The Gilded Age Speaker Who Made the Rules for American Politics
Defining a "statesman" as "a successful politician who is dead," Thomas Brackett Reed gave himself some latitude in pursuing his goals as a congressional leader. His leadership style is encapsulated in the Reed Rules, which serve as the institutional foundation of the modern House of Representatives and as a metaphor for the practice of power ......
In this groundbreaking work, Cara Rogers Stevens examines the fascinating life of Thomas Jefferson's book, Notes on the State of Virginia, from its innocuous composition in the early 1780s to its use as a political weapon by both pro- and antislavery forces in the early nineteenth century. Initially written as a brief statistical introduction to ......
Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award. Master Corporal Jan Stanislaw Jakobczak Memorial Book Award. November 1917. The American troops were poorly trained, deficient in military equipment and doctrine, not remotely ready for armed conflict on a large scale-and they'd arrived on the Western front to help the French push back the ......
In Thunder from the Prairie, Jerry Harrington explores the life of Harold E. Hughes: a man of working-class origins who overcame severe alcoholism to become Iowa governor (1963-1969) and US Senator (1969-1974).As a Democratic governor in traditionally Republican Iowa, Hughes, through his charismatic leadership, helped transform Iowa into a ......
Nearly onequarter of America is covered with forests-almost 800 million acres. There are 151 national forests, comprising close to 200 million acres in thirtynine states and Puerto Rico. These protected lands are administered by the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Department of Agriculture. David Clary here examines the history of and ......
In 2007, for the first time in nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving the Second Amendment. The resulting decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first time the Court declared a firearms restriction to be unconstitutional on the basis of the Second Amendment. It was followed two years later by a ......
Thomas S. Foley, a Democratic representative from the traditionally Republican region of eastern Washington, served in Congress from 1964 to 1994. In 1989 he became the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives from a district west of Texas. His thirty years of experience as a Democrat representing a Republican-leaning district contributed ......
Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley shocked America in 1948 with their allegations that Communist spies had penetrated the American government. The resulting perjury trial of Alger Hiss is already legendary, but Chambers and Bentley also named Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking Treasury official. (Hiss himself thought that White had been the ......
A Kansas Notable BookNearing 60, William D. Street (1851-1911) sat down to write his memoir of frontier life. Street's early years on the plains of western Kansas were both ordinary and extraordinary; ordinary in what they reveal about the everyday life of so many who went out to the western frontier, extraordinary in their breadth and depth of ......
