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  Colin Powell - An American Hero...

  Colin Powell

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  The son of Jamaican immigrants, Colin Powell became one of the most influential Americans of the last century. In this dramatic series of interviews, General Powell describes his ascent from the ROTC to four-star general and eventually to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and mastermind of Desert Storm. He discusses his assignments in Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as his role in the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, along with his eyewitness accounts of Desert Storm, the invasion of Panama, and the Iran-Contra scandal. These interviews demonstrate why so many people see Colin Powell as a moral and human exemplar of the American dream and traditional values.

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  Marcus Crassus: The Life and...

  Editors Charles River

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  The reasons for Spartacus’s enduring appeal are obvious, but his uprising has overshadowed the fact that his was actually the third such uprising against the Roman Republic in a short span. Preceding this, the First and Second Servile Wars had already demonstrated that revolts against Rome and the whole institution of slavery could gain momentum, and these earlier uprisings provided a blueprint for the larger attempt by Spartacus to win freedom.  
  	At the same time, it’s often overlooked how the revolt affected Rome, and how the leader who put it down propelled his career and played an outsized role in Roman politics ahead of the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. Marcus Licinius Crassus is most remembered today for being the richest Roman in history, and arguably the richest man in world history, but that came about in part because he played a key role in the revolutionary events that took place in Rome throughout the 1st century BCE, including the dictatorship of Sulla, the Third Servile War, the First Triumvirate, and the Parthian Wars. Crassus was the son of Publius Licinius Crassus, who was consul in 97 BCE, and while very little is known of Crassus’ early life, his career as a military figure began in earnest when he escaped from Rome in 87 BCE to Spain to avoid Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who, along with Gaius Marius, led the opposition against Sulla.  
  	Thanks to his rise in the military and politics, Crassus’s renown and riches heavily influenced his contemporaries. In the wake of the Third Servile War, Crassus’ patronage helped position Julius Caesar to be appointed governor of Hispania Ulterior. In order to maintain political office, which made him immune from prosecution for his debts, he left for modern day Spain before his praetorship expired.

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  Poisoning the Pecks of Grand...

  Tobin T. Buhk

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  “Traces the footsteps of poisoner Arthur Waite from his marriage to Clara Peck . . . in 1915 to his death by electrocution at Sing Sing Prison in 1917” (MLive.com).   With his boyish good looks, Arthur Warren Waite charmed into marriage the daughter of wealthy Grand Rapids business tycoon John E. Peck in 1916. He then wasted no time executing what he believed to be a flawless scheme to hijack his wife’s inheritance. The plot went awry when a mysterious telegram set off a sequence of events that ultimately exposed his immoral ambition to poison all other Peck heirs. Follow Waite’s fingerprints of indiscretion around Grand Rapids and New York City as author Tobin T. Buhk details this audacious plan of staggering complexity.   Includes photos!   “Follow Waite’s trail around Grand Rapids and New York City as the author, Tobin Buhk details his complex plan meant to make him a rich man.” —Holland Sentinel

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  Gallatin - America's Swiss...

  Nicholas Dungan

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  You won’t find his portrait on our currency anymore and his signature isn’t penned on the Constitution, but former statesman Albert Gallatin (1761-1849) contributed immeasurably to the formation of America. Gallatin was the first president of the council of New York University and his name lives on at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, so it is with pride that New York University Press and the Swiss Confederation publish this new biography of Gallatin.Gallatin’s story is the opposite of the classic American immigrant tale. Born in Geneva, the product of an old and noble family and highly educated in the European tradition, Gallatin made contributions to America throughout his career that far outweighed any benefit he procured for himself. He got his first taste of politics as a Pennsylvania state representative and went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Gallatin became the Secretary of Treasury in Jefferson’s administration and, despite being of the opposite political party to Alexander Hamilton, Gallatin fully respected his predecessor’s fiscal politics. Gallatin undertook a special diplomatic mission for President Madison, which ended the War of 1812 with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent and gave the United States its genuine independence. Gallatin continued in diplomacy as minister to France and to Great Britain, where he skillfully combined his American experience and European background. In the early 1830s, at the age of seventy, he retired from politics and commenced a new career in New York City as a banker, public figure, and intellectual. He helped establish New York University and the American Ethnological Society, became an expert in Native American ethnology and linguistics, and served as president of the New-York Historical Society. Gallatin died at age 88 and is buried in Trinity churchyard at Broadway and Wall Street.In our own day, as we look at reforming our financial system and seek to enhance America’s global image, it is well worth resurrecting Albert Gallatin’s timeless contributions to the United States, at home and abroad. Nicholas Dungan’s compelling biography reinserts this forgotten Founding Father into the historical canon and reveals the transatlantic dimensions of early American history.Co-published with the Swiss Confederation, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

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  One Hundred Miles from Manhattan

  Guillermo Fesser

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  A unique tour of the US: “Who better than a kind-hearted foreigner to help you marvel at our own land and learn something about your fellow Americans?” —Bloomberg Businessweek   In 2002 Guillermo Fesser quit his morning radio talk show in Madrid, and moved with his family to Rhinebeck, NY, for a sabbatical year. Finding himself in a rural community 6,000 miles from home and 100 miles from New York City, Fesser began to discover an America he had never imagined existed.  One Hundred Miles from Manhattan is a fresh, funny, positive and affectionate portrait of life in small-town America—and beyond. This book is filled with the stories of the people Fesser met, the places he visited and the things he learned during his year in Rhinebeck, from the German neighbors who welcome in the New Year by jumping back and forth from the couch to the coffee table to a Texan rancher who follows Native American traditions in the raising of bison; from a guide who leads fishing expeditions into Alaska’s Kuskokwim Mountains to the engineer responsible for the steam conduction system in Manhattan’s underbelly; and from a former follower of Reverend Moon turned track coach to the man who created Big Bird.

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  Crewe in the Great War

  Peter Ollerhead

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  Along with most of the United Kingdom the railway town of Crewe was affected in many ways during the four years of the Great War. The struggle brokered conflict and co-operation in this industrial community planted in the rural acres of Cheshire by the Grand Junction Railway Company in 1843. A military tradition dating back to the town's earliest decades helps to explain the eager response by the young men of Crewe when war was declared in 1914. A rapid increase in the cost of living along with accusations of blatant profiteering soon generated demands for regular wage rises. This conflict between organised labour and industrial and commercial management was more marked in Crewe than elsewhere in the region. Other features of wartime Crewe that are covered in this book are conscription, Zeppelin scares, food shortages, rationing, regular biographical details of those that were killed, the Christmas truce of 1914, influenza epidemics and the division of opinion over a suitable war memorial. These are just some of the issues that affected Crewe during the troubled years of the Great War.

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