Steve Inskeep tells the riveting story of John and Jessie Frémont, the husband and wife team who in the 1800s were instrumental in the westward expansion of the United States, and thus became America's first great political couple John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.

In today’s Europe, deep cracks are showing in the system of political cooperation that was designed to prevent the geopolitical catastrophes that ravaged the continent in the first half of the twentieth century. Europeans are haunted, once again, by the specters of nationalism, fascism, and economic protectionism. Instead of sounding the alarm, many conservatives have become cheerleaders for the demise of the European Union (EU). This compelling book represents the first systematic attempt to justify the European project from a free-market, conservative viewpoint. Although many of their criticisms are justified, Dalibor Rohac contends that Euroskeptics are playing a dangerous game. Their rejection of European integration places them in the unsavory company of nationalists, left-wing radicals, and Putin apologists. Their defense of the nation-state against Brussels, furthermore, is ahistorical. He convincingly shows that the flourishing of democracy and free markets in Europe has gone hand in hand with the integration project. Europe’s pre-EU past, in contrast, was marked by a series of geopolitical calamities. When British voters make their decision in June, they should remember that while Brexit would not be a political or economic disaster for the United Kingdom, it would not solve any of the problems that the “Leavers” associate with EU membership. Worse yet, its departure from the European Union would strengthen the centrifugal forces that are already undermining Europe's ability to solve the multitude of political, economic, and security challenges plaguing the continent today. Instead of advocating for the end of the EU, Rohac argues that conservatives must come to the rescue of the integration project by helping to reduce the EU’s democratic deficit and turning it into an engine of economic dynamism and prosperity. For the author’s video on Brexit, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFReUnO05Fo

International institutions play important roles in political-military issues as well as in economic and environmental affairs. Indeed, it is impossible to understand efforts to resolve regional and local conflicts, or the form and pace of alliance formation and expansion, without paying attention to security institutions. Imperfect Unions discusses a wide variety of security institutions, including NATO, the Western European Union, United Nations peacekeeping, the ASEAB Regional Forum, and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. It describes changes in security institutions, documents the effects of such institutions on national policies, and explores the conditions that affect the patterns of co-operation and discord that ensue. The book helps to improve our understanding of recent developments in international relations such as NATO enlargement and the regionalization of peacekeeping. In theoretical terms, it shows how institutionalist approaches, such as those represented in this volume, can enrich the important field of security studies.

On the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, Union artillery lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson fell while bravely spurring his men to action. His father, Sam, a New York Times correspondent, was already on his way to Gettysburg when he learned of his son’s wounding but had to wait until the guns went silent before seeking out his son, who had died at the town’s poorhouse. Sitting next to his dead boy, Sam Wilkeson then wrote one of the greatest battlefield dispatches in American history. This vivid exploration of one of Gettysburg’s most famous stories--the story of a father and a son, the son’s courage under fire, and the father’s search for his son in the bloody aftermath of battle--reconstructs Bayard Wilkeson’s wounding and death, which have been shrouded in myth and legend, and sheds light on Civil War–era journalism, battlefield medicine, and the “good death.”

Special purpose jurisdictions, such as school districts, water districts, and transit authorities, constitute the most common form of local government in the United States today. This book offers the first political theory of special purpose jurisdictions and provides extensive empirical analyses of the politics and finances of these often overlooked but increasingly influential governments.

From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner). The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name--and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn't limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town's petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the "cold civil war" that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.

A debt-based financial system is incompatible with a truly competitive economy. Our system exists by choice, not the dictates of immutable economic laws, and is leading the U.S. to financial collapse. the author highlights essentially ignored inequities and fallacies inherent in major aspects of our economy and of economic theory. the text explains how the system is skewed to big government and a dominant financial sector and undermining our standard of living.

V.1 The class of books to which the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" belongs is all but unrepresented in our literature, but the absence of similar home-productions can no longer be held to imply either an inability to comprehend their scope or an indifference to their results. To what shall we attribute the welcome accorded of late to certain reproductions and elucidations of the master-works of modern Transcendentalism, if not to the awakening of a long-repressed desire to re-examine the foundations of a spiritual fabric, for whose stability an instinctive confidence alone made answer? To many two attitudes of mind have become insupportable--that of total unconcern about fundamental truth, and that of unthinking acquiescence in the admission of merely juxtaposed and uncommunicating spheres of positive knowledge and impenetrable nescience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

V.1 The class of books to which the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" belongs is all but unrepresented in our literature, but the absence of similar home-productions can no longer be held to imply either an inability to comprehend their scope or an indifference to their results. To what shall we attribute the welcome accorded of late to certain reproductions and elucidations of the master-works of modern Transcendentalism, if not to the awakening of a long-repressed desire to re-examine the foundations of a spiritual fabric, for whose stability an instinctive confidence alone made answer? To many two attitudes of mind have become insupportable--that of total unconcern about fundamental truth, and that of unthinking acquiescence in the admission of merely juxtaposed and uncommunicating spheres of positive knowledge and impenetrable nescience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).