Introduction: Knowledge in Exile -- The League Is the Thing: International Society's Super-University -- Plowshares into Swords: Knowledge, Weaponized -- Internationalist Dunkirk: International Society in Exile -- The Rover Boys of Reconstruction: International Society in the American World -- Coda: Great Leaps Forward.

A critical history of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict Eminent historian Arno J. Mayer traces the thinkers, leaders, and shifting geopolitical contexts that shaped the founding and development of the Israeli state. He recovers for posterity internal critics such as the philosopher Martin Buber, who argued for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs. “A sense of limits is the better part of valour,” Mayer insists. Plowshares into Swords explores Israel’s indefinite deferral of the “Arab Question,” the strategic thinking behind the building of settlements and border walls, and the endurance of Palestinian resistance.

During the summer of 1800, slaves in and around Richmond conspired to overthrow their masters and abolish slavery. This book uses Gabriel's Conspiracy, and the evidence produced during the repression of the revolt, to expose the processes through which Virginians of African descent built an oppositional culture. Sidbury portrays the rich cultures of eighteenth-century black Virginians, and the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, senses of identity that emerged among enslaved and free people living in and around the rapidly growing state capital. The book also examines the conspirators' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, and the complicated African and European roots of their culture. In so doing, it offers an alternative interpretation of the meaning of the Virginia that was home to so many of the Founding Fathers. This narrative focuses on the history and perspectives of black and enslaved people, in order to develop 'Gabriel's Virginia' as a counterpoint to more common discussions of 'Jeffersonian Virginia'.

This work brings together a number of contributions analyzing some of the most pressing issues in the present world and suggests ways and methods to manage these problems.

"General Maxwell D. Taylor was one of the great military heroes of recent American history. During World War II, Taylor fought in Sicily and Italy before parachuting into France as head of the 101st Airborne Division on Dday, 1944. Later he commanded the Division in the Arnhem drop in Holland and in the defense of Basting in the Bulge. After the war, Taylor served as superintendent of West Point, U.S. Commander in Berlin, Commander of the Eighth Army in Korea, and Army Chief of Staff under President Eisenhower. John F. Kennedy named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and sent him to Vietnam in 1961; he returned to that country as Ambassador in 1965, and served as a key advisor to President Johnson until 1969. In Swords and Plowshares, Taylor tells the firsthand story of a life of action, courage, strategy, and dedication. Offering candid and controversial views of such central figures as Dwight Eisenhower, John Dulles, the Kennedy's, and General Westmoreland, Taylor contrasts their varying views of the role of air power in modern warfare, and presents his own approach to the problems of winning wars and making peace. These memoirs ably illustrate why General Maxwell Taylor deserves to rank among Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton as one of the great American military geniuses of our time." -- Publisher.

In September 1980, eight Catholic activists made their way into a Pennsylvania General Electric plant housing parts for nuclear missiles. Evading security guards, these activists pounded on missile nose cones with hammers and then covered the cones in their own blood. This act of nonviolent resistance was their answer to calls for prophetic witness in the Old Testament: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war.” Plowshares explores the closely interwoven religious and social significance of the group’s use of performance to achieve its goals. It looks at the group’s acts of civil disobedience, such as that undertaken at the GE plant in 1980, and the Plowshares’ behavior at the legal trials that result from these protests. Interpreting the Bible as a mandate to enact God’s kingdom through political resistance, the Plowshares work toward “symbolic disarmament,” with the aim of eradicating nuclear weapons. Plowshares activists continue to carry out such “divine obediences” against facilities where equipment used in the production or deployment of nuclear weapons is manufactured or stored. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their actions, this volume helps us better understand their motivations, logic, identity, and ultimate goal.

Twelve-term US Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul reveals an intensely personal side as he reflects on growing up during World War II. He provides a powerful critique of a 20th century full of war. Paul finishes with a stirring view of the future we may choose if we turn from war and violence toward peace and prosperity.

It is January of 1965 and without warning the North Vietnamese launch their Tet Offensive against the South, routing the American supported army and rolling over territory without a fight. In a matter of days it appears as if the Communists are about to score their biggest victory in the Cold War since Stalin's armies rolled over Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, while the West is on the verge of an unprecedented defeat. In Washington, President Lyndon B. Johnson cleans house at the Pentagon and reaches across the political divide to a man who has built a career out of being tough on the Reds: former Vice President M. Richard Nixon, a man in the wilderness of politics after a career ending defeat. With Nixon as Secretary of Defense, the United States sends more than a million men to South Vietnam and proceeds to bomb the North back to the Stone Age, but it is not enough, as the North Vietnamese refuse to give up and beg for terms of peace. Is it time to think about the unthinkable? Told in the form of an oral history by the men and women who fought, protested and profited from the Vietnam War, Beating Plowshares into Swords is a look at the history that never was, but might have been, and a very different 1960's than the one we remember. For years I've heard historians and armchair warriors claim that America fought the war in Vietnam with our hands tied behind our backs; that we really could have won if only North Vietnam had been bombed into to a waste land; if only the Ho Chi Minh Trail had been cut; if only a million more men had been sent in country; if only we had wanted to win. In this short novel, I attempt to construct a scenario where the United States military put the hammer down on the North Vietnamese and what the consequences of such a policy would have been for America, Indochina and the wider world. At the same time I constructed different fates for such historical personages as LBJ and Nixon, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as seen thought the eyes of fictional characters: a young man fighting in the jungles of Southeast Asia, a General working in the halls of the Pentagon and the Oval Office, and an idealistic school teacher marching in the streets of America's cities. History is a great Leviathan, driven by ego and ambition, fear and avarice, ignorance and insight, brute instinct and sheer brilliance, and most of all by forces far beyond the control of any one person no matter how much power they possess. It is full of fascinating What Ifs and Beating Plowshares into Swords is but one of them.

The aim of this volume is to try to account for Isaiah's revolutionary vision from two disciplinary perspectives: one approach is the historical study of the Ancient Near East and the Bible, and the other rests on the study of international relations from a comparative, conceptual perspective.