Max and Memie are the two principle characters. Max has an Irish father, Harry (Dingle) Bellman, and Latin American mother and grows up in desperately poor circumstances. He is a very bright, level-headed young man with natural social skills. Memie comes from an enormously wealthy background but is orphaned at the age of twelve. Sent off to the Defrugals Graduation School for the Super-Rich, she hates it and rebels against all and everything. Being taught that God is good and communism is bad, she chooses to take an opposing view. She is fearless in the face of danger and spends much time looking for revolutions of one sort or another. Max thinks Memie politically naive but, as friend and bodyguard, is forever trying to pull her back from the brink. By nature, she is difficult and neurotic but shows her caring side from time to time. Throughout there is an underlying sexual tension, but in the end, Max's efforts at keeping Memie safe comes to nothing.

A few years in our future, Ken Murphy is a National Guard Colonel and senior manager at a factory in tranquil Highview, West Virginia. When the local economy is thrown into a tailspin by a plant shutdown, Murphy is thrown out of work, with no way to pay for medical care for his son. In an attempt to prove they can operate on their own, the workers move in and occupy the factory. The government intervenes, escalating the labor dispute into a deadly confrontation. As the conflict intensifies, politicians on both sides refuse to back down or compromise, tipping the nation into a bloody civil war.

Keeping the Republic gives students the power to examine the narrative of what′s going on in American politics, distinguish fact from fiction and balance from bias, and influence the message through informed citizenship. Keeping the Republic, Brief Edition, draws students into the study of American politics, showing them how to think critically about "who gets what, and how" while exploring the twin themes of power and citizenship. With students living through one of the most challenging periods in American life, Keeping the Republic is there to be a much-needed resource to help them make sense of politics in America today and become savvy consumers of political information. Carefully condensed from the Full Edition by authors Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright, Keeping the Republic, Brief Edition, gives your students the same continuity and crucial content in a more concise, value-oriented package.

A timely work of major historical importance, examining the whole spectrum of events from the 1916 Easter Rising to the current and ongoing peace process, fully updated with a new afterword for the paperback edition. ‘An essential book ... closely-reasoned, formidably intelligent and utterly compelling ... required reading across the political spectrum ... important and riveting’ Roy Foster, The Times ‘An outstanding new book on the IRA ... a calm, rational but in the end devastating deconstruction of the IRA’ Henry McDonald, Observer ‘Superb ... the first full history of the IRA and the best overall account of the organization. English writes to the highest scholarly standards ... Moreover, he writes with the common reader in mind: he has crafted a fine balance of detail and analysis and his prose is clear, fresh and jargon-free ... sets a new standard for debate on republicanism’ Peter Hart, Irish Times 'The one book I recommend for anyone trying to understand the craziness and complexity of the Northern Ireland tragedy.’ Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes

The 1998 election was the first in the Federal Rupublic to directly oust a government, ending the Kohl era and bringing the new Social Democrat-Green coalition to power. At this time of great change, leading international scholars reflect on the dramatic transformations of Germany's past and on Germany's future prospects.

In 2016 the Democratic Party lost control of every branch of government. Countless explanations and excuses have been offered, but in this heartfelt, evocative book longtime Democratic activist Thomas B. Reston illuminates the true cause: the Party has lost its soul. In Reston’s view the Party has abandoned any unifying idealistic message. Instead of crafting policies and platforms that appeal to the nation as a whole, Democrats target specific blocs of voters –and change their talking points accordingly. This divisive approach will not end well for Democrats, or the country as a whole. If they want to remain competitive on the national stage, Reston argues, Democrats need a coherent, blunt set of American ideals. The good news is, they already have one. In Soul of a Democrat, Reston takes us on a journey through the history of the Party with thumbnail portraits of its most important figures, illuminating the core ideals and principles they fought for. Thomas Jefferson founded the Democratic Party to lift up the people as a whole by empowering each individual citizen. Andrew Jackson committed the party to always fight for outsiders. Woodrow Wilson insisted on a progressive respect for ideas. William Jennings Bryan introduced the altruistic Social Gospel. Franklin D. Roosevelt promised economic security for all. Lyndon B. Johnson championed the ongoing struggle for civil rights. These Democratic statesmen knew that a successful party needs strong idealistic roots, an understandable message, and an emphatic focus on the purpose of what it is doing, instead of on the mechanics. Reston’s concise and elegant book shows modern Democrats how to learn from their own past, and once again become The Party of The People.

"Sinha not only has taken on this vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally and spatially. . . . She covers these difficult issues with remarkable skill and clarity." —S. C. Gwynne, New York Times Book Review We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed—and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the "corrupt bargain" of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha’s startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and take us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote—and which Sinha calls the "last Reconstruction amendment." Within this grand frame, Sinha narrates the rise and fall of what she calls the "Second American Republic." The Reconstruction of the South, a process driven by the alliance between the formerly enslaved at the grassroots and Radical Republicans in Congress, is central to her story, but only part of it. As she demonstrates, the US Army’s conquest of Indigenous nations in the West, labor conflict in the North, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of an overseas American empire were all part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers, immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s, Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom. A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age—and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.