The domination of strangers

Sample

Jim Egan

The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies.

Sample

Saul Kelly, Anthony Gorst

"Suez 1956 was the greatest political crisis of the 1950s, which tested the impartiality of the British Civil Service almost to breaking point. Yet there has been no proper or systematic study of the role of Whitehall in the Suez Crisis. This volume seeks to remedy this deficiency by focusing on the parts played by key individuals in vital posts at crucial times in order to show how the policy process worked during the crisis.". "Each contribution deals with a key 'Whitehall warrior' and seeks to define their private and public attitudes to events in order to determine what influence they had on policy making and to highlight any dilemmas they may have faced."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Mary Beth Norton

"Focusing on the first half-century of English settlement - approximately 1620 to 1670 - Mary Beth Norton looks not only at what colonists actually did but also at the philosophical basis for what they thought they were doing. She weaves theory and reality into a tapestry that reveals colonial life as more varied than we have supposed. She draws our attention to all early dysfunctional family extending over several generations and colonies.". "The basic worldview of this early period, Norton demonstrates, envisaged family, society, and state as similar institutions. She shows us how, because of that familial analogy, women who wielded power in the household could also wield surprising authority outside the home. We see, for example, Mistress Margaret Brent given authority as attorney for Lord Baltimore, Maryland's Proprietor, and Mistress Anne Hutchinson, who sought and assumed religious authority, causing the greatest political crisis in Massachusetts Bay.". "Norton also describes the American beginnings of another way of thinking. She argues that an imbalanced sex ratio in the Chesapeake colonies made it impossible to establish "normal" familial structures, and thus equally impossible to employ the family model as unself-consciously as was done in New England. The Chesapeake, accordingly, became a practical laboratory for the working out of a "Lockean" political system that drew a line between family and state, between "public" and "private." In this scheme, women had no formal, recognized role beyond the family. It is this worldview that eventually came to characterize the Enlightenment and that still looms large in today's culture wars."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

David Marquand

David Marquand's account of how the Labour Party made itself electable and why it remained in the wilderness for so many years now has a new introduction and controversial new chapters on Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.