastes."" Warm and vivacious to her husband's dour and taciturn, Grace was to be a contrast to Calvin for years to come. But as Robert Ferrell shows, their marriage ensured her husband's rise to high office.Ferrell focuses on Grace Coolidge's years in the White House, 1923-1929. Although the president did his best to rein her in - even forbidding her to speak on public issues - Grace quickly became one of the most popular and stylish of first ladies. Among the best-dressed women of her time (famously in red), she became the nation's fashion leader. She also opened the White House to the public, sponsored musicales within its walls, and worked on behalf of the deaf and disabled - all despite a less than supportive spouse. Ferrell recounts how she accomplished all of this, finding strength through the years in her Burlington background, her family, and her faith.In this lively book Ferrell provides a perceptive and often moving account of Grace Coolidge. From his insightful portrait of her Vermont roots to a frank assessment of the Coolidges and their sons, he offers a fresh perspective on a much-admired woman who was perhaps her husband's greatest political asset.Ferrell also takes readers inside Grace's strained marriage to the famously taciturn president who kept his wife in the dark about his plans, both political and personal. He offers a much more subtle look at the Coolidges and their relationship in the public eye than we've had, shedding new light on how she managed to deal with his irascible temper - and how the marriage ultimately triumphed over difficulties that Calvin could not have handled alone.Alternately charming and analytic, Ferrell's narrative will leave readers with the real sense of Grace Coolidge as a human being and a contributor to the historical legacy of presidential wives. For she did more than simply enliven a quiet White House - she set the tone for a nation and for first ladies to come.

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When the United States took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam following the Spanish-American War, it was unclear to what degree these islands were actually part of the U.S. and, in particular, whether the Constitution applied fully, or even in part, to their citizens. By looking closely at what became known as the Insular Cases, Bartholomew Sparrow reveals how America resolved to govern these territories. Sparrow follows the Insular Cases from the controversial Downes v. Bidwell in 1901, which concerned tariffs on oranges shipped to New York from Puerto Rico and which introduced the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, to Balzac v. Puerto Rico in 1922, in which the Court decided that Puerto Ricans, although officially U.S. citizens, could be denied trial by jury because Puerto Rico was ""unincorporated."" There were 35 Insular Cases in all, cases stretching across two decades, cases in which the Court ruled on matters as diverse as tariffs, double jeopardy, and the very meaning of U.S. citizenship as it applied to the inhabitants of the offshore territories. Providing a new look at the history and politics of U.S. expansion at the turn of the twentieth century, Sparrow's book also examines the effect the Court's decisions had on the creation of an American empire. It highlights crucial features surrounding the cases - the influence of racism on the justices, the need for naval stations to protect new international trade, and dramatic changes in tariff policy. It also tells how the Court sanctioned the emergence of two kinds of American empire: formal territories whose inhabitants could be U.S. citizens but still be denied full political rights, and an informal empire based on trade, cooperative foreign governments, and U.S. military bases rather than on territorial acquisitions. ""The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire"" reveals how the United States handled its first major episode of globalization and how the Supreme Court, in these cases, crucially redirected the course of American history.

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Federalism - including its meanings and limits - remains one of the most contested principles in constitutional law. To fully understand its importance, we must turn to a landmark decision nearly two centuries old. M'Culloch v. Maryland (1819) is widely regarded as the Supreme Court's most important and influential decision - one that essentially defined the nature and scope of federal authority and its relationship to the states. Mark Killenbeck's sharply insightful study helps us understand why. Killenbeck recounts how the cashier of the Baltimore branch of the Second Bank of the United States refused to pay Maryland's tax on the bank and how that act precipitated a showdown in the Supreme Court, which addressed two questions: whether the U.S. Congress had the authority to establish a national bank and whether Maryland's tax on the bank was barred by the Constitution. In one of Chief Justice, John Marshall's most famous opinions, the Court unanimously answered yes to both, authorizing the federal government to exercise powers not expressly articulated in the Constitution - and setting an alarming precedent for states-rights advocates. The issues at the heart of M'Culloch are as important today as they were then: the nature and scope of federal constitutional authority, the division of authority between federal and state governments, and the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting and applying the Constitution. Situating the case within the protracted debate about the bank and about federal-state relations, the Panic of 1819, the fate of the Second Bank following the Court's momentous decision, and the ever-expanding and increasingly contentious debate over slavery, Killenbeck's book provides a virtual constitutional history of the first fifty years of the nation. As such, it shows that the development of the Constitution as a viable governing document took place over time and that M'Culloch, with its very broad reading of federal power, marked a turning point for the Constitution, the Court, and the nation. As the Court continues to reshape the boundaries of federal power, M'Culloch looms large as a precedent in a debate that has never been fully settled. And as states today grapple with such questions as abortion, gay rights, medical marijuana, or assisted suicide, this book puts that precedent in perspective and offers a firm grasp of its implications for the future.

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Air raid sirens wail, searchlight beams flash across the sky, and the night is aflame with tracer fire and aerial explosions, as Allied bombers and German anti-aircraft units duel in the thundering darkness. Such "cinematic" scenes, played out with increasing frequency as World War II ground to a close, were more than mere stock material for movie melodramas. As Edward Westermann reveals, they point to a key but largely unappreciated aspect of the German war effort that has yet to get its full due.Long the neglected stepchild in studies of World War II air campaigns, German flak or anti-aircraft units have been frequently dismissed by American, British, and German historians (and by veterans of the European air war) as ineffective weapons that wasted valuable material and personnel resources desperately needed elsewhere by the Third Reich. Westermann emphatically disagrees with that view and makes a convincing case for the significant contributions made by the entire range of German anti-aircraft defenses.During the Allied air campaigns against the Third Reich, well over a million tons of bombs were dropped upon the German homeland, killing nearly 300,000 civilians, wounding another 780,000, and destroying more than 3,500,000 industrial and residential structures. Not surprisingly, that aerial Armageddon has inspired countless studies of both the victorious Allied bombing offensive and the ultimately doomed Luftwaffe defense of its own skies. By contrast, flak units have virtually been ignored, despite the fact that they employed more than a million men and women, were responsible for more than half of all Allied aircraft losses, forced Allied bombers to fly far above high-accuracy altitudes, and thus allowed Germany to hold out far longer than it might have otherwise.Westermann's definitive study sheds new light on every facet of the development and organization of this vital defense arm, including its artillery, radar, searchlight, barrage balloon, decoy sites, and command components. Highlighting the convergence of technology, strategy, doctrine, politics, and economics, Flak also provides revealing insights into German strategic thought, Hitler's obsession with micromanaging the war, and the lives of the members of the flak units themselves, including the large number of women, factory workers, and even POWs who participated.

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Visitors to Colorado's famous ski resorts embrace alpine adventures, luxurious amenities, and a glamorous nightlife, all against a backdrop of towering mountains and high-drifted snow. Wherever they go in search of fresh powder, one thing is certain: skiing has become a major part of recreational sport and culture and, in the process, dramatically altered America's social, physical, economic, and imaginative landscapes. Annie Coleman has written the first cultural history of skiing in the United States, telling how this European sport evolved into an American industry combining recreation, tourism, consumption, and wilderness - along with a solid dose of exhilaration and a dash of celebrity. She reveals how the meaning of skiing changed over the twentieth century, how sport and leisure in America came to be about status and style as much as about physical activity, and how modern consumer culture merged the mythic West with real western places. Coleman traces skiing from its Norse roots and Alpine influences through the utility of ski travel in the winter Rockies to the rise of Colorado resorts. Much more than a history of the sport, her work explains how the recreation industry sold the experience of skiing and created mythic mountain landscapes with real problems - and a ski culture that exalts celebrity and status over the physical act of skiing. Along the way, Coleman looks at bums, bunnies, betties, and everyone else who uses the sport to define who they are and how they fit in. Today's skiers are more diverse than they were half a century ago (though chances are they're wealthier), and even snowboarders have joined the very culture they once opposed - reviving places like Aspen through a subversive youth culture gone mainstream. The allure of white powder at high altitudes, manicured ski runs designed to frame picture-perfect views, the illusion of danger - the American skiing experience is all of this and more. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Ski Style puts readers on the slopes - and in the lodges - to show what it's really all about.

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A powerful German counterattack in Normandy in August 1944 might have been one of the Wehrmacht's great shining moments in the Second World War. The odds were certainly in their favour. Determined to drive the Allies back to the English Channel, elements of four combat-hardened panzer divisions faced off against a single American infantry division near the town of Mortain. Instead, the Americans held their ground, enabling the Allied armies to secure the invasion and ultimately liberate France.In a vivid recreation of this pivotal battle—less celebrated than the encounter at the Falaise Pocket but just as decisive—Mark Reardon tells how the 30th Infantry Division held off the German panzer juggernaut, which was designed to drive a wedge between Allied forces. In recounting this showdown, he offers a new perspective on the German defeat in Normandy and a convincing counterpoint to the conventional view of most military analysts that Germany lost the war as a result of Allied materiel superiority or Hitler's strategic meddling.Through vigorous prose laced with compelling anecdotes, Reardon reconstructs the battle from both sides of the firing line to explain why it evolved and ended as it did. He reveals how professional rivalries and lack of accurate battlefield information hampered the efforts of German generals to execute a successful counteroffensive. He also tells how the U.S. Army profited from the bitter lessons of hedgerow fighting to gain superiority in ground manoeuvre, fire support, and the use of airpower, logistics, communications, and reconnaissance in the face of more experienced and better armed opponents.Reardon's riveting tale reveals that Americans GIs could fight as well as their more vaunted opponent, which gave the U.S. Army the confidence it needed to take the war into the enemy's homeland. Equally important, their victory prevented the Germans from retaking strategic points that would have kept the war bottled up in Normandy.Drawing not only on exhaustive research in Anglo-American and German archives but also on first hand accounts by more than two hundred American soldiers, Reardon's detailed reconstruction fills an important gap in the history of World War II combat that has existed for more than half a century.

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Tying together legal, historical, social, political and literary strands to show how the law itself was implicated in the persistence of slavery, this work sheds new light on slavery and Southern history, as it probes the conscience of a troubled jurist incapable of fully transcending his times.

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The Plains Indians found medicinal value in more than 200 species of native prairie plants. Unfortunately, modern American culture has not paid much attention. White settlers did learn a few plant-based remedies from the Indians, and a few prairie plants were prescribed by frontier doctors. A couple dozen prairie species were listed as drugs in the ""US Pharmacopeia"" at one time or another, and one or two, like the Purple Coneflower, found their way into the bottles of patent medicine. But in both the number of species used and the varieties of treatments administered, Indians were far more proficient than white settlers. Their familiarity with the plants of the prairie was comprehensive - they recognized more varieties of some species of prairie plants than scientists do today. Their knowledge was refined and exact enough that they could successfully administer medicinal doses of plants that are poisonous. All of the species used by frontier doctors were used first by Indians. In ""Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie"", ethnobotanist Kelly Kindscher documents the medicinal use of 203 native prairie plants by the Plains Indians. Using information gleaned from archival materials, interviews and fieldwork, Kindscher describes plant-based treatments for ailments ranging from hyperactivity to syphillis, from arthritis to worms. He also explains the use of internal and external medications, smoke treatments, moxa (the burning of a medicinal substance on the skin), and the doctrine of signatures (the belief that the form or characteristics of a plant are signatures of signs that reveal its medicinal uses). He adds information on recent pharmacological findings to further illuminate the medicinal nature of these plants. Kindscher's study encompasses the entire Prairie Bioregion, a one-million-square-mile area bounded by Texas on the south, Canada on the north, the Rocky Mountains on the west and the deciduous forests of Missouri, Indiana and Wisconsin in the east. Along with information on the medicinal uses of prairie plants by the Indians, Kindscher also lists Indian, common and scientific names and describes Anglo folk uses, medical uses, scientific research and cultivation. Descriptions of the plants are supplemented by 44 line drawings and over 100 range maps.

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The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case was the start of a long period of desegregation, but Brown did not give a roadmap for how to achieve this lofty goal—it only provided the destination. In the years that followed, the path toward the fulfillment of this vision for school integration was worked out in the courts through the efforts of the NAACP Legal Defense organization and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice. One of the major cases on this path was Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967).Revolution by Law traces the growth of Lee v. Macon County from a case to desegregate a single school district in rural Alabama to a decision that paved the way for ending state-imposed racial segregation of the schools in the Deep South. Author Brian Landsberg began his career as a young attorney working for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1964, the year after the lawsuit that would lead to the Lee decision was filed.As someone personally involved in the legal struggle for civil rights, Landsberg writes with first-hand knowledge of the case. His carefully researched study of this important case argues that private plaintiffs, the executive branch, the federal courts, and eventually Congress each played important roles in transforming the South from the most segregated to the least segregated region of the United States. The Lee case played a central role in dismantling Alabama's official racial caste system, and the decision became the model both for other statewide school desegregation cases and for cases challenging conditions in prisons and institutions for mentally ill people. Revolution by Law gives readers a deep understanding of the methods used by the federal government to desegregate the schools of the Deep South.

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Republicans today often ask, “What would Reagan do?” The short answer: probably not what they think. Hero of modern-day conservatives, Ronald Reagan was not even conservative enough for some of his most ardent supporters in his own time—and today his practical, often bipartisan approach to politics and policy would likely be deemed apostasy. To try to get a clearer picture of what the real Reagan legacy is, in this book Marcus M. Witcher details conservatives’ frequently tense relationship with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and explores how they created the latter-day Reagan myth.Witcher reminds us that during Reagan’s time in office, conservative critics complained that he had failed to bring about the promised Reagan Revolution—and in 1988 many Republican hopefuls ran well to the right of his policies. Notable among the dissonant acts of his administration: Reagan raised taxes when necessary, passed comprehensive immigration reform, signed a bill that saved Social Security, and worked with adversaries at home and abroad to govern effectively. Even his signature accomplishment—invoked by “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—was highly unpopular with the Conservative Caucus, as evidenced in their newspaper ads comparing the president to Neville Chamberlain: “Appeasement is as Unwise in 1988 as in 1938.”Reagan’s presidential library and museum positioned him above partisan politics, emphasizing his administration’s role in bringing about economic recovery and negotiating an end to the Cold War. How this legacy, as Reagan himself envisioned it, became the more grandiose version fashioned by Republicans after the 1980s tells us much about the late twentieth-century transformation of the GOP—and, as Witcher’s work so deftly shows, the conservative movement as we know it now.

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Winner of the Richard B. Harwell Award, Tennessee History Book Award and the Doughlas Southall Freeman AwardA critical moment in the Civil War, the Battle of Shiloh has been the subject of many books. However, none has told the story of Shiloh as Timothy Smith does in this volume, the first comprehensive history of the two-day battle in April 1862-a battle so fluid and confusing that its true nature has eluded a clear narrative telling until now.Unfolding over April 6th and 7th, the Battle of Shiloh produced the most sprawling and bloody field of combat since the Napoleonic wars, with an outcome that set the Confederacy on the road to defeat. Contrary to previous histories, Smith tells us, the battle was not won or lost on the first day, but rather in the decision-making of the night that followed and in the next day's fighting. Devoting unprecedented attention to the details of that second day, his book shows how the Union's triumph was far less assured, and much harder to achieve, than has been acknowledged. Smith also employs a new organization strategy to clarify the action. By breaking his analysis of both days' fighting into separate phases and sectors, he makes it much easier to grasp what was happening in each combat zone, why it unfolded as it did, and how it related to the broader tactical and operational context of the entire battle.The battlefield's diverse and challenging terrain also comes in for new scrutiny. Through detailed attention to the terrain's major features-most still visible at the Shiloh National Military Park-Smith is able to track their specific and considerable influence on the actions, and their consequences, over those forty-eight hours. The experience of the soldiers finally finds its place here too, as Smith lets us hear, as never before, the voices of the common man, whether combatant or local civilian, caught up in a historic battle for their lives, their land, their honor, and their homes.""We must this day conquer or perish,"" Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston declared on the morning of April 6, 1862. His words proved prophetic, and might serve as an epitaph for the larger war, as we see fully for the first time in this unparalleled and surely definitive history of the Battle of Shiloh.

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Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I. In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime.After a lengthy gestation that started in the late nineteenth century, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I, laying the foundations for the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention. World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability.Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed.

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In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the unilateral secession of a state from the Union was unconstitutional because the Constitution created “an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.” The Court ruled “there was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.” In his iconoclastic work, Peter Radan demonstrates why the Court’s ruling was wrong and why, on the basis of American constitutional law in 1860–1861, the unilateral secessions of the Confederate states were lawful on the grounds that the United States was forged as a “slaveholders’ Union.”Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union addresses two constitutional issues: first, whether the states in 1860 had a right to secede from the Union and second, what significance slavery had in defining the constitutional Union. These two matters came together when the states seceded on the grounds that the system of government they had agreed to—namely, a system of human enslavement—had been violated by the incoming Republican administration. The legitimacy of this secession was anchored, as Radan demonstrates, in the compact theory of the Constitution, which held that because the Constitution was a compact between the member states of the Union, breaches of its fundamental provisions gave affected states the right to unilaterally secede from the Union. In so doing the Confederate states sought to preserve and protect their peculiar institution by forming a more perfect slaveholders’ Union.Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union stands as the first and only systematic analysis of the legal arguments mounted for and against secession in 1860–1861 and reshapes how we understand the Civil War and, consequently, the history of the United States more generally.

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Choice Outstanding Academic TitleAs controversial in politics as he was in the military, Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was an embattled president, enormously popular with the American people, yet the target of unrelenting censure by political enemies. For the first time in almost a century, this book by the distinguished historian Charles W. Calhoun examines Grant’s administration in depth, offering a fresh look at the 18th president’s policies and actions during his two terms in office (1869–1877).Most biographers focus on Grant’s military career, giving less attention to the significant and complex questions that marked his presidential terms. These concerns, the issues of politics and governance, are at the core of this book. As a political historian with a vast knowledge of nineteenth-century America and an extensive array of original sources at his command, Calhoun approaches Grant’s presidency not as an incongruous or inconsequential sequel to his military career but instead as the polestar of American public life during a crucial decade in the nation’s political development. He explores Grant’s leadership style and traces his contributions to the office of president, including creating a White House staff, employing modern technology to promote the mobility of the presidency, and developing strong ties with congressional leaders to enhance executive influence over legislation. The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant provides a detailed discussion of the administration’s endeavors in a variety of areas—Reconstruction and civil rights, economic policy, the Peace Policy for Native Americans, foreign policy, and civil service reform. It also offers a straightforward examination of the scandals associated with the period, highlighting the “embattled” nature of Grant’s presidency and the deep antagonism that marked his relations with key critics such as Charles Sumner, Henry Adams, and Benjamin Bristow. In sum, this book is a long overdue re-evaluation of a pivotal presidency in America’s political history.

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“This is a book of courtroom war stories, drawn from my forty years of experience as an obscure lawyer for the underdog and the downtrodden.” So begins Renegade for Justice, a memoir of a public interest lawyer driven by the cause of justice. While the stories Stephen Saltonstall tells are entertaining, they are also instructive, providing, as he says, “an insider look at the American justice system, which is rigged against the poor and people of color and tolerates police perjury.”Renegade for Justice begins by telling the story of how and why a privileged kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, broke from family tradition and devoted his professional life to defending the defenseless in a justice system that is crippled by systemic injustice. Activist lawyer Stephen Saltonstall brings readers into the world of criminal defense by recounting narratives of his cases, including a successful attack on a Massachusetts death penalty statute, appeals of two notorious homicide cases (a serial murderer and a cop-killer), an effort to save the life of a little boy whose parents refused to give him the medical treatment he needed for acute lymphocytic leukemia, free speech cases for students and an environmentalist carpenter, litigation to save critical black bear and neotropical migratory songbird habitat from US Forest Service clear-cutting, and more. In a system biased against the public interest and the underprivileged, Saltonstall gives people a model for practicing values-based law.Channeling the spirit of radicals like William Kunstler, Saltonstall writes not only for activists who want to better understand our society, but also for those thinking about becoming a lawyer. As he writes in the preface, “I hope my stories will challenge those of you—you know who you are, you who dream of soft landings in the glittering halls of boring, soul-free law firms doing the bidding of the uber-rich and powerful—to visualize the alternative, a career that’s built on cases and causes that further the public interest, human rights, and care of the natural world.

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This collection of essays, written by the some of the foremost historians in the field of Coast Guard history, highlights the wartime roles played by the United States’ oldest federal maritime service, from its inception through the last decade of the twentieth century. The Fighting Coast Guard features three distinct sections: “Beginnings,” which includes a short overview of the US Revenue Cutter Service (the USCG’s primary forerunner, established in 1790) and two chapters on World War I; “Conflagration,” the role of the USCG during the World War II era; and “The Cold War and Beyond,” an assessment of the Coast Guard’s participation in the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The Fighting Coast Guard is a significant contribution to the limited historiography of the Coast Guard and a critical analysis of various wartime roles undertaken by the Coast Guard during America’s twentieth-century conflicts.Because the Coast Guard operated as part of the Department of the Navy during the two world wars, its service and history is often overlooked or enveloped by the larger service, while the USCG’s limited participation in cold and hot wars since 1945 is often ignored altogether. This anthology provides readers with a solid overview while highlighting some of the service’s most important contributions as a combatant force.This definitive study of the role of the US Coast Guard in wartime, from its modern inception in 1915 through the end of the twentieth century, is long overdue and will shed new light on America’s smallest military service.

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In 1993, JosÉ MedellÍn, an eighteen-year-old Mexican national who lived most of his life in the United States, was arrested for his participation in the gang rape and murder of two girls in Houston, Texas. Despite telling police that he was born in Mexico, he was never informed of his rights to contact the Mexican Consulate, a right guaranteed to him by Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Mexican government filed suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled that the United States had violated the rights of both Mexico and MedellÍn, along with fifty-one other Mexican nationals in other cases. The ICJ instructed the United States to provide “review and reconsideration” of the convictions and sentences of the fifty-two Mexican nationals.Armed with this new decision, MedellÍn sought a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied by the lower courts. He petitioned for a writ of certiorari, which the Supreme Court granted, twice. While President George W. Bush sided with the ICJ, the State of Texas, under Solicitor General Ted Cruz, argued against the president. Despite a nearly universal belief among court watchers and legal scholars that Texas would lose, the Court in a 6-3 decision ruled in favor of Texas and against MedellÍn in June 2008. MedellÍn was executed just two months later.In this volume Alan Mygatt-Tauber tells the story of MedellÍn v. Texas, showing how the Court’s 2008 ruling grappled with the complex question of how a united republic that respects the dual sovereignty of its constituent parts struggles to comply with its international obligations. But this is also a story of international human rights and the anomalous position of the United States regarding the death penalty compared to other nations. In the closing chapters, the author explores the aftermath of the execution, including the continued effort of Mexico to seek justice for its nationals.Mygatt-Tauber offers a detailed examination of the case at every stage of proceedings—trial, appeal, at the International Court of Justice, and in both trips to the Supreme Court. He provides never-before-revealed information about the thinking of the Bush White House in the decision to comply with the ICJ's judgment and to withdraw from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention which granted the ICJ jurisdiction.

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Over the course of World War II, guerrillas from across the Philippines opposed Imperial Japan’s occupation of the archipelago. Although the guerrillas never possessed the combat strength to overcome the Japanese occupation on their own, they disrupted operations, kept the spirit of resistance alive, provided important intelligence to the Allies, and assumed frontline duties fighting the Japanese. By examining the organization, motivations, capabilities, and operations of the guerrillas, James Villanueva argues that the guerrillas were effective because Japanese punitive measures, along with a strong sense of obligation and loyalty to the United States, pushed most of the population to support the guerrillas. Unlike their predecessors opposing the Americans in 1899, the guerrillas during World War II benefited from the leadership of US and Filipino military personnel and received significant aid and direction from General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) Headquarters, conducting one of the most effective and sophisticated resistance campaigns in World War II.Awaiting MacArthur’s Return is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the major World War II guerrilla groups across the Philippine Archipelago, providing a fuller picture of the nature of the war in the Southwest Pacific and revealing the extent to which the guerrilla movement affected operations for both Allied and Imperial Japanese forces.Analyzing the organizational effectiveness of the guerrillas resisting the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, this book alternates narrative chapters with thematic chapters examining the guerrillas’ organization, logistics, administration, intelligence gathering, and the support they received from Allied forces and provided the Allies in turn. Villanueva offers the most in-depth analysis of the guerrillas’ military organization and effectiveness in the context of existing theories of insurgency and counterinsurgency while using an extensive body of memoirs, archival guerrilla and US Army and Navy records, and translations of Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese officers.

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During the global BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020, many called upon the United States to finally face its painful past. Tim Gruenewald’s new book is an in-depth investigation of how that past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Curating America’s Painful Past reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies. Gruenewald analyzes the National Museum of American History (NMAH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).The NMAH, the nation’s most popular history museum, serves as the benchmark for the imagination of US history and identity. The USHMM opened in 1993 as the United States’ official Holocaust memorial and stands adjacent to the National Mall. Gruenewald makes a persuasive case that the USHMM established a successful blueprint for narrating horrific and traumatic histories. Curating America’s Painful Past contrasts these two museums to ask why America’s painful memories were largely absent from the memorial landscape of the National Mall and argues that social injustices in the present cannot be addressed until the nation’s painful past is fully acknowledged and remembered.It was only with the opening of the NMAAHC in 2016 that a detailed account of atrocities committed against African Americans appeared on the National Mall. Gruenewald focuses on the museum’s narrative structure in the context of national discourse to provide a critical reading of the museum. When the NMAI opened in 2004, it presented for the first time a detailed history from a Native American perspective that sought to undo conventional museum narratives. However, criticism led to more traditional exhibitions and national focus. Nevertheless, the museum still marginalizes memories of the vast numbers of Indigenous victims to European colonization and to US expansion. In a final chapter, Gruenewald offers a thought experiment, imagining a memory site like the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, Alabama) situated on the National Mall so the reader can assess how profound an effect projects of national memory can have on facing the past as a matter of present justice.

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Kansas Boy: The Memoir of A. J. Bolinger offers the twenty-first-century reader delightful and revealing insights on life during an era of dramatic change in American history. Bolinger describes those years as 'bursting with energy, wild with ambition.' The Kansas of his childhood and young adulthood was a place where life was lived at a rapid pace: investors pursued fortunes as town developers, settlers sought to establish prosperous farms and ranches, and reformers tried to create an ideal society. A. J. opens his account with a vividly detailed description of the prairie itself, including how the frontier settlements of Kansas were in the process of becoming established communities. Born and raised in Elk County, Kansas, he tells stories of ranching and cattle drives. Retelling some of the legends of early Kansas, he debunks more than a few frontier myths. As he moves toward adulthood his accounts of farming and small-town life grow increasingly aware of the agricultural crisis of the 1880s and 1890s faced by farmers and small-town businesses as they struggled with the growing power of corporations, in particular the railroads. In doing so he offers ground-level insights into the appeal of the Populist movement and the rise of the People' Party. The challenges result in the Bolinger family's move to the city of Topeka where A. J. attends Washburn College. As a college student he helps temperance activist Carry Nation wage her antisaloon campaign and goes to Washburn's new law school. His first step in pursuing what would be a lifelong career in the law is to replicate his family's and his era's pattern of moving to where new opportunities lay: the Oklahoma territory.A. J. Bolinger (1881-1977) offers today's reader a deeply felt memoir with keen insights and thoughtful commentary that is by turns startlingly progressive and deeply conservative. He offers us a richer understanding of life on the prairies and plains of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.

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In William Howard Taft's Constitutional Progressivism Kevin J. Burns makes a compelling case that Taft's devotion to the Constitution of 1787 contributed to his progressivism. In contrast to the majority of scholarship, which has viewed Taft as a reactionary conservative because of his constitutionalism, Burns explores the ways Taft's commitment to both the Constitution and progressivism drove his political career and the decisions he made as president and chief justice. Taft saw the Constitution playing a positive role in American political life, recognizing that it created a national government strong enough to enact broad progressive reforms.In reevaluating Taft's career, Burns highlights how Taft rejected the 'laissez faire school,' which taught that 'the Government ought to do nothing but run a police force.' Recognizing that the massive industrial changes following the Civil War had created a plethora of socioeconomic ills, Taft worked to expand the national government's initiatives in the fields of trust-busting, land conservation, tariff reform, railroad regulations, and worker safety laws. Burns offers a fuller understanding of Taft and his political project by emphasizing Taft's belief that the Constitution could play a constructive role in American political life by empowering the government to act and by undergirding and protecting the reform legislation the government implemented. Moreover, Taft recognized that if the Constitution could come to the aid of progressivism, political reform might also redound to the benefit of the Constitution by showing its continued relevance and workability in modern America.Although Taft's efforts to promote significant policy-level reforms attest to his progressivism, his major contribution to American political thought is his understanding of the US Constitution as a fundamental law, not a policy-oriented document. In many ways Taft can be thought of as an originalist, yet his originalism was marked by a belief in robust national powers. Taft's constitutionalism remains relevant because while his principles seem foreign to modern legal discourse, his constitutional vision offers an alternative to contemporary political divisions by combining political progressivism-liberalism with constitutional conservatism.

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Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons. Words Is a Powerful Thing is Daldorph's record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class-but especially the inmates who came to class week after week-benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon in that jail classroom, where for two hours inmates and instructor became a circle of ink and blood, writing together, reciting their poems, telling stories, and having a few good laughs.Words Is a Powerful Thing brings into the light the works of fifty talented inmate writers whose work deserves attention. Their poetry speaks of 'what really matters' to all of us and gives the reader sustained insight into the role that creativity plays in aiding survival and bringing positive change for inmates, and, in turn, for all of us. Daldorph's account of his teaching experience not only takes the reader inside the daily life at a county jail but also sets the work done in the writing class within the larger context of inmate education is the US corrections system, where education is often one of the few lifelines available to inmates. Words Is a Powerful Thing provides a teaching guide for instructors working with incarcerated writers, offering an extensive examination of both the challenges and benefits.When Brian Daldorph decided the story of his classroom experiences and the great writing produced by the inmates deserved to be told to wider audiences, he struggled with how to bring it all together. Not long after, an inmate wrote a poem titled 'Words Is a Powerful Thing,' offering Daldorph a title, concept, and purpose: to show that the poetry of inmates speaks not just to other inmates but to all of us.

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In 1972, America was completing its withdrawal from the long and divisive war in Vietnam. Air power covered the departure of ground forces, and search and rescue teams from all services and Air America covered the airmen and soldiers still in the fight. Day and night these military and civilian aircrews stood alert to respond to 'Mayday'; calls. The rescue forces were the answer to every man's prayer, and those forces brought home airmen, sailors, marines, and soldiers downed or trapped across the breadth and depth of the entire Southeast Asia theater. Moral Imperative relies on a trove of declassified documents and unit histories to tell their tales.Focusing on 1972, Darrel Whitcomb combines stories of soldiers cut off from their units, advisors trapped with allied forces, and airmen downed deep in enemy territory, with the narratives of the US Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, contract pilots, and special operations teams ready to conduct rescues in Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. All of these missions occur against the backdrop of our withdrawal from the war and our diplomatic efforts to achieve a lasting peace. In detail, Whitcomb shows how American rescue forces supported the military response to the North Vietnamese's massive three-pronged invasion of South Vietnam, America's subsequent interdiction operations against North Vietnam, and ultimately the strategic bombing of Linebacker II.

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We face two global threats: the climate crisis and a crisis of democracy. Located at the crux of these crises, sustainable cities build on the foundations and resources of democracy to make our increasingly urban world more resilient and just. Sustainable Cities in American Democracy focuses on this effort as it emerged and developed over the past decades in the institutional field of sustainable cities - a vital response to environmental degradation and climate change that is shaped by civic and democratic action.Carmen Sirianni shows how various kinds of civic associations and grassroots mobilizing figure in this story, especially as they began to explicitly link conservation to the future of our democracy and then develop sustainable cities as a democratic project. These organizations are national, local, or multitiered, from the League of Women Voters to the Natural Resources Defense Council to bicycle and watershed associations. Some challenge city government agencies contentiously, while others seek collaboration; many do both at some point. Sirianni uses a range of analytic approaches - from scholarly disciplines, policy design, urban governance, social movements, democratic theory, public administration, and planning - to understand how such diverse civic and professional associations have come to be both an ecology of organizations and a systemic and coherent project.The institutional field of sustainable cities has emerged with some core democratic norms and civic practices but also with many tensions and trade-offs that must be crafted and revised strategically in the face of new opportunities and persistent shortfalls. Sirianni's account draws ambitious yet pragmatic and hopeful lessons for a 'Civic Green New Deal'a policy design for building sustainable and resilient cities on much more robust foundations in the decades ahead while also addressing democratic deficits in our polarized political culture.

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Who could forget the Supreme Court's controversial 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore or the 2000 presidential campaign and election that preceded it? Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, endless recounts, raucous allegations, and a constitutional crisis were all roiled into a confusing and potentially dangerous mix--until the Supreme Court decision allowed George W. Bush to become the 43rd President of the United States, despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore.Praised by scholars and political pundits alike, the original edition of Charles Zelden's book set a new standard for our understanding of that monumental decision. A probing chronicle and critique of the vexing and acrimonious affair, it offered the most accurate and up-to-date analysis of a remarkable episode in American politics. Highly readable, its comprehensive coverage, depth of documentation and detail, and analytic insights remain unrivaled on the subject.In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned "lessons of 2000" have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular.

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