Henry M. Jackson ranks as one of the great legislators in American history. With a Congressional career spanning the tenure of nine Presidents, Jackson had an enormous impact on the most crucial foreign policy and defense issues of the Cold War era, as well as a marked impact on energy policy, civil rights, and other watershed issues in domestic politics. Jackson first arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1941 as the Democratic representative of the Second District of Washington State, at the age of 28 the youngest member of Congress. “Scoop” Jackson won reelection time and again by wide margins, moving to the Senate in 1953 and serving there until his death in 1983. He became a powerful voice in U.S. foreign policy and a leading influence in major domestic legislation, especially concerning natural resources, energy, and the environment, working effectively with Senator Warren Magnuson to bring considerable federal investment to Washington State. A standard bearer for the New Deal-Fair Deal tradition of Roosevelt and Truman, Jackson advocated a strong role for the federal government in the economy, health care, and civil rights. He was a firm believer in public control of electric and nuclear power, and leveled stern criticism at the oil industry’s “obscene profits” during the energy crisis of the 1970s. He ran for the presidency twice, in 1972 and 1976, but was defeated for the nomination first by George McGovern and then by Jimmy Carter, marking the beginning of a split between dovish and hawkish liberal Democrats that would not be mended until the ascendance of Bill Clinton. Jackson’s vision concerning America’s Cold War objectives owed much to Harry Truman’s approach to world affairs but, ironically, found its best manifestation in the actions taken by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan. An early and strong supporter of Israel and of Soviet dissidents, he strongly opposed the Nixon/Kissinger policy of detente as well as many of Carter’s methods of dealing with the Soviet Union. Robert Kaufman has immersed himself in the life and times of Jackson, poring over the more than 1,500 boxes of written materials and tapes that make up the Jackson Papers housed at the University of Washington, as well as the collections of every presidential library from Kennedy through Reagan. He interviewed many people who knew Jackson, both friends and rivals, and consulted other archival materials and published sources dealing with Jackson, relevant U.S. political history and commentary, arms negotiation documents, and congressional reports. He uses this wealth of material to present a thoughtful and encompassing picture of the ideas and policies that shaped America’s Cold War philosophy and actions.

In this magisterial history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts and print culture. In Volume 2, O'Brien looks at the genres that became characteristic of Southern thought. Throughout, he pays careful attention to the many individuals who fashioned the Southern mind, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh. Placing the South in the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history while recovering the contributions of numerous influential thinkers and writers, O'Brien's masterwork demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.

This fifteen-volume series collects the personal papers of Joseph Henry, who was the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, a founder of the American scientific community, and a pioneer experimental physicist in electricity in magnetism. The first five volumes were published under the editorship of Nathan Reingold.

Many Americans consider John F. Kennedy's presidency to represent the apex of American liberalism. Kennedy's "Vital Center" blueprint united middle-class and working-class Democrats and promoted freedom abroad while recognizing the limits of American power. Liberalism thrived in the early 1960s, but its heyday was short-lived. In Losing the Center, Jeffrey Bloodworth demonstrates how and why the once-dominant ideology began its steep decline, exploring its failures through the biographies of some of the Democratic Party's most important leaders, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Bella Abzug, Harold Ford Sr., and Jimmy Carter. By illuminating historical events through the stories of the people at the center of the action, Bloodworth sheds new light on topics such as feminism, the environment, the liberal abandonment of the working class, and civil rights legislation. This meticulously researched study authoritatively argues that liberalism's demise was prompted not by a "Republican revolution" or the mistakes of a few prominent politicians, but instead by decades of ideological incoherence and political ineptitude among liberals. Bloodworth demonstrates that Democrats caused their own party's decline by failing to realize that their policies contradicted the priorities of mainstream voters, who were more concerned about social issues than economic ones. With its unique biographical approach and masterful use of archival materials, this detailed and accessible book promises to stand as one of the definitive texts on the state of American liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Publication measures 9 x 11 in. Describes the paintings done by William Henry Jackson. Tells the story of scenes of the old West depicted in them. Includes a bibliography and index.

Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation's number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California - the Joads' newfound home - the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship. When W. B. ''Bill'' Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in downtown Bakersfield, he declared: ''We are angry, not because we were attacked but because we were attacked by a book obscene in the extreme sense of the word.'' But Gretchen Knief, the Kern County librarian, bravely fought back. ''If that book is banned today, what book will be banned tomorrow?'' Obscene in the Extreme serves as a window into an extraordinary time of upheaval in America - a time when, as Steinbeck put it, there seemed to be ''a revolution...going on.''