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Benjamin Franklin’s Humor
Humor is sometimes a serious business, especially the humor of Benjamin Franklin, a master at revealing the human condition through comedy. For the country's bicentennial, Reader's Digest named Franklin “Man of the Year” for embodying the characteristics we admire most about ourselves as Americans: humor, irony, energy, and fresh insight. Recreating Franklin's words in the way that his contemporaries would have read and understood them, this book chronicles Franklin's use (and abuse) of humor for commercial, diplomatic, and political purposes. Dedicated to the uniquely appealing and enduring humor of Benjamin Franklin, the book samples Franklin's apologues on the necessity of ...Read More
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Kentucky's Governors
Compiled and edited by Lowell H. Harrison, the essays in Kentucky’s Governors profile every chief executive of the Bluegrass State from eighteenth-century governor Isaac Shelby to Ernie Fletcher.
First published in 1985, this edition of Kentucky’s Governors is expanded and revised to include governors Wilkinson, Jones, Patton, and Fletcher, as well as new information on respected figures such as Louie B. Nunn.
An introduction by Kentucky’s historian laureate, Thomas D. Clark, provides key insights into successive governors’ evolving constitutional powers and their changing roles in political debates and policy formation. Following Clark’s overview, each chapter presents significant biographical information while ...Read More
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Healing Richard Nixon: A Doctor's Memoir
Richard M. Nixon remains an enigma even thirty years after his resignation. Of the many portraits of this complex man, none have been more intimate or revealing than this memoir from his personal physician, friend, and confidante of more than forty years, John C. Lungren, M.D. Dr. Lungren, with his son and co-author John C. Lungren Jr., portrays Nixon as a paradoxical man—intense, compassionate, guarded, intelligent, resilient, deeply religious, enormously successful but ultimately tragic.
Lungren describes his battle to restore the president’s health after his resignation and reveals previously unknown details about Nixon’s two intensive hospitalizations, his near fatal vascular ...Read More
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1816: America Rising
The year 1816 found America on the cusp of political, social,cultural, and economic modernity. Celebrating its fortieth year of independence, the country’s sense of self was maturing. Americans, who had emerged from the War of 1812 with their political systems intact, embraced new opportunities. For the first time, citizens viewed themselves not as members of a loose coalition of states but as part of a larger union. This optimism was colored, however, by bizarre weather. Periods of extreme cold and severe drought swept the northern states and the upper south throughout 1816, which was sometimes referred to as “The Year ...Read More
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From My Old Kentucky Home to the White House: The Political Journey of Catherine Conner
This lively memoir recounts the story of a determined woman who led a remarkable life in the highest circles of power in both state and national politics. Catherine Conner spent her formative years on a farm named “Solitude," located outside of Bardstown. Her father, who taught her early to ride and swim, told the young woman, “I can't teach you how to be a lady, but I can teach you how to behave like a gentleman.” She was weaned on a secret “early breakfast” of bourbon and milk toddies that her father brought to her every morning. Though she enjoyed ...Read More
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Truman Defeats Dewey
In 1948, Harry S. Truman pulled off the greatest upset in U.S. political history. With his party split on both the left and the right, and facing a formidable Republican opponent in New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Missourian was thought to have little chance of remaining in the White House. But politics in the postwar years were changing dramatically. Truman and his advisers successfully read those changes: their strategy focused on building a coalition of organized labor, African Americans in large northern cities, and traditional liberals--and ignoring protests from the conservative South. Donaldson argues that Dewey did nearly ...Read More
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Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin: America's Ambassadors to Moscow
On November 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov signed an agreement establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two days later Roosevelt named the first of five ambassadors he would place in Moscow between 1933 and 1945. Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin tells the dramatic and important story of these ambassadors and their often contentious relationships with the two most powerful men in the world.
More than fifty years after his death, Roosevelt's foreign policy, especially regarding the Soviet Union, remains a subject of intense debate. Dennis Dunn offers ...Read More
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Henry Clay and the American System
This detailed study of Henry Clay and the American System—a program of vigorous economic nationalism dependent on active government and constitutional aspects of what was perhaps Clay’s greatest contribution to national policy, a contribution that has received surprisingly little study until now.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the new United States experienced rapid material growth, transforming a largely agrarian, pre-modern economy into a diversified, industrializing one. As Speaker of the House in the years following the War of 1812, and later as founder of the Whig party, Clay argued strongly for the development of a home market ...Read More
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Congressional Committee Chairmen: Three Who Made an Evolution
Congress does most of its work in committee, and no understanding of that body can be complete without an analysis of its committees and those who shape them. Andrée Reeves now offers a rare glimpse into the workings of committee chairmanship over a span of thirty-three years-how three chairmen operated and how they influenced their committee and its impact.
As Reeves demonstrates, the chair is the most important player in a congressional committee-the one who holds more cards than his colleagues and can deal a winning hand or call a bluff. His use of institutional and personal resources affects the ...Read More
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John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire
This is the story of a man, a treaty, and a nation. The man was John Quincy Adams, regarded by most historians as America's greatest secretary of state. The treaty was the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, of which Adams was the architect. It acquired Florida for the young United States, secured a western boundary extending to the Pacific, and bolstered the nation's position internationally. As William Weeks persuasively argues, the document also represented the first determined step in the creation of an American global empire.
Weeks follows the course of the often labyrinthine negotiations by which Adams wrested the treaty ...Read More
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