"Now updated with new facts, and abridged for use in Soviet history courses, this gripping book assembles top-secret Soviet documents, translated into English, from the era of Stalin's purges. The dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret transcripts, and other documents expose the hidden inner workings of the Communist Party and the dark inhumanity of the purge process."[book cover].

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War. But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history.

His journey began when he became consciously aware that he was walking on a road that ran through the inside of a dark, strange-looking cave. He has no memory of how he arrived inside this place or where he was before he appeared there. He is forced to move through this journey by an invisible force compelling him to move forward. With each one of these forcible footsteps that he has taken on this road, he senses the road is alive and is trying to prevent him from reaching the end of the journey by playing tricks on his mind with realistic illusion. But as he goes forward, he enters into the unconscious world of a new reality that is sending him telepathic messages, full of unbelievable knowledge and energy as he moves through this living cave that breathes.

"Here are told the stories of five great travelers: Friar John of Plano Carpini, Friar Odoric the Bohemian, William of Rubruquis, Ibn Batuta the Moor and Marco Polo of Venice, together with their own descriptions of the marvels of Cathay, the wonders of India, the four rivers of Paradise and the islands of the South; and the tales that are in the book of Sir John de Mandeville.