The silent majority

Sample

Mark Wahlgren Summers

"For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently enslaved for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction's need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. This book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction's demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors' aims in 1865 were met--and at what cost"--

Sample

Robert P. Steed ... [et al

Much of the recent scholarship about American political parties has attempted to assess the condition of the party system. Are parties becoming increasingly obsolete? Have they forfeited the functions they traditionally performed? Or have they adopted a different role in the political system such that their achievements have gone unrecognized? In short, are American political parties in decline, resurgence, or what? Using information gathered from local party officials in the eleven southern states, the authors examine such key data as who becomes involved in local party organizations and why; how parties recruit and retain workers; what ideological and issue orientations motivate these activists; how intraparty factionalism affects local party organizations; and what connection exists between the party organization and its external environment.

Sample

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

"Every four years as the presidential elections approach, the alarm bell clangs for progressive-minded people, warning them about the looming take-over of the country by Republican ultras intent on yoking the nation under a fascist regime. Every four years, the Democratic Party offers itself as the only bulwark against the jackboot. Every four years, this argument becomes more and more labored; the differences between the two parties harder to detect." "In this volume, the editors and writers of CounterPunch, the radical newsletter and popular website, reveal how each party is fattened by the same roster of corporate contributors; bows to the desires of defense contractors and media conglomerates; hawks an economic program that shifts money up the tree to the super-rich; imprisons the poor with starvation wages or puts them behind bars in a vast gulag mostly created by that bipartisan failure, the War on Drugs." "The message of this book is: don't put the cart before the horse. First come the ideals, the social movements, that create the gravitational pulls that politicians have to heed. Justice won't come to America just because some candidate pledged it on the final night of a convention. It will come through people's movements, citizens organizing together in the workplace, or on the front lines defending their air, their water and their forests. There's work to be done. Let's get to it."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

R.B. Bernstein

Discusses the private life and public career of the fifth president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence.