From Robert Kagan, a leading scholar of American foreign policy, comes an insightful analysis of the state of European and American foreign relations. At a time when relations between the United States and Europe are at their lowest ebb since World War II, this brief but cogent book is essential reading. Kagan forces both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Europe, he argues, has moved beyond power into a self-contained world of laws, rules, and negotiation, while America operates in a “Hobbesian” world where rules and laws are unreliable and military force is often necessary. Tracing how this state of affairs came into being over the past fifty years and fearlessly exploring its ramifications for the future, Kagan reveals the shape of the new transatlantic relationship. The result is a book that promises to be as enduringly influential as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown. Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America's downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women's rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district. After the city's Great Fire, Chicago's downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women's conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men. A Shoppers' Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women's new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

This fascinating book explores the connections between chaos theory, physics, biology, and mathematics. Its award-winning computer graphics, optical illusions, and games illustrate the concept of self-similarity, a typical property of fractals. The author -- hailed by Publishers Weekly as a modern Lewis Carroll -- conveys memorable insights in the form of puns and puzzles. 1992 edition.

Most Americans believe the United States had been an isolationist power until the twentieth century. This is wrong. In a riveting and brilliantly revisionist work of history, Robert Kagan, bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power, shows how Americans have in fact steadily been increasing their global power and influence from the beginning. Driven by commercial, territorial, and idealistic ambitions, the United States has always perceived itself, and been seen by other nations, as an international force. This is a book of great importance to our understanding of our nation’s history and its role in the global community.

In this fascinating analysis, Cher Krause Knight peels back the actual and contextual layers of Walt Disney's inspiration and vision for Disney World in central Florida, exploring the reasons why the resort has emerged as such a prominent sociocultural force. Knight investigates every detail, from the scale and design of the buildings to the sidewalk infrastructure to which items could and could not be sold in the shops, discussing how each was carefully configured to shape the experience of every visitor. Expertly weaving themes of pilgrimage, paradise, fantasy, and urbanism, she delves into the unexpected nuances and contradictions of this elaborately conceived playland of the imagination.

In 1967 the Peace Corps sent P. F. Kluge to paradise - or so the American possessions in Micronesia seemed. His assignment was as noble as it was adventurous: to help the people of those half-forgotten Pacific islands move from old to new, so that paradise would have prosperity and freedom as well as physical beauty. He immersed himself in the lives of the diverse peoples of the islands. He composed speeches for their leaders. He wrote a stirring manifesto that became the Preamble to the Constitution of Micronesia. He began a friendship with a man who would one day be president of Palau. And then, a generation later, P. F. Kluge went back. . . . The result is a book the New Yorker called "remarkably effective," the Economist deemed "terrific"; a book Smithsonian Magazine found to be "written from the heart." The Edge of Paradise shows the impact and ironies of America's presence in an undeveloped part of the world, how perhaps there's no way "a big place can touch a little one without harming it."