From 250 to 150 B.C., the Adena people constructed a burial mound by moving 60,000 tons of earth. The resulting formation, the largest conical burial mound in the country, is located in the middle of the namesake town of Moundsville, West Virginia. Although the Grave Creek Mound, as it is now called, attracts spectators from miles around and is the showpiece of the locals, it is not the only noteworthy feature of the town. Fokker Aircraft Factory, the Fostoria Glass Company, United States Stamping Company, and the Marx Toy Company were all located in Moundsville and nearby Glen Dale, and many of the employees were town residents. The area is also home to the old West Virginia Penitentiary, which is now a national historical landmark, and the Daily Echo, a country newspaper that has been the voice of the community for more than 100 years. The county seat of Marshall County, Moundsville is a Southern town immersed in history and full of people dedicated to its preservation.

A collection of Peanuts cartoons featuring Snoopy.

When Texas Prison Scams Religion exposes corruption in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, especially in the abuse of religion. In many ways, this book is a literature review of 1,800-plus works that defends freedom of conscience in prison while exposing the unconstitutionality of the seminary program that “buys faith with favor” from prisoners. The state veritably ordains the prisoner a “Field Minister” that represents the offices of the Governor, TDCJ Director, and wardens throughout the prison. Therein, TDCJ lies about neutrality in a program all about Christian missions and lies again in falsely certifying elementary Bible students as counselors. Why is the director sponsoring psychopaths counseling psychopaths? In fact, TDCJ pays $314 million a year to UTMB for psychiatric care and receives not a single report of the care given, and worse, for UTMB generates no reports itself. The underbelly TDCJ’s executive culture of cover up is exposed. TDCJ has hired the lowest qualified of the applicant pool many times in the last 25 years and regularly destroys statistics on violence. TDCJ Dir. Collier led the prison to model Louisiana Warden Burl Cain, the most scandal-ridden in penal history according to a host of published news stories for 20 years. Therein, Collier led TDCJ to favor the smallest segment of religious society within Evangelical Dominionism. Texas has no business endorsing the truth of any religion over another. We close with a proposal that utilizes the 400,000,000 hours of officer contact over ten years as a definitive influence in contrast to a commissioner that spends less than 10 minutes on each decision. Maness has been lobbying Austin for 15 years to definitively access staff for his “100,000 Mothers’ 1% Certainty Parole Texas Constitutional Amendment,” which would revolutionize prison culture and save Texans millions of the dollars.

Annotation This important new work is a major analysis of the foundation of Eric Voegelin's political science. Barry Cooper maintains that the writings Voegelin undertook in the 1940s provide the groundwork for the brilliant book that is one of his best known, The New Science of Politics. At the time of that book's publication, however, few were aware of the enormous knowledge and accomplished scholarship that lay behind its illuminating, although sometimes baffling, formulations. By focusing on several of the key chapters in Voegelin's eight- volume History of Political Ideas, especially the studies of Bodin, Vico, and Schelling, Cooper shows how those studies provide the basis for Voegelin's thought. Investigating Voegelin's study of Oriental influences on Western political "ideas," especially Mongol constitutional law, and his study of Toynbee, Cooper seeks to demonstrate the vast range of materials Voegelin used. Cooper contends that, as with other great thinkers, political crisis, specifically the world war of 1939-1945, stimulated Voegelin's intellectual and spiritual achievement. He provides an analysis of Voegelin's immediate concern with the course of World War II, his ability to understand those dramatic events in a large context, and his ability to provide an insightful account of the causes, the significance, and the consequences of the spiritual and political disorder that was evident all around him. In Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, Cooper makes the connection between Voegelin's political writings of the 1940s and the meditative interpretations that began to appear with the publication of Anamnesis and with the later volumes of Order and History much more intelligible than does any existing discussion of Voegelin. Scholars in intellectual history and political science will benefit enormously from this valuable new addition to Voegelin studies

Looks at the early years of the motion picture industry through 1907.

Here is a comprehensive survey of the film and television career of London-born director Andrew V. McLaglen. An opening biography considers the events and circumstances that contributed to his development as a filmmaker, including his relationships with his actor father Victor McLaglen, fellow director John Ford, and motion picture icon John Wayne, who collaborated with Andrew McLaglen on such films as McLintock! (1963), Hellfighters (1968), The Undefeated (1969) and Chisum (1970). An extensive annotated filmography covers every theatrical feature film McLaglen directed, as well as his television productions and the films he worked on prior to becoming a director. Appendices provide information on the numerous documentaries in which McLaglen has appeared, and a list of stage plays he has directed since his retirement from motion pictures in 1989.