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"If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier."
—Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973)

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, stands tall among American icons. The representative from Montana won her seat at a time when women didn't have the right to vote in most states. Her firm stances inspired both admiration and fury across party lines, and she gained nearly canonical status among feminists and pacifists. In Jeannette Rankin: A Political Woman, James Lopach and Jean Luckowski demythologize Rankin, showing her to be a talented, driven, and deeply divided woman.

Until now, no biography has explored Rankin's inconsistencies. The authors extensively consulted the correspondence of her family members and contemporaries, uncovering ties between her politics and her familial and personal relationships. They reveal how she succeeded through her wealthy brother's influence as well as her own extraordinary efforts; how she drew inspiration not from her rural roots but from the radical hotbed of Greenwich Village; and how she championed an independent, woman-centered life while deferring to family.

Revealing her complexities along with her accomplishments, Jeannette Rankin: A Political Woman will be the definitive biography of this path-breaking politician for years to come.

In this remarkable book, recounting his long, influential career as a congressman from New York, Stephen Solarz gives an insider’s view of the life of a hard-working legislator in the forefront of democracy movements and human rights during a tumultuous time in our nation’s history. A member of the class of 1974, the so-called “Watergate” class, when 75 freshman Democrats were elected to the Congress, Solarz was part of the group that brought about a power shift in the House from an inner circle of senior committee chairs to a much larger group of subcommittee leaders. Early on he sought and won a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he earned a reputation as an expert in international relations, traveling to more than 100 countries and meeting the likes of Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Nelson Mandela, Indira Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, and Robert Mugabe. Solarz gives fascinating, detailed descriptions of his role in bringing democracy to South Korea and Taiwan, the triumph of people power in the Philippines, the peace agreement in Cambodia, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, and the adoption of the resolution authorizing the use of force in the first Gulf War. Written in an engaging style, Journeys to War and Peace will appeal to all who value the struggle for human rights and seek a better understanding between differing cultures and peoples.

Justice and peace are key concepts in the discourse of many academic disciplines. Conceptually, they are obviously linked, but perennial disputes surround the question of their interdependence and whether priority must be accorded to justice or peace. This volume brings together a diverse group of internationally renowned scholars from the fields of political theory, philosophy, international relations, history, cultural anthropology, and law to address these overarching questions and offer suggestions on how the friction between justice and peace might be resolved. The contributors draw on long-standing philosophical debates in order to address historical as well as contemporary conflicts ranging from the establishment and enforcement of legal and political norms in the disputes of early modern Europe to present-day tensions inherent in the constitutionalization of international law.