America the Unusual

America the Unusual PDF Author: John W Kingdon
Publisher: John W. Kingdon (copyright holder)
ISBN: 0312189710
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
A book about why the United States is different from other industrialized countries.

America the Unusual

America the Unusual PDF Author: John W Kingdon
Publisher: John W. Kingdon (copyright holder)
ISBN: 0312189710
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
A book about why the United States is different from other industrialized countries.

Cruel and Unusual

Cruel and Unusual PDF Author: Anne-Marie Cusac
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The statistics are startling. Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has multiplied over five times to become the highest in the world. More than two million inmates reside in state and federal prisons. What does this say about our attitudes toward criminals and punishment? What does it say about us? This book explores the cultural evolution of punishment practices in the United States. Anne-Marie Cusac first looks at punishment in the nation’s early days, when Americans repudiated Old World cruelty toward criminals and emphasized rehabilitation over retribution. This attitude persisted for some 200 years, but in recent decades we have abandoned it, Cusac shows. She discusses the dramatic rise in the use of torture and restraint, corporal and capital punishment, and punitive physical pain. And she links this new climate of punishment to shifts in other aspects of American culture, including changes in dominant religious beliefs, child-rearing practices, politics, television shows, movies, and more. America now punishes harder and longer and with methods we would have rejected as cruel and unusual not long ago. These changes are profound, their impact affects all our lives, and we have yet to understand the full consequences.

From Wealth to Power

From Wealth to Power PDF Author: Fareed Zakaria
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What turns rich nations into great powers? How do wealthy countries begin extending their influence abroad? These questions are vital to understanding one of the most important sources of instability in international politics: the emergence of a new power. In From Wealth to Power, Fareed Zakaria seeks to answer these questions by examining the most puzzling case of a rising power in modern history--that of the United States. If rich nations routinely become great powers, Zakaria asks, then how do we explain the strange inactivity of the United States in the late nineteenth century? By 1885, the U.S. was the richest country in the world. And yet, by all military, political, and diplomatic measures, it was a minor power. To explain this discrepancy, Zakaria considers a wide variety of cases between 1865 and 1908 when the U.S. considered expanding its influence in such diverse places as Canada, the Dominican Republic, and Iceland. Consistent with the realist theory of international relations, he argues that the President and his administration tried to increase the country's political influence abroad when they saw an increase in the nation's relative economic power. But they frequently had to curtail their plans for expansion, he shows, because they lacked a strong central government that could harness that economic power for the purposes of foreign policy. America was an unusual power--a strong nation with a weak state. It was not until late in the century, when power shifted from states to the federal government and from the legislative to the executive branch, that leaders in Washington could mobilize the nation's resources for international influence. Zakaria's exploration of this tension between national power and state structure will change how we view the emergence of new powers and deepen our understanding of America's exceptional history.

Rare Birds of North America

Rare Birds of North America PDF Author: Steve N. G. Howell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691117969
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The first comprehensive illustrated guide to North America's vagrant birds Rare Birds of North America is the first comprehensive illustrated guide to the vagrant birds that occur throughout the United States and Canada. Featuring 275 stunning color plates, this book covers 262 species originating from three very different regions—the Old World, the New World tropics, and the world's oceans. It explains the causes of avian vagrancy and breaks down patterns of occurrence by region and season, enabling readers to see where, when, and why each species occurs in North America. Detailed species accounts describe key identification features, taxonomy, age, sex, distribution, and status. Rare Birds of North America provides unparalleled insights into vagrancy and avian migration, and will enrich the birding experience of anyone interested in finding and observing rare birds. Covers 262 species of vagrant birds found in the United States and Canada Features 275 stunning color plates that depict every species Explains patterns of occurrence by region and season Provides an invaluable overview of vagrancy patterns and migration Includes detailed species accounts and cutting-edge identification tips

Unusual for Their Time

Unusual for Their Time PDF Author: Andrew Och
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943226122
Category : Presidents' spouses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Author Andrew Och's brings readers along on his travels to "to nearly every city, town, village, home, school, church, birthplace, cemetery, train station, farm, plantation, library, museum, general store, town center and cottage" that relates to America's first ladies in the 1700s through the 1800s.

Amazing and Unusual USA

Amazing and Unusual USA PDF Author: Jeff Bahr
Publisher: Publications International
ISBN: 9781412716833
Category : Curiosities and wonders
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Discover some of the most unusual sights in the United States in this beautiful hardcover coffee table book. Full-color photography highlights weird roadside attractions, strange natural wonders, and positively mysterious phenomena. From the world's largest bug and the world's largest globe to historic castles and a floating bridge, you'll find a treasure trove of sites to explore.

Fire in America

Fire in America PDF Author: Stephen J. Pyne
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805218
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
From prehistory to the present-day conservation movement, Pyne explores the efforts of successive American cultures to master wildfire and to use it to shape the landscape.

Cruel and Unusual

Cruel and Unusual PDF Author: Mark Crispin Miller
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393059175
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In "Cruel and Unusual," Mark Crispin Miller exposes what he calls the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, and their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet.

Motel of the Mysteries

Motel of the Mysteries PDF Author: David Macaulay
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547770723
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

Inventing a Nation

Inventing a Nation PDF Author: Gore Vidal
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This New York Times bestseller offers “an unblinking view of our national heroes by one who cherishes them, warts and all” (New York Review of Books). In Inventing a Nation, National Book Award winner Gore Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls, and the salons of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. We come to know these men, through Vidal’s splendid prose, in ways we have not up to now—their opinions of each other, their worries about money, their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings them to life at the key moments of decision in the birthing of our nation. He also illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they delivered, and the institutions of government by which we still live. More than two centuries later, America is still largely governed by the ideas championed by this triumvirate. The author of Burr and Lincoln, one of the master stylists of American literature and most acute observers of American life, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of these formidable men