This powerful book reminds us of the enormous power the nation accords its political leaders and how in the significant period, 1897–1913, these leaders failed to meet their responsibilities. Their inadequacies, the authors feel, delayed the administration of justice for all citizens, neglected the Negro, and seriously impaired the future effectiveness of their own once viable, successful, and justly proud Republican Party. The authors follow the maneuvers of McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Senators Aldrich, Platt, Allison, and Spooner, and House Speaker "Uncle" Joe Cannon as they juggled pressing domestic questions, perpetuating themselves in power without really confronting the public need. From the outset, when the party came into power in 1897 under remarkably auspicious circumstances, until it met final defeat at the hands of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the Republican leaders laid a foundation by default for the Democratic return to power. Their neglect of major national problems afforded the Democrats a golden opportunity to appropriate those issues as their own.

When the Roman Republic became the master of an overseas empire, the Romans had to adapt their civic institutions so as to be able to rule the dominions that were successively subjected to their imperium. As a result, Rome created an administrative structure mainly based on an element that became the keystone of its empire: the provincia. This book brings together nine contributions from a total of ten scholars, all specialists in Republican Rome and the Principate, who analyse from diverse perspectives and approaches the distinct ways in which the Roman res publica constituted and ruled a far-flung empire. The book ranges from the development of the Roman institutional structures to the diplomatic and administrative activities carried out by the Roman commanders overseas. Beyond the subject on which each author focuses, all chapters in this volume represent significant and renewed contributions to the study of the provinces and the Roman empire during the Republican period and the transition to the Principate.

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.