"It is spectacular to watch his poems upend everything. In this book, the paint squeezes its artist from the tube. The facts are not to be believed, but you will ardently believe that they are facts."--Darcie Dennigan, author of 'Corinna A-maying the Apocalypse' This loosely federated republic of curses, verses, and fractured mythic narratives holds a single truth to be self-evident: our genius for disorder is our truest gift. TJ Beitelman teaches writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Inspired by true events, A More Perfect Union is an epic story of love and courage, desperation and determination, and three people whose lives are inescapably entwined… Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape the famine in Ireland, only to face anti-immigrant prejudice. Determined never to starve again, he changes his surname to Taylor and heads south to Virginia, seeking work as a traveling blacksmith on the prosperous plantations. Torn from her home and sold to Jubilee Plantation, Sarah must navigate its intricate hierarchy. And now an enigmatic blacksmith is promising her not just the world but also her freedom. How could she say no? Enslaved at Jubilee Plantation, Maple is desperate to return to her husband and daughter. With Sarah’s arrival, she sees her chance to be reunited at last with her family—but at what cost?
An extraordinary American comes to life in this vivid, groundbreaking portrait of the early days of the republic—and the birth of modern politics When the roar of the Revolution had finally died down, a new generation of American politicians was summoned to the Potomac to assemble the nation's newly minted capital. Into that unsteady atmosphere, which would soon enough erupt into another conflict with Britain in 1812, Dolley Madison arrived, alongside her husband, James. Within a few years, she had mastered both the social and political intricacies of the city, and by her death in 1849 was the most celebrated person in Washington. And yet, to most Americans, she's best known for saving a portrait from the burning White House, or as the namesake for a line of ice cream. Why did her contemporaries give so much adulation to a lady so little known today? In A Perfect Union, Catherine Allgor reveals that while Dolley's gender prevented her from openly playing politics, those very constraints of womanhood allowed her to construct an American democratic ruling style, and to achieve her husband's political goals. And the way that she did so—by emphasizing cooperation over coercion, building bridges instead of bunkers—has left us with not only an important story about our past but a model for a modern form of politics. Introducing a major new American historian, A Perfect Union is both an illuminating portrait of an unsung founder of our democracy, and a vivid account of a little-explored time in our history.
This easy-to-understand book tells why and how the Constitution of the United States was created. "Simple, attractive, informative....The most accessible history of the Constitution to date."--School Library Journal.
In this definitive collection, the writings of Herbert J. Storing have been assembled into six categories: the Founding Fathers and their legacy; race relations in America; rights and the public interest; bureaucracy and big government; statesmanship and the presidency; and liberal education. With profound understanding and incisive prose, Herbert J. Storing elucidates the nature and enduring importance of America's deepest political principles. His work is presented here with the thoughtful care and organization of one of his students - Joseph M. Bessette.
This book describes a fiscal plan designed to balance the federal budget without austerity or endangering the entitlement programs. It does this primarily through increasing income taxes on the wealthy by raising rates and eliminating deductions. It calls for significant savings in the cost of health-care delivery without diminishing services and an end to government waste and inefficiency. It largely eliminates poverty through raising the minimum wage, and a full employment program in which the government serves as the employer of last resort. This program is paid for by a new net-worth tax on the wealthiest 1 percent. The plan intends to improve economic equity and preserve political democracy by reducing the income/wealth disparity which exists today. The plan extends Medicare to all, eliminates payroll taxes, and funds entitlements out of the general fund. State and municipal costs are significantly reduced by absorbing Medicaid patients into Medicare, thus freeing up capital for necessary infrastructure repair and the expansion of education funding for preschool through college. Working- and middle-class families will see their first real increase in disposable income in almost thirty years through the elimination of the payroll taxes, the reduction in the personal cost of health care and the increase in the minimum wage. The full employment program and the increase in disposable income for so many will serve to stimulate the economy, bring about business expansion, and increase employment. The cost of doing business in America will be reduced by eliminating company contributions to the payroll tax, ending the need for company-paid health insurance and a reduction in the corporate tax rate. These savings will motivate bringing jobs home from overseas and increase the profit margins for American companies providing capital for research and development, modernization, and expansion.
Schools are entrusted with ensuring the safety of students and staff. One measure of the safety of America's public schools is the presence of violence on school campuses. Violent incidents include rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attacks or fights with and without a weapon, threats of physical attack with and without a weapon, and robberies with and without a weapon. In order to provide a measure of the most severe incidents, those crimes that would be considered aggravated assaults were included as serious violent incidents. This book examines school bullying, prevention of youth hate crimes and other safety plans and policies within schools.
In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations. This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions.?
