The Great Depression and the New Deal touched the lives of almost every Kentuckian during the 1930s. Fifty years later the Commonwealth is still affected by the legacies of that era and the policies of the Roosevelt administration. George T. Blakey has written the first full study of this turbulent decade in Kentucky, and he offers a fresh perspective on the New Deal programs by viewing them from the local and state level rather than from Washington. Thousands of Kentuckians worked for New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Projects Administration; thousands more kept their homes through loans from the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Tobacco growers adopted new production techniques and rural farms received their first electricity because of the Agricultural Adjustment and Rural Electrification administrations. The New Deal stretched from the Harlan County coal mines to a TVA dam near Paducah, and it encompassed subjects as small as Social Security pension checks and as large as revived Bourbon distilleries. The impact of these phenomena on Kentucky was both beneficial and disruptive, temporary and enduring. Blakey analyzes the economic effects of this unprecedented and massive government spending to end the depression. He also discusses the political arena in which Governors Laffoon, Chandler, and Johnson had to wrestle with new federal rules. And he highlights social changes the New Deal brought to the Commonwealth: accelerated urbanization, enlightened land use, a lessening of state power and individualism, and a greater awareness of Kentucky history. Hard Times and New Deal weaves together private memories of older Kentuckians and public statements of contemporary politicians; it includes legislative debates and newspaper accounts, government statistics and personal reminiscences. The result is a balanced and fresh look at the patchwork of emergency and reform activities which many people loved, many others hated, but no one could ignore.

The U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service manage about 628 million acres of public land, mostly in the 11 western states and Alaska. Under the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (FLTFA), revenue raised from selling BLM lands is available to the agencies, primarily to acquire non-federal land within the boundaries of land they already own -- known as in-holdings, which can create significant land management problems. To acquire land, the agencies can nominate parcels under state-level interagency agreements or the Secretaries can use their discretion to initiate acquisitions. FLTFA expires in 2010. The author was asked to determine (1)FLTFA revenue generated, (2)challenges to future sales, (3)FLTFA expenditures, and (4)challenges to future acquisitions. This is an edited and indexed edition.

The official report from the House Intelligence Committee on Donald Trump’s secret pressure campaign against Ukraine, featuring an exclusive introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author and biographer Jon Meacham For only the fourth time in American history, the House of Representatives has conducted an impeachment inquiry into a sitting United States president. This landmark document details the findings of the House Intelligence Committee’s historic investigation of whether President Donald J. Trump committed impeachable offenses when he sought to have Ukraine announce investigations of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Penetrating a dense web of connected activity by the president, his ambassador Gordon Sondland, his personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and many others, these pages offer a damning, blow-by-blow account of the president’s attempts to “use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election” and his subsequent attempts to obstruct the House investigation into his actions. Published here with an introduction offering critical context from bestselling presidential historian Jon Meacham, The Impeachment Report is necessary reading for every American concerned about the fate of our democracy.

Airpower is not widely understood. Even though it has come to play an increasingly important role in both peace and war, the basic concepts that define and govern airpower remain obscure to many people, even to professional military officers. This fact is largely due to fundamental differences of opinion as to whether or not the aircraft has altered the strategies of war or merely its tactics. If the former, then one can see airpower as a revolutionary leap along the continuum of war; but if the latter, then airpower is simply another weapon that joins the arsenal along with the rifle, machine gun, tank, submarine, and radio. This book implicitly assumes that airpower has brought about a revolution in war. It has altered virtually all aspects of war: how it is fought, by whom, against whom, and with what weapons. Flowing from those factors have been changes in training, organization, administration, command and control, and doctrine. War has been fundamentally transformed by the advent of the airplane.