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It was a year packed with unsettling events. The Panic of 1857 closed every bank in New York City, ruined thousands of businesses, and caused widespread unemployment among industrial workers. The Mormons in Utah Territory threatened rebellion when federal troops approached with a non-Mormon governor to replace Brigham Young. The Supreme Court outraged northern Republicans and abolitionists with the Dred Scott decision ("a breathtaking example of judicial activism"). And when a proslavery minority in Kansas Territory tried to foist a proslavery constitution on a large antislavery majority, President Buchanan reneged on a crucial commitment and supported the minority, a disastrous miscalculation which ultimately split the Democratic party in two. In America in 1857, eminent American historian Kenneth Stampp offers a sweeping narrative of this eventful year, covering all the major crises while providing readers with a vivid portrait of America at mid-century. Stampp gives us a ...

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. Meteorologists had been warning residents about a two-day heat wave, but these temperatures did not end that soon. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; the records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had failed, leaving thousands of residents without electricity for up to two days. Any by July 20, over 700 people had perished - more than twice the number that died in the Chicago Fire of 1871, twenty times the number of those struck by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 - in the great Chicago heat wave, one of the deadliest in American history. Heat waves in the United States kill more people during a typical year than all other natural disasters combined. Until now, no one could explain either the overwhelming n...

Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley shocked America in 1948 with their allegations that Communist spies had penetrated the American government. The resulting perjury trial of Alger Hiss is already legendary, but Chambers and Bentley also named Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking Treasury official. (Hiss himself thought that White had been the real target of the House Un-American Activities Committee.) When White died only a week after his bold defense before Congress, much speculation remained about the cause of his death and the truth of the charges made against him. Armed with a wealth of new information, Bruce Craig examines this controversial case and explores the ambiguities that have haunted it for more than half a century. The highest ranking figure in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to be accused of espionage, White played a central role in the founding of the United Nations' twin financial institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. For years...

This book is concerned with the fundamental issues of elder respect, how it is practiced and perceived in the broad context of human service settings, and with the resolution of those issues. The writings presented in this book describe the role of elder respect in health, social work, religious, and cultural and ethnic settings. The authors aim for elder respect to be better understood by professionals in human services as well as by those people who care for elderly relatives in the East and the West. Product details Format Paperback | 398 pages Dimensions ...

The Panama Canal is a world-famous site central to the global economy, but the social, cultural, and political history of the country along this waterway is little known outside its borders. In Musica Tipica, author Sean Bellaviti sheds light on a key element of Panamanian culture, namely the story of cumbia or, as Panamanians frequently call it, "musica tipica," a form of music that enjoys unparalleled popularity throughout Panama. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Bellaviti reconstructs a twentieth-century social history that illuminates the crucial role music has played in the formation of national identities in Latin America. Focusing, in particular, on the relationship between cumbia and the rise of populist Panamanian nationalism in the context of U.S. imperialism, Bellaviti argues that this hybrid musical form, which forges links between the urban and rural as well as the modern and traditional, has been essential to the development of a sense of n...