Contains the texts of 46 speeches by: Robert Y. Hayne, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Thomas Corwin, Thomas Hart Benton, William H. Seward, Jeremiah Clemens, William P. Fessenden, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Borah, Rebecca L. Fenton, Huey P. Long, Joseph R. McCarthy, Hubert H. Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon, Frank Church, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Michael J. Mansfield, Everett M. Dirksen, Gale W. McGee, Robert C. Byrd, and other Senators.
Contains the texts of 46 speeches by: Robert Y. Hayne, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Thomas Corwin, Thomas Hart Benton, William H. Seward, Jeremiah Clemens, William P. Fessenden, Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, William E. Borah, Rebecca L. Fenton, Huey P. Long, Joseph R. McCarthy, Hubert H. Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon, Frank Church, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Michael J. Mansfield, Everett M. Dirksen, Gale W. McGee, Robert C. Byrd, and other Senators.
Includes lists, tables, and statistics on: Senators; Senatorial elections; Sessions; Party leadership and organization; Committees; Senate organization; and Senate powers.
NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT--OVERSTOCK SALE --Significantly reduced list price Prepared under the direction of Nancy Erickson, Secretary of the Senate. Includes a preface by Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was serving as the President Pro Tem in 2008. Provides a history of the office followed by portraits and brief biographies of the Senators who served as President Pro Tem between 1789 and 2007. Other resources produced by the United States (U.S./US) Senate can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/515"
Winner of the Society for History in the Federal Government's George Pendleton Prize for 2013 The United States Senate has fallen on hard times. Once known as the greatest deliberative body in the world, it now has a reputation as a partisan, dysfunctional chamber. What happened to the house that forged American history's great compromises? In this groundbreaking work, a distinguished journalist and an eminent historian provide an insider's history of the United States Senate. Richard A. Baker, historian emeritus of the Senate, and the late Neil MacNeil, former chief congressional correspondent for Time magazine, integrate nearly a century of combined experience on Capitol Hill with deep research and state-of-the-art scholarship. They explore the Senate's historical evolution with one eye on persistent structural pressures and the other on recent transformations. Here, for example, are the Senate's struggles with the presidency--from George Washington's first, disastrous visit to the chamber on August 22, 1789, through now-forgotten conflicts with Presidents Garfield and Cleveland, to current war powers disputes. The authors also explore the Senate's potent investigative power, and show how it began with an inquiry into John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. It took flight with committees on the conduct of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and World War II; and it gained a high profile with Joseph McCarthy's rampage against communism, Estes Kefauver's organized-crime hearings (the first to be broadcast), and its Watergate investigation. Within the book are surprises as well. For example, the office of majority leader first acquired real power in 1952--not with Lyndon Johnson, but with Republican Robert Taft. Johnson accelerated the trend, tampering with the sacred principle of seniority in order to control issues such as committee assignments. Rampant filibustering, the authors find, was the ironic result of the passage of 1960s civil rights legislation. No longer stigmatized as a white-supremacist tool, its use became routine, especially as the Senate became more partisan in the 1970s. Thoughtful and incisive, The American Senate: An Insider's History transforms our understanding of Congress's upper house.
In the eyes of both contemporaries and historians, the United States became an empire in 1898. By taking possession of Cuba and the Philippines, the nation seemed to have reached a watershed moment in its rise to power—spurring arguments over whether it should be a colonial power at all. However, the questions that emerged in the wake of 1898 built on long-standing and far-reaching debates over America’s place in the world. Andrew Priest offers a new understanding of the roots of American empire that foregrounds the longer history of perceptions of European powers. He traces the development of American thinking about European imperialism in the years after the Civil War, before the United States embarked on its own overseas colonial projects. Designs on Empire examines responses to Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico, Spain and the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, Britain’s occupation of Egypt, and the carving up of Africa at the Berlin Conference. Priest shows how observing and interacting with other empires shaped American understandings of the international environment and their own burgeoning power. He highlights ambivalence among American elites regarding empire as well as the prevalence of notions of racial hierarchy. While many deplored the way powerful nations dominated others, others saw imperial projects as the advance of civilization, and even critics often felt a closer affinity with European imperialists than colonized peoples. A wide-ranging book that blends intellectual, political, and diplomatic history, Designs on Empire sheds new light on the foundations of American power.
