Academia's golden age

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Timothy Reese Cain

"Today, academic freedom is a core value in American higher education, and tenure is its primary protection. Yet modern understandings of faculty rights and responsibilities did not arise without difficulties; they were debated and defined by American academics in the decades leading up to World War II. Conditional agreements during this period set the stage for modern conditions of faculty work and fundamental elements of American higher education. Through its examination of the development and experiences of academic freedom and tenure--and, especially, the activities of the professional, voluntary, and labor organizations that battled over their establishment--this book provides the historical context necessary for understanding modern debates over academic freedom, tenure, and the widespread casualization of academic labor"--

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Mary Doria Russell

Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God. It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war's final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell's many fans and earn her even more.

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Robert F. Rogers

"Ferdinand Magellan's fateful landfall on Guam, the first inhabited Pacific island known to Europeans, ushered in the age of European exploration in the Pacific and led inexorably to foreign domination of every traditional island society throughout Oceania. In the centuries after Magellan's landing in 1521, Guam became a small green oasis for alien priests, soldiers, traders, pirates, and other expatriates. Destiny's Landfall tells the story of this colorful cavalcade of outsiders and of the indigenous Chamorro people who, in a remarkable feat of resiliency, maintained their language and their identity despite three centuries of colonial domination by three of history's most powerful nation-states: Spain, Japan, and the United States." "Today, international airlines, nuclear-powered submarines, and satellite tracking stations have replaced Spanish galleons. But though Americanized, modernized, and multiethnic, Guam continues to fulfill the geopolitical role imposed on it by outsiders. In this comprehensive look at one of the world's last colonies, Robert E. Rogers evokes the dramatic but little-known saga of Guam's people - from the precontact era to Spanish domination, from colonial rule under a U.S. naval government to the massive military invasions of World War II, and on through the booms and busts, the scandals and victories experienced by Guamanians in their still-unfulfilled quest to regain control of their future."--BOOK JACKET.

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James MacGregor Burns

The divisions between a man of ideals and a protector of presidential authority is the focus of this detailed study of Roosevelt during the difficult war years.