The gradual secularization of European society and culture is often said to characterize the development of the modern world, and the early Italian humanists played a pioneering role in this process. Here Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, have edited and translated seven primary texts that shed important light on the subject of "civic humanism" in the Renaissance.Included is a treatise of Francesco Petrarca on government, two representative letters from Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni's panegyric to Florence, Francesco Barbaro's letter on "wifely" duty, Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue on avarice, and Angelo Poliziano's vivid history of the Pazzi conspiracy. Each translation is prefaced by an essay on the author and a short bibliography. The substantial introductory essay offers a concise, balanced summary of the historiographcal issues connected with the period.

Italian humanism - Documents written by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) "How a ruler ought to govern his State"--Coluccio Salutati "Letter to Peregrino Zambeccari" - Leonardo Bruni "Panegyric to the City of Florence" - Francesco Barbaro "On wifely duties" - Poggio Bracciolini "On avarice" - Angelo Poliziano "The Pazzi conspiracy."

Earth Republic: Chatter from the Capital’s Cauldron (and Beyond) is a collection of ten free-wheeling articles written in conversational style, verging on the informally careless. The potpourri of commentaries on theatre, sport, food, agriculture, world politics, Bruce Springsteen, Imran Khan, women’s rights, world peace, people’s belief systems, the right to privacy judgement… all with the flavour of New Delhi, right up to the present-day NCR, with tribal India and outer space forming a billowing backdrop for the grand production that is the Republic of Earth. Earth Republic brings to the recliner, as well as to the office-desk-trying-to-look-busy, thoughts from time and space, and last night’s rally at the mantle-piece. It is an invitation to forge reality and rattle the galaxy, all in one pranayama-yoga clarion call.

While fighting a war for the Union, the Republican party attempted to construct the world's most powerful and most socially advanced nation. Rejecting the common assumption that wartime domestic legislation was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy. Republicans were a dynamic, progressive party, the author shows, that championed a specific type of economic growth. They floated billions of dollars in bonds, developed a national currency and banking system, imposed income taxes and high tariffs, passed homestead legislation, launched the Union Pacific railroad, and eventually called for the end of slavery. Their aim was to encourage the economic success of individual Americans and to create a millennium for American farmers, laborers, and small capitalists. However, Richardson demonstrates, while Republicans were trying to construct a nation of prosperous individuals, they were laying the foundation for rapid industrial expansion, corporate corruption, and popular protest. They created a newly active national government that they determined to use only to promote unregulated economic development. Unwittingly, they ushered in the Gilded Age.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

St. Augustine and Roman law are the two bridges from Athens and Jerusalem to the world of modern law. Augustine's almost eerily modern political realism was based upon his deep appreciation of human evil, arising from his insights into the human personality, the product of his reflections on his own life and the history of his times. These insights have traveled well through the ages and are mirrored in the pages of Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt. The articles in this volume describe the life and world of Augustine and the ways in which he conceived both justice and law. They also discuss the little recognized Augustinian contributions to the field of modern hermeneutics - the discipline which informs the art of legal interpretation. Finally, they include Augustine's valuable discussion of church/state relations, the law of just wars, and proper role and limits of coercion, and the procreative dimensions of marriage. The volume also includes an extremely useful, definitive bibliography of Augustine and the law, and will leave readers with an increased appreciation of the contributions which Augustine has made to the history of jurisprudence. No one can read Augustine and these articles on his view of the law without taking away a new view of the law itself.