As a boy, John Quincy Adams witnessed a war that led to the birth of a new nation. As a young man, he traveled throughout Europe, gaining a broad view of the world. He began to think about the kinds of improvements he wanted for the new country. Some of these came into being during his lifetime. Most came long after his death.

One of the most celebrated women of her time, a spellbinding speaker dubbed the Queen of the Lyceum and America's Joan of Arc, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades.

"There is nothing like a dame," proclaims the song from South Pacific. Certainly there is nothing like the fast-talking dame of screen comedies in the 1930s and '40s. In this engaging book, film scholar and movie...

Between 1880 and 1914, tens of thousands of men and women left France for distant religious missions...

The biography of Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Sherley being scattered over many diflerent vohimes, some in manuscript, and some in print,their travels and adventures are, in general, little known, and have...

Eli Whitney was bor n on December 8, 1765, one month after the f irst British tax was placed on the American colonies. Taxes such as these eventually led to the American Revolution.

The copyrights of Herman Kahn’s most significant works are held by Hudson Institute. The selection of texts resented in this book is based on these works. We would like to thank Hudson Institute, its Board of Trustees, and...

"Time equals progression— progression equals death."
The equation is logical. But few of us think of each moment and each physical movement as comprising a path to our certain end. Surely such torture would drive us mad. But for Ed Zine, who suffers from a debilitating form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), this statement is a mantra that holds him prisoner—figuratively and literally.

From Neville Chamberlain's disastrous appeasement of Hitler in Munich to Reagan's pivotal encounter with Gorbachev in Geneva, the history of the twentieth century as told through its most fateful summit meetings.

The first modern biography of an American financial giant.
Using previously unreleased archives, Edward J. Renehan Jr. narrates the compelling life of Cornelius Vanderbilt: willful progenitor of modern American business. Vanderbilt made his initial fortune building ferry and cargo routes...

Everyone has seen the footage: a heavily bearded Saddam Hussein blinking under the bright lights of infantry cameras, dazed to find himself in U.S. Army custody. Yet while the breaking news...

Liberia was in the headlines in 1990 when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid seige to the capital, Monrovia. In response to the crisis...

The Addict opens a window on the very private world of prescription drug addiction, revealing the harrowing and riveting story of a young woman whose life has been taken over by an impulse that she can't control and a need that she can't extinguish. Lucy's first appointment with Dr. Michael Stein was on a sunny day in April, and the minute she sat down she said, "I'm here for your program," beginning a series of intimate encounters during the course of a year that took her back to the origins of her addiction and unraveled a life driven by compulsion and the constant pursuit of the next pill...

The first woman judge in the state of North Carolina and the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court, Susie Marshall Sharp (1907-1996) broke new ground for women in the legal profession. When she retired in 1979, she left a legacy burnished by her tireless pursuit of lucidity in the law, honesty in judges, and humane conditions in prisons...

In my work on this book I have been assisted in many different ways. The Maxwell Cummings Family of Montreal and the 1939 Club of Los Angeles have endowed chairs, at Tel Aviv University and at UCLA, that facilitated the mplementation of this project. Short stays at the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine (1992) and at the Getty
Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles (1996) provided me with the most invaluable of all privileges: free time. Throughout the years, I have greatly benefited from the vast resources and the generous help offered by the Wiener Library at Tel Aviv University, the University Research Library at UCLA, the Leo Baeck Institute
Archives in New York, and the library and archives of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.