Nations of Nations tells the history of our country in a very tangible way that is accessable and interesting. It is a rare history book that focusues as much on the culture and the people from different time periods as the country's leaders and law makers. Which, when studying American History, is of the utmost importance.

NATION OF NATIONS VOLUME TWO: SINCE 1865 WAS A FABULOUS TEXT BOOK. THIS BOOK HELPED ME TO BETTER UNDERSTAND ALL ASPECTS OF THE INFORMATION WITHIN. AS A FRESHMAN THIS YEAR I HAD A HARD TIME ADJUSTING TO MY CLASSES BUT WITH THIS TEXT I HAD NO PROBLEMS UNDERSTANDING MY READING ASSIGNMENTS AND ENDED UP DOING VERY WELL IN THE CLASS. I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE A HARD TIME PICKING OUT THE IMPORTANT PARTS OF A PARAGRAPH BECAUSE IT HAS GOOD OUTLINES. IT WAS A FANTASTIC TEXT BOOK!

As usual, Mr. Szporluk's lucid and informative style makes understanding Eastern Europe a pleasure, in an area where unbiased analysis is still not the norm. Too many of us are still forced to rely on unreliable or falsified Soviet or even Tsarist era materials. Congratulations!

Yet again, Szporluk's has delivered a lucid analysis of another aspect of Eastern Europe's history. He has made accesable to the average reader what could be an obscure subject. Russian identity, a topic which has both fascinated and frustrated scholars in recent decades, is made easy as Szporluk's describes its developement or lack thereof. This is an achievement which should be enjoyed by all.

This book is an absolute must not only for loyal followers of a natural rights theory as basis of the US constitution. Every scholar who wants to research the foundations of American constitutionalism in depth should have this book in the personal library. It his here that he will find pure Lockeanism and is here that Zuckert puts forward his case of Lockean natural rights and social contract theory as ideological basis for the founders in such a concise way that it is difficult to argue against his case. Of course this is what avid Zuckert readers are used to. This book, however, in referring to Jefferson as a natural rights thinker argues the natural rights theory with one of the most convincing witnesses you can find in American history: Thomas Jefferson. Zuckert depicts the Declaration of Independence and American political thought from an interesting perspective, Jefferson's viewpoint. He succeeds in disputing the main opposing theories to the natural rights theory such as the exemplary role of classical Greece and Rome, the continuity theory based on Puritan thought and Bailyn's point that Locke was only one among others influential on American political thought, to name just a few. I did note, however, a certain tendency to neglect historical facts especially as far as the influence of the English common law and Whiggish thought on the framers is concerned. Finally, that Zuckert did not examine the Constitution itself as closely as the Declaration of Independence is not only excusable. It serves a good purpose: to underline the importance of the Declaration of Independence as an outflow of quintessential American thought, thus a document America should be proud of.

Yet again, Michael Zuckert has produced a forceful, challenging, and overly fascinating work of scholarship. His previous work, "Natural Rights and the New Republicanism," in many ways a "prequel" to this volume, was a historical and not to mention philosophical landmark. This work picks up right where he left off. Part I of the work consists of an in depth analysis of the Declaration of Independence. This interpretration bristles with new insight. Unlike many past scholars, Zuckert makes an overt effort to place the Declaration in context. He does this by examining other sources of information, e.g. Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" for instance. The end result, I must say, is brilliant. Contrary to modern conceptions, he demonstrates what the Declaration was really meant to say, and, at the same time, how philosophically sophisticated it really was. In Part II, Zuckert endeavors to prove that the United States was indeed founded as the natural rights republic, in a modern, dynamic, forward looking philosophical climate. To begin with, he picks apart the thesis that the American Revolution was merely an extension of the Glorious Revolution undertaken by the Whig ruling class in the late 1680s. This however, is nothing new, especially if one has already read his account of the Glorious Revolution and natural rights philosophy in his previous work. Nevertheless, he shows conclusively the incompatibility between the two Revolutions, primarily, but not wholly, through a comparison of the Declaration of Independence and the English "Bill of Rights." Moving on, Chapters 5 and 6 address the issue of Puritanism and its legacy in early America. Many scholars have proposed that the American Revolution was merely an extension of ideals held by the early Calvinist settlers of the 17th century. It is this thesis, however, that Zuckert completely demolishes. He conducts and in depth analysis of Puritan ideology, as well as its sources. Of particular interest is discussion of Martin Luther's concept of the "Two Kingdoms," and its influence in American thought. To make a long story short, he demonstrates how dramatically Locke's ideas clash with those of the early Puritans. This contention is driven home clearly by an examination of important political/relgious thinkers in 18th centiry New England, Elisha Williams and Jonathan Mayhew in particular. Finally, in Chapter 7 finds Zuckert further pushing his case for the natural rights republic. He takes on the so-called "classical republican" or "civic humanist" thesis expounded by such scholars as J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon Wood, deftly making mincemeat of them. Pressing on, he examines Thomas Jefferson's evolving political philosophy to reveal the truly radical, natural rightist foundations of American republicanism. Although the book is by and large solid, I do have several misgivings about it. First and foremost, Zuckert's Jefferson scholarship is highy suspect, as can be devined through use of Merill Peterson's biography, as the small, unscholarly Library of America collection of Jefferson's writings. I was very surprised that he did not cite Dumas Malone's definitive 6 volume biography "Jefferson and His Time," or Julian Boyd's definitive collection of Jefferson's papers. Also, Zuckert's refutation of the Puritan "Continuity Thesis," strikes me as a bit odd, as it does not prove anything at all concerning the colonies outside of New England, none of which have any Puritan heritage whatsoever. Despite these shortcomings, the work as a whole is brilliant. This volume, as well as his previous offering, is an absolute must for anyone interested in the relevant disciplines.

Simon P Newman's Parades And The Politics Of The Street focuses on festivities and political connections in early American history, considering how parades were involved in drawing together people of different social levels, and how they influenced politics and opinions about popular leadership. This title would be useful for the college-level course on early American history as supplemental reading.

Simon Newman has given a vivid, fresh and accessible vision of life in early-European America. I'd never given a moment's thought to these matters of public demonstration...A must-read for anyone even remotely interested in colonial, social, even labor history.

Found out about the book - People to People, Poland - by accident. Before we left England on a tramp steamer I phoned a fellow mentioned in the book from Gdansk who offered such hospitality to my self and my friend. We were accepted as guests by his family for two days. Without the book we wouldn't have met some splendid people and wouldn't have had our eyes opened to their warmth and generosity. This experience has been repeated time and again.

I knew I would be going to Lithuania for a dance festival that occurs every 4 years. This was the first time (in 1994) since the country was returned to freedom from behind the Iron Curtain. It was also the first time my mother returned after 50 years! I picked a few people from different cities based on a few characteristics listed in the book: age, what they like to do, and how much Enlish they knew (my Lithuania is quite basic). My longest pen-pal, now friend, have been corresponding for years. She invited me to stay in her empty flat for all three weeks! She even met us at the airport when we arrived with an armload of flowers - a big tradition in the eastern bloc countries. She showed us many places, we met with her family, we went to her beach house on the opposite side of the country. I visited other people I met in the book in other towns. One person gave me ideas of places to go, another I met in the town where my mother grew up. My mother and I met up with some relatives of ours in other towns, went driving to many smaller places and really learned a lot about how life has changed since the forties, and since the Soviets were driven out. I picked people who from their 20s to their 40s. One was an artist, one a translator, a student, a newspaper writer, a homemaker, and a teacher. Two did not write back, but I made many friends a learned a lot about the people of Lithuania and how they lived. To me, that is more important than sitting in a hotel room, or taking a bus tour; it is the people who make up a country. This book provides a way for People to meet People. I highly recommend it, or others in this series. Poland is next for me.

Robert Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch ably collaborate to edit The People's War: Responses To World War II In The Soviet Union, an informative wealth of writings drawn from notable scholars and historians on how ordinary soviet citizens responded to the experiences, horrors, and deprivations of war, including Stalinist leadership and the Nazi invasion of the motherland. The contributors draw upon a wealth of archival and recently published material, much of which was not previously available until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here detailed is the calculated destruction of a Jewish town by the Germans, an chilling picture of life in occupied Minsk, cultural developments, women's roles in combat, the morale of ordinary Red Army troops, and more. A balanced, comprehensive picture of civilian life behind the front lines, candid descriptions of command structure and the repressive power of the soviet state, and the reaction, cooperation, and opposition to them by the soviet people, all provide a wide ranging, complex, and revealing historical portrait not previously possible and highly recommended for students of Soviet studies, World War II history, and the endurance of the human spirit under even the most difficult of circumstances.

Thurston is history professor at Miami U.,Ohio,his books include: "life & terror in Stalin's Russia".(1996)..which might be considered subtitle for this well documented book. Of 5.74 million Soviet POW's, an estimed 60% died in prisons by end 1941. Stalin refused aid to all POWs held..even his own son. Contributors include German & Russian top scholars.

The only problem of this book is that almost all of the Czech people talked like English, but still, the dialogue was nicely written if you could just overlook such shortcoming. The whole plot, well, it was also nicely done but too preditable. All the main characters are far too stereotyped but again, sculptered quite well for us to accept. Putting suppose-to-be-priceless paintings underground of a church with a river close by? How could anyone with common sense would store any painting in a wet--not just humid--underground vault with dripping walls? This is the only dumb thing that was illogically put into this very fluently written novel. But again, no harm done here, since you still could finish it in just one sitting, hehehe.

'The Phoenix of Prague' is a really excellently written thriller, which I enjoyed very much. (My only regret is that it finished and none of the author's previous works seem to be readily available.) I read a lot of thrillers and mystery books, and usually the quality of the writing is just OK, even though the genre ensures that the pages keep turning quickly. The writing in 'The Phoenix of Prague', on the other hand, is a notch above the usual. I strongly recommend this book

Recent English royal biographies, perhaps following the success of Fraser's "Mary Queen of Scots," remain fixated on the Tudor era, Elizabeth I in particular, with less frequent mention of Mary Tudor or Mary Stuart, and/or perhaps Henry's wives. The romance of the Stuart queens, however, didn't end with Mary Queen of Scots - it reached its apogee with her grandchild, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia. Married to the hapless Frederick, Elector Palatine, in 1619 she and her young family were brought to Prague as the newly elected (and Protestant) King and Queen following the deposition (defenestration, to be exact) of the previous Catholic regime. In power for little more than a few weeks, they were chased back into Germany after the disastrous Battle of the White Mountain, following which Elizabeth languished in exile in Holland for the best part of the next 40 years. Oran's 1930s bio is the standard work on Elizabeth - she pays particular attention to the life of a woman in the 17th century European court: hobbies, clothes, sports and the ubiquitous letter-writing. Elizabeth turned the damsel-in-distress cliche on its head, being a furious rider and outdoorswoman as well as a supple European politician and skilled linguist. Despite competition with the other women in the Stuart family (e.g., Charles I's and II's respective wives), it was Elizabeth's genes that won out - under the Act of Succession, every English monarch since 1713 has been required to prove an ancestral link to the Winter Queen. Classic biography and a useful bridge between Antonia Fraser's four Stuart books (Mary/James I/Gunpowder Plot/Royal Charles) and C.V. Wedgwood's numerous 17th century histories (e.g. Thirty Years War, Montrose).

Elizabeth, the daughter of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, was widely acclaimed as the most beautiful princess in Europe. Her hand was sought by many, but James selected the Protestant prince of a small German state, Frederick of the Palatine, to counterbalance the intended match of his eldest son with the Catholic royal daughter of either France or Spain. It would prove to be a true love match, as well as a political disaster.

This history follows the eventful life and tumultous times of Elizabeth of Bohemia, known as the Winter Queen for the brief duration of her husband's reign. The research is solid, the writing scholarly yet engagingly annecdotal. The narrative is particularly strong: settings are described with unusual care and color, and telling bits of cultural detail help evoke a sense of time and place.

The relationships between Elizabeth and her many family members are vividly drawn. Most poignant among these were her strong sibling attachment to her oldest brother Henry, her passionate but disappointing marriage to the moody Frederick, and the sense of betrayal she must have suffered when her father all but abandoned her. She survived war and endured exile -- not only from Bohemia and her husband's hereditary Palatine, but also from England. Neither James nor his successor Charles I acknowledged her as a queen, or permitted her to return to England.

Students of history might be interested in Elizabeth's descendents, which, in 1938, included the ruling sovereigns of Denmark, Great Britain, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Roumania, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Italy. By any measure, this is an impressive family saga!

I was having trouble interpreting Plato's The Republic, this book has been tremendously helpful. If you are having the same problem then get this book now!!

For college students, this book is a godsend. It lays out in common English basically everything that Plato and Socrates say in The Republic. Some of the most famous things from The Republic, including the Noble Lie, the Ship of State, and the Allegory of the Cave are put into layman's terms, making those papers and homework questions relatively easy to write. If you are a student, or are reading The Republic for fun, you have to have this book.

Peter Medawar was once asked by a Customs official when he landed in USA "Do you intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America?". To which he replied that he did not intend to do so, and he hoped that he would not do so by accident.

This irreverent tone is apparent in several of the essays in this collection, notably in his review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man" and Koestler's "The Act of Creation". He had a highly skeptical attitude to pretence of all kinds, and was not hesitant to speak out.

Medawar won a Nobel Prize for medicine and he took a broad view on science and its relation to society. Everyone with an interest in science, especially biological science, will find many items of interest in this collection.

This is a superb collection of essays by a Nobel Prizewinner in medicine who was also one of the best popular writers on science in recent times. Pluto's Republic contains the essays in two previous collections, The Art of the Soluble and The Hope of Progress, both currently out of print. It also contains essays on induction and intuition in scientific thought, several pieces not previously collected in book form and some new items. The contents range far and wide, including some vigorous polemics with Arthur Koestler following Medawar's review of The Act of Creation, comments on some recent books on the state of the art in cancer research and an essay on 'type A' behaviour and heart disease.

Medawar has forthright views on the use of technology to improve the world. He also considers that the traditional division of "pure" and "applied" science is unhelpful, probably deriving from the same perverse cast of mind that created the "romantic versus rational" dichotomy between imaginative and critical thinking, allied with the old Anglo-Saxon class distinction between science (for amateur "gentlemen") and technology (for grubby professional "players"). The traditional view, preserved jealously by pure scientists, is that researchers of high caliber should be allowed to follow their interests wherever they will, either in the belief that this is what the universities and the life of the mind are all about, or in the confident expectation that eventually fundamental work will pay off at the practical level. Medawar concedes

"This procedure works; that is, it works sometimes, and it may be the best we can do, but might not the converse approach be equally effective, given equal talent? That is, to start with a concrete problem, but then to allow the research to open out in the direction of greater generality...I can see no reason why this approach if it were to be attempted by persons of the same ability, should not work just as well as its more conventional counterpart. Research done in this style is always in focus, and those who carry it out, if temporarily baffled, can always retreat from the general into the particular."

It is increasingly accepted that science should have some strategic role to play in education but misconceived ideas about science have made it hard to work out what that role might be. A vacuum is waiting to be filled in the theory and practice of education, and Medawar's book should help to fill it. The "piling up the data" theory has to be put in its place (the dust-bin of history) because it promotes over specialisation, as though the person who spends the most time digging the most narrow trench will get further in the field. At the same time outsiders are discouraged from trying to find out what the scientists are up to, for how can they ever find the time to get into the trenches and master the accumulated store of information?

The alternative "hot air balloon" view of science may be more helpful and realistic. Rival theories do not depend on the sheer weight of evidence (most of the evidence can be used to support opposing theories), nor do they gain credibility by longevity alone. They need to compete for survival under critical scrutiny and tests. Five types of test can be applied: the test of evidence, the test of internal consistency, the test of consistency with other well-tested theories, the check on the problem (does the theory actually solve the problem, or just skirt around it) and the check of metaphysics (the least understood at this stage). With this view of knowledge people like Leonard Woolf could claim that he could become an expert in any field with three months of concentrated study (between running the Hogarth Press, writing Fabian tracts and socialising in Bloomsbury). More realistically we might follow the advice of Jacques Barzun in The House of Intellect

With a cautious confidence and sufficient intellectual training, it is possible to master the literature of a subject and gain a proper understanding of it: specifically, an understanding of the accepted truths, the disputed problems, the rival schools and the methods now in favor. This will not enable one to add to what is known, but it will give possession of all that the discipline has to offer the world.

There is much talk of the modern explosion of knowledge. This is mostly an explosion of publications, some of which advance our knowledge but only by a very small amount. Many do not even do as much as that. The existence of high quality science reporting in popular magazines (New Scientist etc) nullifies the despairing belief that the frontiers of science are receding ever further from view. These publications make Barzun's aim (if not Woolf's) entirely feasible for anyone who wants to keep informed of the main lines of scientific advance; to keep track of the balloons which float in the air, tugging at their mooring lines, while on board the balloons the infernal Popperian dialectic of conjecture and refutation rages, day and night.