When the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) delayed home rule for Ireland, a faction of Irish nationalists - the Irish Republican Brotherhood - decided to take direct action and infiltrated a number of other nationalist and militia outfits. On Easter Monday 1916, whilst armed men seized key points across Dublin, a rebellion was launched from the steps of the General Post Office (GPO) and Patrick Pearse proclaimed the existence of an Irish Republic and the establishment of a Provisional Government. The British response was a military one and martial law was declared throughout Ireland. Over the next five days they drove the rebels back in violent street fighting until the Provisional Government surrendered on April 29. Central Dublin was left in ruins. The leaders of the rising were tried by court martial: 15 of them were summarily executed and a further 3,500 'sympathizers' imprisoned. Although the majority of the Irish population was against the rebellion, the manner of its suppression began to turn their heads in favor of those who would call for independence from Britain 'at any cost.' Covering in detail this important milestone in the ongoing Anglo-Irish struggle, bestselling author Michael McNally thoroughly examines the politics and tactics employed, to provide a well-researched study of the roots and outcome of this conflict. Furthermore, the array of unique photographs depicting this calamitous event help to bring to life one of the key episodes that shaped Irish history.

Citizenship in a Republic is the title of a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States, at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. One notable passage from the speech is referred to as "The Man in the Arena": It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

Under constant, increasingly militarized surveillance, the Arizona-Sonora border is portrayed in the media as a site of sharp political and ethnic divisions. But this view obscures the region's deeper history. Bringing to light the shared cultural and commercial ties through which businessmen and politicians forged a transnational Sunbelt, Standing on Common Ground recovers the vibrant connections between Tucson, Arizona, and the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora. Geraldo L. Cadava corrects misunderstandings of the borderland's past and calls attention to the many types of exchange, beyond labor migrations, that demonstrate how the United States and Mexico continue to shape one another. In the 1940s, a flourishing cross-border traffic developed among entrepreneurs, tourists, and students, as politicians on both sides worked to cultivate a common ground of free enterprise.However, the modernizing forces of manufacturing, ranching, and agriculture marginalized the very workers who propped up the regional economy, and would eventually lead to the social and economic instability that has troubled the Arizona-Sonora corridor in recent times. Standing on Common Ground clarifies why we cannot understand today's fierce debates over illegal immigration and border enforcement without identifying the roots of these problems in the Sunbelt's complex pan-ethnic and transnational history.

Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.

Plato's Republic is one of the most well-known and widely discussed texts in the history of philosophy, but how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2500 years after it was originally composed? Alain Badiou invents a new genre in order to breathe fresh life into Plato's text and restore its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has retranslated the work from the original Greek and, by making various changes, adapted it for our times. In this innovative reimagining of a classic text, Badiou has removed all references specific to ancient Greek society, from the endless exchanges about the moral courage of poets to those political considerations that were only of interest to the aristocratic elite. On the other hand, Badiou has expanded the range of cultural references: here philosophy is firing on all cylinders, and Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud and Hegel. They demonstrate the enduring nature of true philosophy, always ready to move with the times. Moreover, Badiou the dramatist has made the Socratic dialogue a true oratorial contest: in his version of the Republic, the interlocutors have more in mind than merely agreeing with the Master. They stand up to him, put him on the spot and thereby show thought in motion. Through this work of writing, scholarship and philosophy, we are able, for the first time, to read a version of Plato's text which is alive, stimulating and directly relevant to our world today.