The Committee on House Administration is pleased to present this revised book on our United States Government. This publication continues to be a popular introductory guide for American citizens and those of other countries who seek a greater understanding of our heritage of democracy. The question-and-answer format covers a broad range of topics dealing with the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our Government as well as the electoral process and the role of political parties.--Foreword.
Freedom in the World contains both comparative ratings and written narratives and is now the standard reference work for measuring the progress and decline in political rights and civil liberties on a global basis.
"Having watched from a front row seat as many incumbent and electoral campaign presidential teams managed administration transitions, Martha Kumar was struck by how productively the Bush and Obama teams worked together to effect a smooth transition of power in 2008. She has reflected upon what made the transition so effective, and wonders if it could be a model for future incoming and outgoing administrations. This book focuses on the preparations made by President Bush's transition team as well as those by Senators Obama and McCain as one administration exited and the other entered the White House. Using this recent transition as a lens through which to examine the presidential transition process, Kumar simultaneously outlines the congressional legislation that paved the way for this distinctive transition and interweaves comparative examples from previous administrative transitions going back to Truman-to-Eisenhower. She evaluates the early and continuing actions by the General Services Administration to plan and set up transition offices; the work on financial disclosure issues handled by the Office of Government Ethics; and the Office of Management and Budget's preparatory work. In this fascinating historical and contemporary vivisection of presidential transitions, Kumar maps out, in the words of former NSA advisor General James L. Jones, the characteristics of a smooth "glide path" for presidential campaign staffs and their administrations"--
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
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