Book by Joseph L. Blau

Excerpts from 4 of this 18th century firebrand's major works including Rights of Man and The American Crisis

In one handy volume, scholars, students, and general readers alike have an authentic and responsible selection of Madison's writings. The wide range of material shows the development of a major political thinker over more than half a century as he encounters successfully the provocative questions of American political life from the Revolution and making of the Constitution to the sectional crisis over slavery. Introduction, headnotes, bibliography, and index have all been revised for this edition, especially welcome as the Constitutional bicentennial approaches.

Nonviolence in America is a comprehensive compilation of first-hand sources that document the history of nonviolence in the United States from colonial times to the present. Editors Staughton and Alice Lynd bring together materials from diverse sources that illuminate a movement in American history that is sometimes assumed to have begun and ended with the anti-nuclear and civil rights struggles of the '50s and '60s but which is, in fact, older than the Republic itself. This revised and expanded edition of Nonviolence in America opens with writings of William Penn and John Woolman, of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, and of anarchists Emma Goldman and William Haywood. It continues with testimonies of suffragettes and conscientious objectors of both World Wars, trade unionists and anti-nuclear activists. It includes classics such as Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," William James' "The Moral Equivalent of War," and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." Bringing Nonviolence in America right up to the present are writings on the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars, and the continuing struggles against nuclear power plants and weaponry and for preservation of the Earth and its peoples.

While women's experience encompasses all that is human, while women have participated in history and the making of history through all time, until very recently they have been largely excluded from the writing of that history. Most of what we know of the past experience of women comes to us largely through the distorting lens of men's reflections and observations. In the now classic The Female Experience, Gerda Lerner describes history as seen by women, as colored by their values. What she creates is fascinating narrative of the lives and history of ordinary women, a book that provides a new framework for the study of their past experience. If women's history is now a healthy and ever-growing discipline, we have in a large part this award-winning author to thank. Avoiding the traditional chronological periods by which U.S. history is most often studied, Lerner groups her sources—many taken from manuscripts previously unknown, and others only available in research libraries—according to the lifecycle of women, their roles in a male-defined society, in the workplace, in politics, and finally in the contemporary world where feminism is creating an altogether new consciousness. From "runaway wives" in eighteenth-century America, through an anonymous account of a mother's death during childbirth, to appeals in our century for freedom of sexual preference, The Female Experience recounts history from the woman's point of view, and goes a long way toward reconstructing a female past and analyzing it with appropriate concepts. In the general introduction and chapter essays Lerner offers commentary that not only knits these disparate primary sources together, but also interprets them in an innovative way. Now brought up to date with a new preface, The Female Experience is a book that pulses with life, a stunning testament not only to the long-ignored role of women in society, but a pioneering effort to reinvent the way we look at history.