Search results for ""university press of kansas""

America's most popular film critic is hardly alone in singing the praises of ""Singin' in the Rain"". This quintessential American film - made in Hollywood's Golden Age, showcasing the genius of Gene Kelly, and featuring what Ebert calls 'the most joyous musical sequence ever filmed' - has inspired love and admiration from fellow critics, film scholars, and movie buffs worldwide for more than half a century. Indeed, its reputation continues to grow: the American Film Institute now ranks it number 1 on its list of the Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time and number 5 on its list of the Greatest American Films of All Time. Echoing the enthusiasm of the film's most devoted fans, Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar embrace and illuminate both the film and its reputation. Combining lucid prose with meticulous scholarship, they provide for the first time the complete inside story of how this classic movie was made, marketed, and received. They re-create the actual movie-making experience, on the set and behind the scenes, and chronicle every step in production from original concept through casting, scripting, rehearsals, filming, scoring, and editing. They then trace its distribution, critical reception, and enduring reputation. The book is brimming with human interest, bursting with anecdotes and quotes by and about the film's stars and makers. Here are Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor at the top of their form, along with Debbie Reynolds and Cyd Charisse in their breakthrough roles. Here, too, are fascinating tidbits - about censorship troubles, continuity flaws, stunt doubles for Kelly, voice doubles for cast members, the dubbing of taps, and genealogy of all the songs. Hess and Dabholkar also provide in-depth analyses of each of the major song-and-dance performances, including details of everything from the dynamics of 'Gotta Dance!' to the physical challenges of the remarkable title number. Based on exhaustive research in oral histories, studio production records, letters, memoirs, and interviews, their book is factually impeccable, compulsively readable, and indispensable for anyone who loves movies at their absolute best.

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During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court decided important cases - most famously Dred Scott - that spoke to sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual cases and to the Taney Court, but this is the first comprehensive examination of the major slavery cases that came before the Court between 1825 and 1861. Earl Maltz presents a detailed analysis of all eight cases and explains how each fit into the slavery politics of its time, beginning with The Antelope, heard by the John Marshall Court, and continuing with the seven other cases taken before the Roger Taney Court: The Amistad, Groves v. Slaughter, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Strader v. Graham, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Ableman v. Booth, and Kentucky v. Denison. Case by case, Maltz identifies the political and legal forces that shaped each of the judicial outcomes while clarifying the evolution of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence. He reveals the beliefs of each justice about the morality of slavery and the judicial role in constitutional cases to show how their actions were determined by a complex interaction of political and doctrinal considerations. Thus he offers a more nuanced understanding of the antebellum federal judiciary, showing how the decision in Prigg hinged on views about federalism as well as attitudes toward human freedom, while the question of which slaves were freed in The Antelope depended more on complex fact-finding than on a condemnation of the slave trade. Maltz also challenges the view that the Taney Court simply mirrored Southern interests and argues that, despite Dred Scott, the overall record of the Court was not particularly proslavery. Although the progression of the Court's decisions reflects a change in the tenor of the conflict over slavery, the aftermath of those decisions illustrates the limits of the Court's ability to change the dynamic that governed political struggles over such divisive issues. As the first accessible account of all of these cases, ""Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861"" underscores the Court's limited capability to resolve the intractable political conflicts that sharply divided our nation during this period.

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Each pilot and bombardier/navigator sat side by side in an all-weather jet built for low-level bombing runs, precision targeting, and night strikes. Their success—and their very lives—depended on teamwork in flying their versatile A-6 Intruders. And when the North Vietnamese mounted a major offensive in 1972, they answered the call.Carol Reardon chronicles the operations of Attack Squadron 75, the "Sunday Punchers," and their high-risk bombing runs launched off the U.S.S. Saratoga during the famous LINEBACKER campaigns. Based on unparalleled access to crew members and their families, her book blends military and social history to offer a unique look at the air war in Southeast Asia, as well as a moving testament to the close-knit world of naval aviators.Theirs was one of the toughest jobs in the military: launching off the carrier in rough seas as well as calm, flying solo and in formation, dodging dense flak and surface-to-air missiles, delivering ordnance on target, and recovering aboard safely. Celebrating the men who climbed into the cockpits as well as those who kept them flying, Reardon takes readers inside the squadron's ready room and onto the flight decks to await the call, "Launch the Intruders!" Readers share the adrenaline-pumping excitement of each mission—as well as those heart-stopping moments when a downed aircraft brought home to all, in flight and on board, that every aspect of their lives was constantly shadowed by danger and potential death.More than a mere combat narrative, Launch the Intruders interweaves human drama with familial concerns, domestic politics, and international diplomacy. Fliers share personal feelings about killing strangers from a distance while navy wives tell what it's like to feel like a stranger at home. And as the war rages on, headlines like Jane Fonda's visit to Hanoi and the Paris Peace Accords are all viewed through the lens of this heavily tasked, hard-hitting attack squadron.A rousing tale of men and machines, of stoic determination in the face of daunting odds, Reardon's tale shines a much-deserved light on group of men whose daring exploits richly deserve to be much better known.

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It has become known to many as the moment when the U.S. Supreme Court kicked God out of the public schools, supposedly paving the way for a decline in educational quality and a dramatic rise in delinquency and immorality. The 6-to-1 decision in Engel v. Vitale (1962) not only sparked outrage among a great many religious Americans, it also rallied those who cried out against what they perceived as a dangerously activist Court. Bruce Dierenfield has written a concise and readable guide to the first - and still most important - case that addressed the constitutionality of prayer in public schools. The 22-word recitation in a Long Island school that was challenged in Engel v. Vitale was hardly denominational - not even overtly Christian - but a handful of parents saw it as a violation of the First Amendment's proscription again the establishment of religion. The case forced the Supreme Court to take a stand on Jefferson's ""wall of separation"" between church and state. When it did so, the Court declared that by endorsing the prayer recitation - no matter how brief, nondenominational, or voluntary - the Long Island school board had unconstitutionally approved the establishment of religion in school. Writing with impeccable fairness and sensitivity, Dierenfield sets his account of the Engel decision in the larger historical and political context, citing battles over a wide range of religious activities in public schools throughout American history. He takes readers behind the scenes at school board meetings and Court deliberations to show real people wrestling with deeply personal issues. Through interviews with many of the participants, he also reveals the large price paid by the plaintiffs and their children, who were frequently harassed both during and after the trial. For a long time, opponents of the decision have loudly claimed that it was based on a distorted reading of the First Amendment and deprived Americans of their right to practice religion. Dierenfield shows that the polarizing effect of Engel - a decision every bit as controversial as Roe v. Wade - has reverberated through the subsequent decades and gained intensity with the rise of the religious right. His book helps readers understand why, even in the face of this landmark decision, Americans remain divided on how divided church and state should be.

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In the violent world of radical extremists, ""the enemy of my enemy is my friend."" In this provocative study, George Michael reveals how that precept plays out in the unexpected bonding between militant Islam and the extreme right in America and Europe. At first glance, these two groups would seem to share little if any common ground. Why would various neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white separatists, and antigovernment radicals find themselves attracted to movements, such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Egyptian Islamic Jihad? After all, the extreme right's racist and radical Christian segments tend to deride and exclude all nonwhites and non-Christians, while Islamic fundamentalists angrily denounce all non-Muslims, especially Americans, as infidels. Nevertheless, as Michael shows, they have developed strikingly similar critiques on such issues as American foreign policy, the media, modernity, and the New World Order. The first book to focus on the growing linkage between these two movements, ""The Enemy of My Enemy"" analyzes the histories and ideologies guiding these disparate groups, clarifies the nature of their mutual appeal, and shows how the Internet and globalization have made increased interaction possible. Michael notes that one particularly dominant thread running throughout both camps is a fervent anti-Semitism, accompanied by strong pro-Palestinian views, anger over Israel's influence on American policymakers, and opposition to the Iraq War and the U.S. presence in the Middle East. Michael also speculates on how the so-called War on Terror might unfold if this unexpected and alarming convergence grows stronger. While the thought of Americans assisting or fighting alongside Islamic militants - in America - sounds utterly far-fetched, Michael points out that some members of the extreme right have publicly expressed admiration for Al Qaeda's audacious attacks on 9/11. Daring to consider the unthinkable, Michael provides an insightful and sane look at the possibilities for collaboration between these groups and raises a quiet but clear alarm for anyone concerned about America's future.

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Winner of the US Civil War Center Ribbon of Honor.

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For nearly a century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been famous for tracking and apprehending gangsters, kidnappers, spies, and, much more recently, international terrorists. The agency itself has done much to promote its successes, helping to embellish its legendary aura. Athan Theoharis, however, contends that a closer look at the historical record reveals a much less idealized and much more disturbing vision of the FBI. Created in 1908 with a staff of three dozen, the FBI has grown to more than 27,000 agents and support personnel, while its role has shifted dramatically from law enforcement to intelligence operations. Theoharis, America's leading authority on the FBI, assesses the consequences of this shift for democratic politics, showing how the agency's obsession with absolute secrecy has undermined both civil liberties and agency accountability. As Theoharis reveals, FBI history has been marked by operational failures, overrated abilities, and the frequent use of highly suspect means - wiretaps, buggings, break-ins - that challenge the Constitution's guarantee against illegal searches. The agency has also gathered and disseminated derogatory (and often untrue) information in an effort to discredit citizens whose views are seen as ""dangerous."" Most disturbing, it has drifted toward equating political dissent with genuine subversion, an approach with potentially grave consequences for free and open public discourse. Theoharis also shows that the FBI's vaunted spy-catching prowess has been vastly overrated, from the early days of the ""Communist conspiracy"" to the more recent Wen Ho Lee and Robert Hanssen fiascos. And he criticizes Hoover's longstanding refusal to admit that organized crime actually existed, perhaps due to his preoccupation with the sex lives of public figures like JFK, Martin Luther King, and Rock Hudson, whose amorous escapades he recorded in his ""Do Not File"" files. More recently, the notorious incidents at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City, as well as the 9/11 attacks, have further eroded public confidence in the FBI and tarnished its reputation. Throughout, Theoharis raises serious questions about the extralegal nature of the FBI's activities and its troubling implications for the rule of law in America.

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Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth explores the shifting reputation of our most controversial founding father. Since the day Aaron Burr fired his fatal shot, Americans have tried to come to grips with Alexander Hamilton's legacy. Stephen Knott surveys the Hamilton image in the minds of American statesmen, scholars, literary figures, and the media, explaining why Americans are content to live in a Hamiltonian nation but reluctant to embrace the man himself.Knott observes that Thomas Jefferson and his followers, and, later, Andrew Jackson and his adherents, tended to view Hamilton and his principles as "un-American." While his policies generated mistrust in the South and the West, where he is still seen as the founding "plutocrat," Hamilton was revered in New England and parts of the Mid-Atlantic states. Hamilton's image as a champion of American nationalism caused his reputation to soar during the Civil War, at least in the North. However, in the wake of Gilded Age excesses, progressive and populist political leaders branded Hamilton as the patron saint of Wall Street, and his reputation began to disintegrate.Hamilton's status reached its nadir during the New Deal, Knott argues, when Franklin Roosevelt portrayed him as the personification of Dickensian cold-heartedness. When FDR erected the beautiful Tidal Basin monument to Thomas Jefferson and thereby elevated the Sage of Monticello into the American Pantheon, Hamilton, as Jefferson's nemesis, fell into disrepute. He came to epitomize the forces of reaction contemptuous of the "great beast"-the American people. In showing how the prevailing negative assessment misrepresents the man and his deeds, Knott argues for reconsideration of Hamiltonianism, which rightly understood has much to offer the American polity of the twenty-first century.Remarkably, at the dawn of the new millennium, the nation began to see Hamilton in a different light. Hamilton's story was now the embodiment of the American dream—an impoverished immigrant who came to the United States and laid the economic and political foundation that paved the way for America's superpower status. Here in Stephen Knott's insightful study, Hamilton finally gets his due as a highly contested but powerful and positive presence in American national life.

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While millions of Americans were defending liberty against the Nazis, liberty was under vicious attack at home. One of the worst outbreaks of religious persecution in U.S. history occurred during World War II when Jehovah's Witnesses were intimidated, beaten, and even imprisoned for refusing to salute the flag or serve in the armed forces.Determined to claim their First Amendment rights, Jehovah's Witnesses waged a tenacious legal campaign that led to twenty-three Supreme Court rulings between 1938 and 1946. Now Shawn Peters has written the first complete account of the personalities, events, and institutions behind those cases, showing that they were more than vindication for unpopular beliefs-they were also a turning point in the nation's constitutional commitment to individual rights.Peters begins with the story of William Gobitas, a Jehovah's Witness whose children refused to salute the flag at school. He follows this famous case to the Supreme Court, where he captures the intellectual sparring between Justices Frankfurter and Stone over individual liberties; then he describes the aftermath of the Court's ruling against Gobitas, when angry mobs savagely assaulted Jehovah's Witnesses in hundreds of communities across America.Judging Jehovah's Witnesses tells how persecution—much of it directed by members of patriotic organizations like the American Legion—touched the lives of Witnesses of all ages; why the Justice Department and state officials ignored the Witnesses' pleas for relief; and how the ACLU and liberal clergymen finally stepped forward to help them. Drawing on interviews with Witnesses and extensive research in ACLU archives, he examines the strategies that beleaguered Witnesses used to combat discrimination and goes beyond the familiar Supreme Court rulings by analyzing more obscure lower court decisions as well.By vigorously pursuing their cause, the Witnesses helped to inaugurate an era in which individual and minority rights emerged as matters of concern for the Supreme Court and foreshadowed events in the civil rights movement. Like the classics Gideon's Trumpet and Simple Justice, Judging Jehovah's Witnesses vividly narrates a moving human drama while reminding us of the true meaning of our Constitution and the rights it protects.

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This biography of Hayes recreates the rapidly changing world of Victorian America as experienced by one of its most reflective and perceptive figures. Hayes emerges as more progressive and far-sighted than previously suggested. The author argues that he was a pragmatic champion of equal rights.

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What does philosophy know of love? From Plato on, philosophers have struggled to pin love to the dissecting table and view it in the cold light of logic. Yet, as Arthur Danto writes in the foreword to this volume, "how incorrigibly stiff philosophy is when it undertakes to lay its icy fingers on the frilled and beating wings of the butterfly of love."Love, elusive and philosophically intractable as it is, has long fascinated philosophers. In this collection of classic and modern writings on the topic of erotic love, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have chosen excerpts from the great philosophical texts and combined them with the most exciting new work of philosophers writing today.The result is a broadly conceived, comprehensive, and important work, nearly as stimulating and provocative as love itself. It examines the mysteries of erotic love from a variety of philosophical perspectives and provides an impressive display of the wisdom that the world's best thinkers have brought, and continue to bring, to the study of love.

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Physical training in the US Army has a surprisingly short history. Bodies for Battle by Garrett Gatzemeyer is the first in-depth analysis of the US Army’s particular set of practices and values, known as its physical culture, that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to tactical challenges and widespread anxieties over diminishing masculinity. The US Army’s physical culture assumed a unity of mind and body; learning a physical act was not just physical but also mental and social. Physical training and exercise could therefore develop the whole individual, even societies. Bodies for Battle is a study of how the US Army developed modern, scientific training methods in response to concerns about entering a competitive imperial world where embodied nations battled for survival in a Social Darwinist framework. This book connects social and cultural worries about American masculinity and manliness with military developments (strategic, tactical, technological) in the early twentieth century, and it links trends in the United States and the US Army with larger trans-Atlantic trends.Bodies for Battle presents new perspectives on US civil-military relations, army officers’ unease with citizen armies, and the implications of compulsory military service. Gatzemeyer offers a deeply informed historical understanding of physical training practices in the US Army, the reasons why soldiers exercise the way they do, and the influence of physical culture’s evolution on present-day reform efforts. Between the 1880s and the 1950s, the army’s set of practices and values matured through interactions between combat experience, developments in the field of physical education, institutional outsiders, application beyond the military, and popular culture. A persistent tension between discipline and group averages on one hand and maximizing the individual warrior’s abilities on the other manifested early and continues to this day. Bodies for Battle also builds on earlier studies on sport in the US military by highlighting historical divergences between athletics and disciplinary and combat readiness impulses. Additionally, Bodies for Battle analyzes applications of the army’s physical culture to wider society in an effort to “prehabilitate” citizens for service.

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Newt Gingrich is one of the most polarizing and consequential figures in US politics. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, he rose from a minority party backbencher to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years. Though much has been written about Gingrich, accounts of his time in Congress are incomplete and often skewed.In their book Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur, political scientists Matthew N. Green and Jeffrey Crouch draw from newly uncovered archival material, original interviews, and other data to provide a fresh and insightful look at Gingrich’s entire congressional career. Green and Crouch argue that Gingrich is best understood as a “party entrepreneur,” someone who works primarily to achieve their congressional party's collective goals. From the moment he entered Congress, Gingrich was laser-focused on achieving two party-related objectives—a Republican majority in the House and a more conservative society—as well as greater influence for himself.Using a conceptual framework taken from theories of military strategy, the authors explain how Gingrich initially struggled because of a mismatch between his lofty goals and the resources available to him. After years of patiently cultivating allies, tempering his immediate objectives, and waiting for favorable circumstances to emerge, Gingrich finally claimed victory in 1994, with Republicans winning control of the House and electing Gingrich as Speaker. Yet while Gingrich had been creative, patient, and ultimately successful at gaining power for himself and his party, he proved ineffective at balancing his goals with the demands of the Speakership, and he resigned from Congress just four years later.Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur, the latest contribution to the Congressional Leaders series, sheds new light on a historically important congressional leader whose complicated legacy is still debated today by scholars, journalists, and politicians.

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American by Birth explores the history and legacy of Wong Kim Ark and the 1898 Supreme Court case that bears his name, which established the automatic citizenship of individuals born within the geographic boundaries of the United States. In the late nineteenth century, much like the present, the United States was a difficult, and at times threatening, environment for people of color. Chinese immigrants, invited into the United States in the 1850s and 1860s as laborers and merchants, faced a wave of hostility that played out in organized private violence, discriminatory state laws, and increasing congressional efforts to throttle immigration and remove many long-term residents. The federal courts, backed by the Supreme Court, supervised the development of an increasingly restrictive and exclusionary immigration regime that targeted Chinese people. This was the situation faced by Wong Kim Ark, who had been born in San Francisco in the 1870s and who earned his living as a cook. Like many members of the Chinese community in the American West he maintained ties to China. He traveled there more than once, carrying required re-entry documents, but when he attempted to return to the United States after a journey from 1894 to 1895, he was refused entry and detained. Protesting that he was a citizen and therefore entitled to come home, he challenged the administrative decision in court. Remarkably, the Supreme Court granted him victory.This victory was important for Wong Kim Ark, for the ethnic Chinese community in the United States, and for all immigrant communities then and to this day. Though the principle had links to seventeenth-century English common law and in the United States back to well before the American Civil War, the Supreme Court's ruling was significant because it both inscribed the principle in constitutional terms and clarified that it extended even to the children of immigrants who were legally barred from becoming citizens. American by Birth is a richly detailed account of the case and its implications in the ongoing conflicts over race and immigration in US history; it also includes a discussion of current controversies over limiting the scope of birthright citizenship.

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Wherever we turn in America today, we see angry citizens disparaging government, distrusting each other, avoiding civic life, and professing a hatred of politics and politicians of all stripes. Is our situation hopeless? Wilson Carey McWilliams wouldn’t think so. McWilliams, one of the preeminent political theorists of the twentieth century, was closely identified with an ambitious intellectual enterprise to reclaim and restore democracy as a source of national veneration, inspiration, and salvation. Better than most of his contemporaries, he understood and illuminated the major sources of the political malaise that afflicts our nation’s citizens. For him, the key to reinvigorating our republic depends on our ability to reclaim the “second voice” of American politics—the one that emanates from our literature, churches, families, and schools and speaks out on behalf of community and civic responsibility. The writings gathered here cohere into McWilliams’s most mature and most developed philosophical statement—the distillation of a distinguished career of thinking about the American experiment. From insights into “The Framers and the Constitution” to reflections on “America as Technological Republic,” he shares a love for an older tradition of democracy, one based upon the active self-rule of self-governing citizens. “Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights” and “On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community” may force readers to adjust their understandings of American politics, while “Democracy and the Citizen” and “Political Parties as Civic Associations” will resound for observers of the current political scene, regardless of party. Carey McWilliams not only offers a prescient analysis of the current crisis in American citizenship and governance but also shows us what sources within the American tradition might exist to save us from our worst selves. His broad and iconoclastic approach to American politics should appeal to both conservatives and liberals—to anyone, in fact, who cares about the state of democracy in America.

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Popular impressions of the imperial Japanese army still promote images of suicidal banzai charges and fanatical leaders blindly devoted to their emperor. Edward Drea looks well past those stereotypes to unfold the more complex story of how that army came to power and extended its influence at home and abroad to become one of the world's dominant fighting forces.This first comprehensive English-language history of the Japanese army traces its origins, evolution, and impact as an engine of the country's regional and global ambitions and as a catalyst for the militarization of the Japanese homeland from mid-nineteenth-century incursions through the end of World War II. Demonstrating his mastery of Japanese-language sources, Drea explains how the Japanese style of warfare, burnished by samurai legends, shaped the army, narrowed its options, influenced its decisions, and made it the institution that conquered most of Asia. He also tells how the army's intellectual foundations shifted as it reinvented itself to fulfill the changing imperatives of Japanese society-and how the army in turn decisively shaped the nation's political, social, cultural, and strategic course.Drea recounts how Japan devoted an inordinate amount of its treasury toward modernizing, professionalizing, and training its army—which grew larger, more powerful, and politically more influential with each passing decade. Along the way, it produced an efficient military schooling system, a well-organized active duty and reserve force, a professional officer corps that thought in terms of regional threat, and well-trained soldiers armed with appropriate weapons.Encompassing doctrine, strategy, weaponry, and civil-military relations, Drea's expert study also captures the dominant personalities who shaped the imperial army, from Yamagata Aritomo, an incisive geopolitical strategist, to Anami Korechika, who exhorted the troops to fight to the death during the final days of World War II. Summing up, Drea also suggests that an army that places itself above its nation's interests is doomed to failure.

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Responding to Vine Deloria, Jr.’s call for all people to “become involved” in the struggle to protect Indigenous sacred sites, Dana Lloyd’s Land Is Kin proposes a rethinking of sacred sites, and a rethinking of even land itself. Deloria suggested using the principle of religious freedom, but this principle has failed Indigenous peoples for decades. Lloyd argues that religious freedom fails Indigenous claimants because settler law creates a tension between two competing rights—one party’s religious freedom and another party’s property rights. In this contest, the right of property will always win.Through an analysis of the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which she interprets as a case about sovereignty and the meaning of land, Lloyd proposes a multilayered understanding of land and the different roles it can simultaneously play. Rejecting the binary logic of sacred religion versus secular property, Lloyd uses the legal dispute over the High Country—an area of the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Indigenous nations—to show that there are at least five different, but not equally valid, ways to understand land in the Lyng case: home, property, sacred site, wilderness, and kin. To protect the High Country, the Yurok filed a religious freedom lawsuit but then proceeded to describe the land as their home in court. They lobbied for protecting the High Country through a wilderness designation even as they continued to argue that they had been managing it for centuries. They have purchased large parcels of ancestral land and also declare the land their kin, a relationship that ostensibly excludes the possibility of ownership.Land Is Kin demonstrates the complexity of land in contemporary religious, political, and legal discourse. By drawing on Indigenous perspectives on the land as kin, Lloyd points toward a framework that shifts sovereignty away from binary oppositions—between property and sacred site, between the federal government and Native nations—towards seeing the land itself as sovereign.

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Contested Valor is a challenging examination of the use and status of black Marines in United States military service during the Cold War era. These pioneering men experienced contested military integration, as well as multiple forms of institutional and social opposition, which called their humanity, manhood, and rights to full citizenship into question. Efforts to undermine their service compromised their right to be counted among the elite and sidelined their story to the fringes of Marine Corps and US history.Cameron McCoy describes the factors and pressures leading to the racial turbulence that surfaced in the Marine Corps from the end of World War II through Vietnam, and the measures taken by civilian and Marine officials to maintain and restore organizational integrity based on a foundation of white supremacy. He examines the psychological effects of institutionalized racism on African American Marines during the Vietnam era and the emergence of a new generation of black men unwilling to submit to the traditions of a Jim Crow Marine Corps. By exploring the realities American society constructed about black Marines, this work calls attention to the diverse ways in which these men coped within a strict, prejudiced organization and found greater purpose as US Marines despite an embattled image.Contested Valor weaves the experiences of black Americans in the armed forces into the larger tapestry of the American racialist past and aptly captures the dilemmas, triumphs, and pitfalls that the first African American Marines encountered during the contentious eras of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. McCoy explores the creation of organizational policies designed to minimize their footprint as US Marines until the social experiment of military integration faded and illustrates the discriminatory practices that further delegitimized their wartime reputation.McCoy demonstrates that black Marines’ absence from the historical record has been compounded by the negligence and oversight of past historians as the Marine Corps reckons with its racist past and its first black Marines.

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On October 5, 1892, the last of the major outlaw gangs of the Old West was destroyed in a gun battle in Coffeyville, a small town in southeastern Kansas. When the smoke cleared, eight men were dead and three others were seriously injured. Four of the dead were members of the notorious Dalton Gang: Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, and two brothers, Bob and Grat Dalton. A fifth outlaw, twenty-one-year-old Emmett Dalton, was captured alive but with twenty-three bullet and buckshot wounds.Emmett Dalton not only survived Coffeyville but prospered. After serving a fourteen-year prison term at the Kansas state penitentiary, he moved to Southern California. In a world completely foreign to him, he published two accounts of his and his brothers’ exploits (both of which were made into movies) and became a celebrity who worked with the first generation of Hollywood cowboys and one of Los Angeles’s most respected property developers.Ian Shaw’s Into the Sunset is the remarkable story of Emmett Dalton and how he and his brothers drifted from one side of the law to the other in the frontier lands of the late nineteenth century. It is the story of shoot-’em-ups and train robberies, of the closing frontier, and of what desperate men in desperate times do to survive. Following Dalton to California, Shaw tells the story of how Emmett was able to live a life that would become the stuff of legend and achieve the level of success that was once the object of each member of the Dalton Gang.

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On January 6, 2021, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and other supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection was widely denounced as an attack on the Constitution, and the subsequent impeachment trial was framed as a defense of constitutional government. What received little attention is that the January 6 insurrectionists themselves justified the violence they perpetrated as a defense of the Constitution; after battling the Capitol police and breaking doors and windows, the mob marched inside, chanting “Defend your liberty, defend the Constitution.”In Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American. In his careful analysis of US history, Goldstein demonstrates the well-established pattern of movements devoted to defending the power of dominant racial, ethnic, and religious groups, which deploy the rhetoric of constitutional devotion to express their national visions and justify their violence. Goldstein describes this as constitutional nationalism, an ideology that defines being an American as standing with, and by, the Constitution. This history includes the Ku Klux Klan’s self-declared mission to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which served to justify its campaign of violence in the 1860s and 1870s to prevent Black people from exercising the right to vote; Protestant Americans who felt threatened by the growing population of Catholics and Jews and organized mass movements to defend their status and power by declaring that the Constitution was made for a Protestant nation; native-born Americans who resisted the rising population of immigrants and who mobilized to exclude the newcomers and their alien ideas; corporate leaders arguing that regulation is unconstitutional and un-American; and Timothy McVeigh, who believed he was defending the Constitution by killing 168 people with a truck bomb.Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution reveals how the Constitution as the central embodiment and common ground of American identity has long been used to promote conflicting versions of American identity and to justify hatred, violence, and exclusion.

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In The Siege of Vicksburg: Climax of the Campaign to Open the Mississippi River, May 23-July 4, 1863, noted Civil War scholar Timothy B. Smith offers the first comprehensive account of the siege that split the Confederacy in two. While the siege is often given a chapter or two in larger campaign studies and portrayed as a foregone conclusion, The Siege of Vicksburg offers a new perspective and thus a fuller understanding of the larger Vicksburg Campaign. Smith takes full advantage of all the resources, both Union and Confederate-from official reports to soldiers' diaries and letters to newspaper accounts-to offer in vivid detail a compelling narrative of the operations. The siege was unlike anything Grant's Army of the Tennessee had attempted to this point and Smith helps the reader understand the complexity of the strategy and tactics, the brilliance of the engineers' work, the grueling nature of the day-by-day participation, and the effect on all involved, from townspeople to the soldiers manning the fortifications.The Siege of Vicksburg portrays a high-stakes moment in the course of the Civil War because both sides understood what was at stake: the fate of the Mississippi River, the trans-Mississippi region, and perhaps the Confederacy itself. Smith's detailed command-level analysis extends from army to corps, brigades, and regiments and offers fresh insights on where each side held an advantage. One key advantage was that the Federals had vast confidence in their commander while the Confederates showed no such assurance, whether it was Pemberton inside Vicksburg or Johnston outside. Smith offers an equally appealing and richly drawn look at the combat experiences of the soldiers in the trenches. He also tackles the many controversies surrounding the siege, including detailed accounts and analyses of Johnston's efforts to lift the siege, and answers the questions of why Vicksburg fell and what were the ultimate consequences of Grant's victory.

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Winner: Thomas M. Cooley Book PrizeThomas M. Cooley Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic TitleWhen the Supreme Court strikes down favored legislation, politicians cry judicial activism. When the law is one politicians oppose, the court is heroically righting a wrong. In our polarized moment of partisan fervor, the Supreme Court's routine work of judicial review is increasingly viewed through a political lens, decried by one side or the other as judicial overreach, or 'legislating from the bench.' But is this really the case? Keith E. Whittington asks in Repugnant Laws, a first-of-its-kind history of judicial review.A thorough examination of the record of judicial review requires first a comprehensive inventory of relevant cases. To this end, Whittington revises the extant catalog of cases in which the court has struck down a federal statute and adds to this, for the first time, a complete catalog of cases upholding laws of Congress against constitutional challenges. With reference to this inventory, Whittington is then able to offer a reassessment of the prevalence of judicial review, an account of how the power of judicial review has evolved over time, and a persuasive challenge to the idea of an antidemocratic, heroic court. In this analysis, it becomes apparent that that the court is political and often partisan, operating as a political ally to dominant political coalitions; vulnerable and largely unable to sustain consistent opposition to the policy priorities of empowered political majorities; and quasi-independent, actively exercising the power of judicial review to pursue the justices' own priorities within bounds of what is politically tolerable.The court, Repugnant Laws suggests, is a political institution operating in a political environment to advance controversial principles, often with the aid of political leaders who sometimes encourage and generally tolerate the judicial nullification of federal laws because it serves their own interests to do so. In the midst of heated battles over partisan and activist Supreme Court justices, Keith Whittington's work reminds us that, for better or for worse, the court reflects the politics of its time.

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Rarely does the Supreme Court reverse itself as quickly and profoundly as it did in recent campaign finance cases, with the Citizens United decision of 2010 undoing the constraints of the McCain-Feingold Act upheld in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003). And rarely have the stakes seemed so high, as billionaires vie for elected office and dark money floods political campaigns. In timely fashion, this new edition updates Melvin Urofsky's classic study of campaign finance law, bringing his cogent analysis of the relevant statutes and court cases up to date.Urofsky explains in clear and convincing language what was - and is - at stake in the twists and turns of campaign finance laws taken up by the nation's highest court in the past decades. Beginning with Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and moving through McConnell, Citizens United, and finally McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014), Urofsky discusses the two principles at issue in these cases: freedom of political speech, and the protection of the political process from undue influence. Conventional wisdom holds that in such cases liberals want greater restrictions and conservatives want corporations to have greater freedom to influence voters. But working from a rich store of primary sources, probing the motivations and ideas of all participants in the campaign finance legal story, Urofsky reveals a far more complex picture, one whose significance transcends simple political ideologies.In a time of controversies over political speech in the blogosphere, social media, and cable news, and claims of electoral fraud, The Campaign Finance Cases offers a much-needed, balanced account of how issues critical to American democracy figure in the adjudication of campaign finance law, and how a changing political and media landscape might alter the process.

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Before 1968, women's athletics in higher education meant playdays and sports days. That spring, when the National Division of Girls and Women in Sports announced that national collegiate sports championships for women would begin in 1969, Marlene Mawson, a new hire on the physical education faculty at the University of Kansas, was charged with establishing a women's athletics program. 'I was on my own,' Mawson recalls, 'because there was no precedent for creating a women's athletics program with a meager budget.' That meant planning sports competition schedules, staffing coaches, organizing policies and procedures for coaches and athletes, coordinating practice schedules, budgeting, and directing the new KU intercollegiate sports program for women without intervention or guidance. In their first decade, KU women's teams competed in national championships in volleyball, basketball, softball, and gymnastics.In this book, Mawson, who was inducted into the KU Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009, describes her remarkable career, from her early years in Missouri to her retirement. With behind-the-scenes views and insights that reflect a lifetime's experience, her memoir weaves together the history of the development of women's athletics at the University of Kansas and the story of the birth of women's intercollegiate athletics across the United States - from the Olympic Development Committee to Title IX to the NCAA. It is an engaging account of groundbreaking personal achievement by a woman in the world of college sports, and a stirring record of an extraordinary but little-documented decade in the evolution of women's athletics.

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In this expanded third edition, renowned scholar Stephen Skowronek, addresses Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Skowronek’s insights have fundamentally altered our understanding of the American presidency. His “political time” thesis has been particularly influential, revealing how presidents reckon with the work of their predecessors, situate their power within recent political events, and assert their authority in the service of change.A classic widely used in courses on the presidency, Skowronek’s book has greatly expanded our understanding of and debates over the politics of leadership. It clarifies the typical political problems that presidents confront in political time, as well as the likely effects of their working through them, and considers contemporary innovations in our political system that bear on the leadership patterns from the more distant past. Drawing out parallels in the politics of leadership between Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and between James Polk and John Kennedy, it develops a new and revealing perspective on the presidential leadership of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump.In this third edition Skowronek carefully examines the impact of recent developments in government and politics on traditional leadership postures and their enactment, given the current divided state of the American polity, the impact of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, of a more disciplined and homogeneous Republican party, of conservative advocacy of the “unitary theory” of the executive, and of progressive disillusionment with the presidency as an institution.A provocative review of presidential history, Skowronek’s book brims with fresh insights and opens a window on the institution of the executive office and the workings of the American political system as a whole. Intellectually satisfying for scholars, it also provides an accessible volume for students and general readers interested in the American presidency.

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For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed - despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow 'downwinders,' tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford's wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering.At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases. Against the heartrending details of personal illness and loss and, ultimately, persistence in the face of a legal system that protects the government on all fronts and at all costs, The Hanford Plaintiffs draws a damning picture of the failure of the US Congress and the Judiciary to defend the American public and to adequately redress a catastrophic wrong. Documenting the legal, medical, and human cost of one community's struggle for justice, this book conveys in clear and urgent terms the damage done to ordinary Americans in the name of business, progress, and patriotism.

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Wars ravage Iraq and Afghanistan. An earthquake devastates Haiti. The economy is in crisis and America is in the death grip of partisan politics. But what really, really gets you down? Your college basketball team loses a key game. It kind of makes a person wonder—first, of course, about his priorities, but then, inevitably, about the nature of such an obsession, one clearly shared with millions of sports fans spanning the United States. In a book that begins with one fan’s passion for a game, Andrew Malan Milward takes a deep dive into sports culture, team loyalty, and a shared sense of belonging—and what these have to do with character, home, and history.At the University of Kansas—where the inventor of the sport coached its first team—basketball is a religion, and Milward is a devoted follower with a faith that has grown despite time and distance. Jayhawker, his first venture into nonfiction, bears the marks of the accomplished storyteller. Sharply observed, deftly written, and often as dramatic as its Subject, the book pairs personal memoir with cultural history to conduct us from the world of the athlete to the literary life, from competition to camaraderie, from the history of the game to the game as a reflection of American history at its darkest hour and in its shining moments. A journey through one man’s obsession with basketball, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball tells a quintessential American story.

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Finalist: Lambda Literary Award for LBGTQ Nonfiction.Far from the coastal centers of culture and politics, Kansas stands at the very center of American stereotypes about red states. In the American imagination, it is a place LGBT people leave. No Place Like Home is about why they stay. The book tells the epic story of how a few disorganized and politically naïve Kansans, realizing they were unfairly under attack, rolled up their sleeves, went looking for fights, and ended up making friends in one of the country’s most hostile states.The LGBT civil rights movement’s history in California and in big cities such as New York and Washington, DC, has been well documented. But what is it like for LGBT activists in a place like Kansas, where they face much stiffer headwinds? How do they win hearts and minds in the shadow of the Westboro Baptist Church (̶Christian” motto: “God Hates Fags”)? Traveling the state in search of answers—from city to suburb to farm—journalist C. J. Janovy encounters LGBT activists who have fought, in ways big and small, for the acceptance and respect of their neighbors, their communities, and their government. Her book tells the story of these twenty-first-century citizen activists—the issues that unite them, the actions they take, and the personal and larger consequences of their efforts, however successful they might be. With its close-up view of the lives and work behind LGBT activism in Kansas, No Place Like Home fills a prairie-sized gap in the narrative of civil rights in America. The book also looks forward, as an inspiring guide for progressives concerned about the future of any vilified minority in an increasingly polarized nation.

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It's not just the bully in the schoolyard that we should be worried about. The one-on-one bullying that dominates the national conversation, this timely book suggests, is actually part of a larger problem—a natural outcome of the bullying nature of our national institutions. And as long as the United States embraces militarism and aggressive capitalism, systemic bullying and all its impacts—at home and abroad—will persist as a major crisis.Bullying looks very similar on the personal and institutional levels: it involves an imbalance of power and behavior that consistently undermines its victim, securing compliance and submission and reinforcing the bully’s sense of superiority and legitimacy. The similarity, this book tells us, is not a coincidence. Applying the concept of the “sociological imagination,” which links private problems and public issues, authors Charles Derber and Yale Magrass argue that individual bullying is an outgrowth—and a necessary function—of a larger social phenomenon. Bullying is seen here as a structural problem arising from systems organized around steep power hierarchies—from the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, and corporate offices to classrooms and playing fields and the environment. Dominant people and institutions need to create a culture in which violence and aggression are seen as natural and just: one where individuals compete over who will be bully or victim, and each is seen as deserving their fate within this hierarchy. The larger the inequalities of power in society, or among nations, or even across species, the more likely it is that both institutional and personal bullying will become commonplace. The authors see the life-long psychological scars interpersonal bullying can bring, but believe it is almost impossible to reduce such bullying without first challenging the institutions that breed and encourage it.In the United States a system of intertwined corporations, governments, and military institutions carries out “systemic bullying” to create profits and sustain its own power. While acknowledging the diversity and savagery of many other bully nations, the authors contend that America, as the most powerful nation in the world—and one that aggressively promotes its system as a model—merits special attention. It is only by recognizing the bullying built into this model that we can address the real problem, and in this, Bully Nation makes a hopeful beginning.

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The Medal of Honor may be America’s highest military decoration, but all Medals of Honor are not created equal. The medal has in fact consisted of several distinct decorations at various times and has involved a number of competing statutes and policies that rewarded different types of heroism. In this book, the first comprehensive look at the medal’s historical, legal, and policy underpinnings, Dwight S. Mears charts the complex evolution of these developments and differences over time.The Medal of Honor has had different qualification thresholds at different times, and indeed three separate versions—one for the army and two for the navy—existed contemporaneously between World Wars I and II. Mears traces these versions back to the medal’s inception during the Civil War and continues through the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—along the way describing representative medal actions for all major conflicts and services as well as legislative and policy changes contemporary to each period. He gives particular attention to retroactive army awards for the Civil War; World War I legislation that modernized and expanded the army’s statutory award authorization; the navy’s grappling with both a combat and noncombat Medal of Honor through much of the twentieth century; the Vietnam-era act that ended noncombat awards and largely standardized the Medal of Honor among all services; and the perceived decline of Medals of Honor awarded in the ongoing Global War on Terror.Mears also explores the tradition of awards via legislative bills of relief; extralegislative awards; administrative routes to awards through Boards of Correction of Military Records; restoration of awards previously revoked by the army in 1917; judicial review of military actions in federal court; and legislative actions intended to atone for historical discrimination against ethnic minorities. Unprecedented in scope and depth, his work is sure to be the definitive resource on America’s highest military honor.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America.The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming—the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols.A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.

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Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book PrizeIn the narrative of D-Day the Canadians figure chiefly—if at all—as an ineffective force bungling their part in the early phase of Operation Overlord. The reality is quite another story. As both the Allies and the Germans knew, only Germany’s Panzers could crush Overlord in its tracks. The Canadians’ job was to stop the Panzers—which, as this book finally makes clear, is precisely what they did. Rescuing from obscurity one of the least understood and most important chapters in the history of D-Day, Stopping the Panzers is the first full account of how the Allies planned for and met the Panzer threat to Operation Overlord. As such, this book marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Normandy campaign.Beginning with the Allied planning for Operation Overlord in 1943, historian Marc Milner tracks changing and expanding assessments of the Panzer threat, and the preparations of the men and units tasked with handling that threat. Featured in this was the 3rd Canadian Division, which, treated so dismissively by history, was actually the most powerful Allied formation to land on D-Day, with a full armored brigade and nearly 300 artillery and antitank guns under command. Milner describes how, over four days of intense and often brutal battle, the Canadians fought to a literal standstill the 1st SS Panzer Corps—which included the Wehrmacht’s 21st Panzer Division; its vaunted elite Panzer Lehr Division; and the rabidly zealous 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division, whose murder of 157 Canadian POWs accounted for nearly a quarter of Canadian fatalities during the fighting.Stopping the Panzers sets this murderous battle within the wider context of the Overlord assault, offering a perspective that challenges the conventional wisdom about Allied and German combat efficiency, and leads to one of the freshest assessments of the D-Day landings and their pre-attack planning in more than a decade.

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An intimate history of the lives of ordinary Japanese during World War II that introduces us to housewives in provincial cities struggling to feed their families while supporting the war effort, a conscript from northern Japan who endured the harshest and most abusive training imaginable to learn to fly, Tokyo teenagers mobilized to work in wartime factories, children evacuated from the big cities to a life in the countryside with little food, bullying, and no privacy, farmers pressured to grow more rice and wheat with less fertilizer and fewer hands, and a Kyoto octogenarian whose inability to contribute to the war effort leads him to contemplate suicide.

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The original edition of A Season of Inquiry, first published in 1986, offered the public an insider’s account of the workings of the Church investigation and of the nation’s espionage agencies, including the CIA’s covert action against the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile. In this new edition the author, then a special assistant to Senator Church, revisits the circumstances surrounding the investigation and subsequent, shocking report and reminds us its continuing relevance—in instances such as the Iran-Contra investigation, the 9/11 and Iraqi WMD intelligence failures, the Edward Snowden affair, and, most recently, the US Senate Torture Report. A Season of Inquiry Revisited details a moment that was at once a high-water mark for intelligence accountability in the United States and a low point in the American people’s trust of the agencies sworn to protect them. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, and the release of the Pentagon Papers, revelations of domestic spying sent a shock wave through the nation and spurred the political establishment to action. While a White House panel focused narrowly on CIA spying at home, the Church Committee enlarged its investigation to include the FBI, the National Security Agency, and a host of other primarily military espionage services, as well as CIA assassination plots around the world. Johnson describes the political players and their pursuit of information, the abuses they discovered, and the remarkable reports they compiled, chronicling a litany of disquieting operations carried out against American citizens and foreign leaders in Latin America and Africa. With a new preface and postscript along with an updated chronology and appendix, this new edition revisits a moment of reckoning in the halls of power. The nation has now arrived at a time when the lessons of the Church Committee warrant special remembering.

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The campaign intended to secure the Wehrmacht's flanks had proven one front too many for the German Army. And now the offensive at Stalingrad, the epic clash that marked Germany's failure on the Eastern Front, was entering its grim final phase. In Book One of the third volume of his acclaimed Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz offers the definitive account--the ""ground truth"" to counter a half-century's worth of myth and misinformation- of the beginning of the end of one of the most infamous battles of the Second World War, and one of the most costly in lives and treasure in the annals of history.When Volume Two left off, Germany's vaunted Sixth Army, already deflected from its original goal—the Caucasus oil fields- had been drawn into a desperate war of attrition within the ravaged city of Stalingrad. In Volume Three, Book One, we see the ultimate consequences of the Germans' overreach and the gathering force of the Red Army's massive manpower and increasingly sophisticated command. After failing repeatedly to find and exploit the weaknesses in Axis defenses, Stalin and the Stavka (High Command) finally seized their chance in mid-November of 1942 by launching a bold and devastating counteroffensive, Operation Uranus.Glantz draws a detailed and vivid account of how, in Operation Uranus, the Red Army's three fronts defeated and largely destroyed two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth Army and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad pocket—turning the Germans' world on its head. Like its predecessor volumes, this one makes extensive use of sources previously out of reach or presumed lost, such as reports from the Sixth Army's combat journal and newly released Soviet and Russian records. These materials (many cited at length or printed in their entirety in a companion volume) lend themselves to a strikingly new interpretation of the campaign's planning and execution on both sides—a version of events that once and for all gets at the ground truth of this historic confrontation.

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In Book Two of the third volume of his magisterial Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz continues and concludes his definitive history of one of the most infamous battles of World War Two, the Stalingrad campaign that signaled Germany's failure on the Eastern Front and marked a turning point in the war. Book Two finds Germany's most famous army—General Friedrich Paulus's Sixth—in dire straits, trapped in the Stalingrad kessel, or pocket, by a Red Army that has seized the initiative in what the Soviets now term the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army's counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, is well underway, having largely destroyed the bulk of two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army.Drawing on materials previously unavailable or believed lost, Glantz gives a closely observed account of the final ten weeks of Germany's ill-fated Stalingrad campaign. In short order, the Red Army parried and then defeated two German attempts to rescue the Sixth Army, crushed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, severely damaged the German Fourth Panzer and Second Armies, and finally destroyed the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad. With well over half-a-million soldiers torn from its order of battle, Hitler's Axis could only watch in horror as its status abruptly changed from victor to vanquished. This book completes a vivid and detailed picture of the Axis defeat that would prove decisive as a catastrophe from which Germany and its Wehrmacht could never recover.As in the preceding volumes, Glantz extensively mines newly available materials to provide a clearer and more accurate picture of what actually happened at Stalingrad at this crucial moment in World War II—a ""ground truth"" that gets beyond the myths and misinformation surrounding this historic confrontation. And this concluding chapter, relating events even more steeped in myth than those that came before, is especially bracing as it takes on controversial questions about why Operation Uranus succeeded and the German relief attempts failed, whether the Sixth Army could have escaped encirclement or been rescued, and who, finally was most responsible for its ultimate defeat. The answers Glantz provides, embedded in a fully-realized account of the endgame at Stalingrad, make this book the last word on one of history's epic clashes.

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How can the United States create the political will to address our major urban problems—poverty, unemployment, crime, traffic congestion, toxic pollution, education, energy consumption, and housing, among others? That’s the basic question addressed by the new edition of this award-winning book. Thoroughly revised and updated for its third edition, Place Matters examines the major trends and problems shaping our cities and suburbs, explores a range of policy solutions to address them, and looks closely at the potential political coalitions needed to put the country’s “urban crisis” back on the public agenda. The problem of rising inequality is at the centre of Place Matters. During the past several decades, the standard of living for the American middle class has stagnated, the number of poor people has reached its highest level since the 1960s, and the super-rich have dramatically increased their share of the nation’s wealth and income. At the same time, Americans have grown further apart in terms of where they live, work, and play. This trend—economic segregation—no longer simply reflects the racial segregation between white suburbs and minority cities. In cities and suburbs alike, poor, middle class, and wealthy Americans now live in separate geographic spaces. The authors have updated the case studies and examples used to illustrate the book’s key themes, incorporated the latest Census data, and drawn on exit polls and other data to examine the voting patterns and outcomes of the 2012 elections. They have expanded their discussion of how American cities are influenced by and influence global economic and social forces and how American cities compare with their counterparts in other parts of the world. And they draw upon the latest research and case studies not only to examine the negative impacts of income inequality and economic segregation but also assess the efforts that civic and community groups, unions, business, and government are making to tackle them. Fully up to date and far richer and more provocative, this new version surpasses its previous editions and will continue to be an essential volume for all who study urban politics and care about our cities.

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When Harry Truman was rescued from political obscurity to become Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate, black Americans were deeply troubled. Many believed that Truman, born and raised in former slave-holding Missouri, was a step back on civil rights from Henry Wallace, the liberal incumbent vice president. But by the end of his own presidency, black newspaper publishers cited Truman for having “awakened the conscience of America and given new strength to our democracy by his courageous efforts on behalf of freedom and equality.”In this first full-scale account of Truman’s evolving views on civil rights, Robert Shogan recounts how Truman outgrew the bigotry of his Jackson County upbringing to become the first president since Lincoln to attempt to redress the nation’s long history of injustice toward its black citizens—and in the process transformed the course of race relations in America. Shogan vividly demonstrates the full significance of the 33rd president’s contributions to that transformation. He ordered the integration of the armed forces and threw the weight of the Justice Department behind the long struggle against segregation in housing and education. And he used the platform of his presidency to relentlessly trumpet the cause of equal rights for those least favoured Americans, even making an unprecedented address to the NAACP. Going beyond other accounts of Truman, Shogan points out the political and personal factors that motivated the president and weighs the potential political costs and benefits of his civil rights actions. Shogan also explains Truman’s shift away from his formative racial prejudices by shedding light on the forces that shaped his character and leadership qualities. These included his political tutelage under “Boss Tom” Pendergast, which taught him the value of black voters, and the influence of populism, which fostered his support for underdogs such as black Americans. Illuminating how Truman became the first president to make racial injustice a political priority—and the first to denounce segregation as well as discrimination—Shogan’s book opens a new and provocative window on the struggle for civil rights in America.

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Forever known for its blazing cinematic image of General George S. Patton (portrayed by George C. Scott) addressing his troops in front of a mammoth American flag, Patton won seven Oscars in 1971, including those for Best Picture and Best Actor. In doing so, it beat out a much-ballyhooed M*A*S*H, irreverent darling of the critics, and grossed $60 million despite an intense anti-war climate. But, as Nicholas Evan Sarantakes reveals, it was a film that almost didn’t get made. Sarantakes offers an engaging and richly detailed production history of what became a critically acclaimed box office hit. He takes readers behind the scenes, even long before any scenes were ever conceived, to recount the trials and tribulations that attended the epic efforts of producer Frank McCarthy—like Patton a U.S. Army general—and Twentieth Century Fox to finally bring Patton to the screen after eighteen years of planning. Sarantakes recounts how filmmakers had to overcome the reluctance of Patton’s family, copyright issues with biographers, competing efforts for a biopic, and Department of Defence red tape. He chronicles the long search for a leading man—including discussions with Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, and even Ronald Reagan—before settling on Scott, a brilliant actor who brought to the part both enthusiasm for the project and identification with Patton’s passionate persona. He also tracks the struggles to shoot the movie with a large multinational cast, huge outlays for military equipment, and filming in six countries over a mere six months. And he provides revealing insider stories concerning, for example, Scott’s legendary drinking bouts and the origins of and debate over his famous opening monologue. Drawing on extensive research in the papers of Frank McCarthy and director Franklin Schaffner, studio archives, records of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, contemporary journalism, and oral histories, Sarantakes ultimately shows us that Patton is more than just one of the best war films ever made. Culturally, it also spoke to national ideals while exposing complex truths about power in the mid-twentieth century.

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When Congress endorsed massive aid to schools in 1965, the idea that the federal government had any responsibility for public education was controversial. Twenty years later, not only had that controversy dissipated, Washington's role in education had dramatically expanded. Gareth Davies explores how both conservatives and liberals came to embrace the once daring idea of an active federal role in elementary and secondary education and uses that case to probe the persistence--and growth--of big government during a supposedly anti-government era. By focusing on institutional changes in government that accompanied the civil rights revolution, Davies shows how initially fragile programs put down roots, built a constituency, and became entrenched. He explains why the federal role in schools continued to expand in the post-LBJ years as the reform impulse became increasingly detached from electoral politics, centring instead on the courts and the federal bureaucracy. Meanwhile, southern resistance to school desegregation had discredited the ""states rights"" argument, making it easier for conservatives as well as liberals to seek federal solutions to social problems. Although LBJ's landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act deferred to local control, the legislation of the Nixon-Ford years issued directives that posed greater challenges to traditional federalism than Johnson's grand ideals. As Davies shows, the new political climate saw the achievement of such breakthroughs as mandated bilingual education, school finance reform, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act--measures that, before the seventies, would have been considered unthinkably intrusive by liberals as well as conservatives. And when Ronald Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education, conservatives worked with liberals to derail his agenda. Davies' surprising study shows that the distancing of American conservatism from its anti-statist traditions helped pave the way for today's ""big government conservatism,"" which enabled a Republican-dominated Congress to pass No Child Left Behind. By revealing the endurance of Great Society values during a period of Republican ascendance, his book opens a window on our political process and offers new insight into what really makes government grow.

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Ever since the Lewis and Clark Expedition spotted its first wild turkey in Kansas, the state has celebrated a rich ornithological history—especially in light of its habitat diversity and its location within the Central Migratory Flyway. That birding bounty is now given its due by a respected team of authors, all recognized avian authorities, in a beautifully produced large-format volume highlighted with professional-quality color photographs and maps. The first such survey in twenty years, this remarkable book depicts every one of the state’s now-documented 473 species. Designed for all knowledgeable birders and professional ornithologists, it provides scientifically accurate information on distribution, breeding, and behavior for each species. It not only significantly updates the previous two-volume field guide Birds in Kansas but also reflects a more than 10% increase in known species—47 more than previously listed, including the Long-billed Murrelet, Ross’s Gull, and Broad-billed Hummingbird. The contents are arranged by family—from abundant groups like Plovers and Sandpipers to the lone Frigate Bird (Fregata magnificens) recorded in the state. For each species, a map shows the counties in which it has been reported, and many species include maps for both breeding and banding. Use of color in the distribution maps allows depiction of seasonal bird distribution. The text also includes a brief life history for most regularly breeding species, as well as information on migratory routes explaining where the birds travel when they leave Kansas. Birds of Kansas will be a vital addition to the library of anyone who seeks a better understanding of the diverse and ever-fascinating Kansas avifauna.

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Once upon a time in America, Herbert Hoover accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of usurping the coveted label 'liberal'. Nowadays, Republicans have so successfully stigmatized the word that even Democrats run from it. But in 1955, Louis Hartz offered perhaps the most famous interpretation of American history of the second half of the twentieth century in his book ""The Liberal Tradition in America"", to which students of American political culture have found themselves returning time and again over the last several decades. Hartz argued that America is inherently liberal, since it lacked a feudal heritage, was born middle class, and consequently did not develop either a strong conservative or socialist movement. Liberalism's Lockean outlook was America's one and only political philosophy, he believed. In this new book, eight prominent scholars consider whether Hartz's analysis should be repudiated or updated and whether a study of America as a 'liberal society' is still a rewarding undertaking. Offering their own respective understandings of the significance of ""The Liberal Tradition in America"" in the worlds of yesterday and today, they reassess the Hartzian legacy after half a century while also addressing the triumphs, failures, trials, and tribulations of liberalism in America. These eight distinguished scholars offer insights that are often critical of Hartz, representing a plurality of viewpoints that suggest no definitive conclusion as to the status today of his famous book. But although some may judge Hartz's work as misguided, they affirm that his concern for the fate of liberal society is still with us. These stimulating essays will reward all readers who seek a better understanding of both the Hartzian legacy and America's brand of liberalism today. More than just engaging with Hartz, they bring their own views of the American liberal tradition to the fore.

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It began modestly, as a series of high school courses to train young men and women in industrial and domestic arts. Then in 1903 the Kansas legislature set in motion a chain of educational innovations by authorizing an auxiliary program of the normal college at Emporia. The State Manual Training Normal School opened its doors to 54 students, and ten years later it became independent. The ensuing century saw it evolve into Kansas State Teachers College in 1923, then Kansas State College of Pittsburg in 1959, and finally in 1977 the Pittsburg State University that 7,000 students now attend. This book recounts how an institution of higher learning took root and grew from a vocational school to a multipurpose campus with over one hundred programs of study. Randy Roberts and Shannon Phillips chronicle the rich, colorful story of the emergence of this modern university from its chrysalis. Their's is the first photographic history of Pittsburg State - and the only history of the school to cover the years from World War II to the present. In this single stunning volume, nearly 400 photographs - many in color, and many never before published - track the institution's growth and convey its changing culture over the school's dynamic first century. Distilling the essence of Pittsburg State - from the state's largest academic building housing the Kansas Technology Center, to Emporia-Pittsburg sports rivalries, to Apple Day celebrations - this book strikes a judicious balance between narrative and illustration to reflect ideals set down in 1903 that guide the university to this day. Whether paying tribute to esteemed faculty members or revisiting significant events such as the football stadium's construction (with faculty help), it faithfully captures the history of PSU and the vision of people like R. S. Russ, Odella Nation, and Harry Hartman who played pivotal roles in shaping the university. In his foreword, PSU president Tom Bryant observes that if former president William Brandenburg were to walk across the Oval today, he would see a place that looked much different from the institution he helped build; but he would recognize a school where students are still valued and where education continues to open doors - and change lives. This photographic history will delight anyone associated with Pittsburg State University and provide inspiration for its next hundred years.

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Almost 35 years before New York saw the first great battle waged by the new United States of America for its independence, rumours of a slave conspiracy spread in the city, leading to the conviction and execution of over 70 slaves. This text retells the dramatic story of these landmark trials.

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This is the biography of Benjamin O. Davis Sr., one of just six black officers in the line of the Regular Army in the 86 years from the Civil War to World War II. He became the only one to make the rank of brigadier general.

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An illustrated collection of wetlands inhabitants and their environment. The book examines how the wetlands are not just breeding sites and stopovers for different species, but also provide important services for the state's human population.

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This work offers the writings and thoughts on Kansas of 17 authors. The contributors' views span the period 1910 to 1994: they show not only a physical love of Kansas the place, but also present it as a state of mind. Writers include William Allen White, Zula Bennington Green and Robert Day.

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An account of the Vietnam War, as seen by the American PFCs, sergeants and platoon leaders in the rivers and jungles and trenches. Into their stories, Lehrack has woven a narrative that explains the events they describe and places them into both a historical and a political context. The book tells the story of teenagers leading squads of men into the jungle on night missions, the story of boredom, confusion, and equipment shortages, of friends suddenly blown away, of disappointing homecomings. It is also the story of young men placed under unbearable strain and asked to do the impossible, who somehow stretched to meet the demands placed upon them.

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