Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century... even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.            But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville’s inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Clarel is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville’s poem to new life.

“Once there were two brothers. One went to sea and the other became Vice President. Neither was heard from again.” Vice... President Marshall’s humorous remark about the Vice-Presidency reflects the neglect the office has been given. Yet, as “a heartbeat away” from the Presidency, the office is the key to smooth transitions. With the growth of the “modern Presidency” the Vice President’s role has also grown. This work is a generic work on the office. It follows a thematic, rather than a biographical approach and includes such topics as considerations in selecting a vice-presidential running mate; the evolving role of the office; the Vice President’s role as administration spokesperson; the VP’s relationship to presidential staff; the importance of both presidential and vice-presidential personality in defining the role of a particular Vice-President; the question of whether the Vice Presidency is a stepping stone or stumbling block to election to the Presidency. The work also compares the three instances of succession (Truman; Johnson; Ford) during the time frame under study, pointing out that a Vice President has a one in five chance of moving into the Presidency via succession. Included, too, is a succinct discussion of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, a delineation of both the Vice President’s role during presidential disability as well as the process for filling vacancies in the Vice Presidency.

An examination of privacy and the evolution of communication, from broken sealing wax to high-tech wiretappingA sweeping story of the right to privacy... as it sped along colonial postal routes, telegraph wires, and even today’s fiber-optic cables, American Privacy traces the lineage of cultural norms and legal mandates that have swirled around the Fourth Amendment since its adoption. Legally, technologically, and historically grounded, Frederick Lane’s book presents a vivid and penetrating exploration that, in the words of people’s historian Howard Zinn, “challenges us to defend our most basic rights.” 

American Progressivism is a one-volume edition of some of the most important essays, speeches, and book excerpts from the leading figures of national... Progressivism. It is designed for classroom use, includes an accessible interpretive essay, and introduces each selection with a brief historical and conceptual background. The introductory essay is written with the student in mind, and addresses the important characteristics of Progressive thought and the role of Progressives in the development of the American political tradition. Students of American political thought, American politics, American history, the presidency, Congress, and political parties will find this reader to be an invaluable source for insight into Progressivism.

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post–World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive... housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives. American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his... country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative.

As a child Aminatta Forna witnessed the upheavals of postcolonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness of exile in Britain, and the terrible... consequences of her dissident father's stand against tyranny. Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had been one of the first black students to come to Britain after the war. He stole the heart of Aminatta's mother and returned with her to Sierra Leone. But as Aminatta Forna shows with compelling clarity, the old Africa was torn apart by new ways of Western parliamentary democracy, which gave birth only to dictatorships and corruption of hitherto undreamed-of magnitude. It was not long before Mohamed languished in jail as a prisoner of conscience, and worse was to follow. Aminatta's search for the truth that shaped both her childhood and the nation's destiny began among the country's elite and took her into the heart of rebel territory. The Devil that Danced on the Water is a book of pain and anger and sorrow, written with tremendous dignity and beautiful precision.

Join the editors of TIME in a fast-paced journey through the adventures of man on Planet Earth in this richly illustrated volume, which explores... history's most important turning points. Here are the great religions: Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Here are the great empires, from the vanished civilization of the Minoans on Crete to the glories of Classical Greece and Rome to the mysterious collapse of the Maya culture in Mexico. Here are the visionary scientists who altered our view of nature's laws: Newton and Darwin, Copernicus and Einstein. Here are the great conquerors,including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan and Napoleon. And here are the great clashes between cultures, as Christian knights besiege Muslim citadels in the Crusades, a handful of Spanish conquistadors topple the empires of the Aztecs and Incas, and Japan attacks the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The book is arranged chronologically, rapidly accelerating in pace as it reports the development of the technologies that define the modern world, from the coming of the railroad and the telegraph to the advent of photography, the cinema and television and culminating in the invention of the transistor and the boot-up of the World Wide Web. And it offers fresh perspectives on cultures too often overlooked, from the Golden Age of Islam to the voyages of Viking mariners to China's renascence under the Ming dynasty. Presented in a special oversized format, this beautifully illustrated volume also offers a sweeping panorama of man's greatest artistic achievements, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to marvelous medieval maps and on to the great paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance. As an illuminating guide to mankind's triumphs and sorrows, and as a gallery of human culture, science, art and architecture, it offers a dazzling and provocative encounter with the great turning points of history.