Ayn Rand chose Leonard Peikoff to be her successor as the spokesman for Objectivism. And in this brilliantly reasoned, thought-provoking work we learn why, as he demonstrates how far America has been detoured from its original path and led down the same road that Germany followed to Nazism. Self-sacrifice, Oriental mysticism, racial "truth," the public good, doing one's duty—these are among the seductive catch-phrases that Leonard Peikoff dissects, examining the kind of philosophy they symbolize, the type of thinking that lured Germany to its doom and that he says is now prevalent in the United States. Here is a frightening look at where America may be heading, a clarion call for all who are concerned about preserving our right to individual freedom.

As China emerges as a global force in the twenty-first century, questions of how existing great powers will navigate the geopolitical transition loom large. In Fateful Transitions, Daniel M. Kliman revisits historic power shifts to shed light on enduring patterns in international relations, demonstrating that the regime type of ascendant powers greatly influences global interactions. Since the late nineteenth century, the world's major democracies have tended to accommodate or conciliate ascendant democratic states. Certain attributes of democracy, such as a free press and domestic checks and balances, encourage trust during power shifts, whereas closed and autocratic regimes on the ascent tend to produce a cycle of suspicion, competition, and confrontation. Drawing on democratic peace theory and power transition theory, Kliman compares Great Britain's embrace of U.S. ascendancy in the early twentieth century to its confrontational stance toward autocratic Germany and later U.S. mistrust of the Soviet Union. Within this geopolitical context, he evaluates the interactions between China and current great powers, the United States and Japan. Building on this analysis, Kliman offers new insights into the dynamics of power shifts and explores their implications for how today's established and emerging powers can successfully navigate fateful transitions.

In the sixth volume of The iPINIONS Journal, political commentator Anthony Livingston Hall shares an intelligent, humorous, and sometimes moving collection of essays that provide an entertaining and thought-provoking recap of 2010's major events. With a unique perspective, Hall provides commentary on the passage of the healthcare reform, the BP oil spill, and whether Michael Jackson is the biological father of his children. As he offers his opinion on an eclectic mix of political, social, and cultural events that include the Tea Party craze, political upheaval in the Ukraine, the Jersey Shore phenomenon, the unity pact among the Chilean miners, the military quagmire in Afghanistan, and the rehabilitation of Michael Vick, Hall displays his worldview with a passion for international current events that is unsurpassed. Included are his post-mortem commentaries on famous people who made pioneering or extraordinary contributions to mankind such as: United States Senator Robert Byrd, New York Yankees Owner George Steinbrenner, and Tom Bosley of the television show Happy Days. This volume of commentaries is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to recall, assess, and engage in lively discussions about the major events of 2010.

Here is a compact study of how Mark's Gospel meditates on time. It examines how the Gospel's contemporary setting in ordinary time defines its genre, and how Mark uses the Hebrew scriptures to remember and recall past teachings, prophecies and histories. The suspended time narratives, Mark's 'intercalations', on the other hand, interrupt the narrative of the critical time present. Finally, by bringing the eternal horizon into the events of the present, Mark's 'mythic time' reveals the crisis events as a momentary interruption of ordinary time. Similarly, during the 'ritual time', the Gospel narrative breaks with its own historical setting in order to unravel the dead-endedness of the crisis story by symbolically taking it outside time.

Alcott's wealth of allusion to other writers, such as Charlotte Bronte, Margaret Fuller, and, especially, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of recurring motifs such as textiles, texts, and theatricals reveals her consistent subversion of conventional values for women.

Road trips loom large in the American imagination, and stories from the road have been central to crafting national identities across North and South America. Tales of traversing this vast geography, with its singular landscape, have helped foster a sense of American exceptionalism. Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas—the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War—John Ochoa pursues literary travelers across landscapes and centuries. At each historical crossroads, the nations of North and South invented or reinvented themselves in the shadow of empire. Travel accounts from these periods offered master narratives that shaped the notion of America’s postimperial future. Fellow Travelers recounts the complex, on-the-road relationships between travelers such as Lewis and Clark, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Kerouac’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the Che Guevara and Alberto Granado of The Motorcycle Diaries. Such journeys reflect concerns far larger than their characters: tensions between the voices of the rugged individual and the democratic many, between the metropolis and the backcountry, and between the intimate and the vast. Working across national literatures, Fellow Travelers offers insight into a shared process of national reinvention and the construction of modern national imaginaries. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University.

This book traces the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. It examines the historical novel's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history; with the rise of literary regionalism; with the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance; with changing conceptions of gender roles; and with the authors' troubled responses to the great revolutionary and imperialistic conflicts of the modern era. However, though inevitably much concerned with the theory of genre and with the specific contents of the genre of historical romance, Professor Dekker devotes most of his book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Allen Tate, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner, as well as to the Briton whose name was synonymous with the genre for most of the nineteenth century - Sir Walter Scott. 'The American Historical Romance is the richest, most fully meditated and most rewarding yet written by this author ... It is the most important book on the relations of British and American fiction to come out for many years. No devotee of the American novel will ignore it.' -- The Times Literary Supplement

This is a collection of studies on ancient (especially Latin) poetry and historiography, concentrating especially on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of considering the literature to illuminate the historical Roman context and the historical context to illuminate the literature. It takes the form of a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, for whom twenty-one scholars have contributed essays reflecting the interests and approaches that have typified Woodman's own work. The authors that he has continuously illuminated - especially Velleius, Horace, Virgil, Sallust, and Tacitus - figure particularly prominently.

In his book Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee analyzes fictional texts as a "discursive territoriality" that shape readers' notions of (and ambivalence about) national and regional belonging. Several canonical works of literary fiction have provided their readers with verbal maps that in their depictions of boundary spaces construct indirect images of national territory and geography. Beebee analyzes the historical and cultural diversity in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Nikolai Gogol's, and Ivan Turgenev's competing geographies of Russia and its empire, Euclides da Cunha's ambivalent nomination of the sertanejo (backlander) as the "bedrock of the Brazilian race," William Faulkner's and Jose Lins do Rego's cultural memories of the plantation, Jose Maria Arguedas's novelistic ethnogeographies of Andean culture, Juan Benet's construction of region as both metaphor and metonym for Francoist Spain, and the "utopian" North American (U.S. and Canada) desert landscapes of Mary Austin, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Harjo.