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"My life has been given special purpose," Jake Pickle says. "Some men live to make money, drink, chase women, collect art, excel at a sport, or pursue other things that give them pleasure. The thing I got hooked on was helping people. And I've had the privilege of helping people by the thousands. Serving in Congress was the greatest honor of my life."

In this book, Jake Pickle tells the story of a lifetime in public service, including thirty-one years as Representative for Texas' Tenth Congressional District. Jake tells his story by telling stories—most of them humorous, some poignant—that add up to a warmly personal account of his life and career.

At the heart of the book are Jake's stories of political life in Washington, Austin, and on the campaign trail. These range from hilarious accounts of all that can and does happen at small-town Texas parades and rallies to clear, no-baloney explanations of some of the major legislation that Jake helped to pass. His stories about Social Security reform, tax-exempt organizations, and pension fund reform legislation make these complex topics easy to understand.

This book was written as a collaboration between Jake and his daughter, Peggy Pickle. It offers the fun of listening to a born raconteur spin his tales, while it reveals the ethics and integrity of a man who never forgot that the people elected him to serve them.

As chief of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, James Jesus Angleton built a formidable reputation. Although perhaps best known for leading the agency's notorious “Molehunt”—the search for a Soviet spy believed to have infiltrated the upper levels of the American government—Angleton also played a key role in the U.S. intervention in the Italian election of 1948, in Israel's development of nuclear weapons, and in the management of the CIA's investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He later led CIA efforts to contain the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, including the campaign to destroy the liberal Catholic magazine Ramparts. 

In this deeply researched biography, Michael Holzman uses Angleton's story to illuminate the history of the CIA from its founding in the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. Like many of his colleagues in the CIA, James Angleton learned the craft of espionage during World War II as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he became a friend and protégé of the British double agent Kim Philby. Yet Angleton's approach to counterintelligence was also influenced by his unusual Mexican American family background and his years at Yale as a student of the New Critics and publisher of modernist poets. His marriage to Cicely d'Autremont and the couple's friendship with E. E. and Marion Cummings became part of a network of cultural connections that linked the U.S. secret intelligence services and American writers and artists during the postwar period. 

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including previously unexamined archival documents, personal letters, and interviews, Holzman looks beneath the surface of Angleton's career to reveal the sensibility that governed not only his personal aims and ambitions but those of the organization he served and helped shape.

No other governor has become so completely identified with Texas and its citizens as Jim Hogg, the first native Texan to hold the state's highest office. His fame was not, however, easily earned. Orphaned at twelve, he worked as farmhand, typesetter, and country editor to finance his study of law, an endeavor that eventually led him into public life.

Even before his admission to the bar in 1875 he served as justice of the peace in Wood County. Later, in two terms as district attorney (1881–1885), he proved himself a fearless prosecutor. His growing reputation, with his magnetic personality, brought him the attorney generalship in 1887, and in that office he fulfilled his campaign promises to enforce all laws. During Hogg's tenure, suits brought by his department resulted in the restoration of more than a million acres of state lands held by the railroads.

In 1890 Hogg was elected governor. Early the next year he began urging his reform program, the keystone of which was establishment of the Railroad Commission. He also brought about the passage of laws preventing the watering of railroad securities, the indiscriminate issuance of municipal securities, and the establishment of landholding companies. Land ownership by aliens was likewise restricted.

Throughout Hogg's public life, from iustice of the peace to governor, he was motivated by his concern for the welfare of the people. Invariably his criterion for evaluation of an issue was the effect of a decision upon the common welfare. In this democratic progressivism he was the Texas version of Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt. Molded by his varied experiences, Jim Hogg was a man of many professions—printer, lawyer, politician, statesman, oil magnate. In these relationships he was still a warmly human person, a loving son, brother, husband, father, friend. His ambition to provide abundantly for his family was expansive enough to include all Texans; so his love for "the people" was reiterated in his public benefactions, through which Texans are even today still sharing his wealth.

Jim Hogg's varied public life and his heart-warming personal life are dramatically presented in this absorbing biography. In it, the far-sweeping panorama of Texas development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is shown in relation to his dreams and achievements.

Jean-Paul Marat’s role in the French Revolution has long been a matter of controversy among historians. Often he has been portrayed as a violent, sociopathic demagogue. This biography challenges that interpretation and argues that without Marat’s contributions as an agitator, tactician, and strategist, the pivotal social transformation that the Revolution accomplished might well not have occurred.

Clifford D. Conner argues that what was unique about Marat - which set him apart from all other major figures of the Revolution, including Danton and Robespierre - was his total identification with the struggle of the propertyless classes for social equality.

This is an essential book for anyone interested in the history of the revolutionary period and the personalities that led it.

Not available.

The first full biography of the southern U.S. Supreme Court justice who championed both the U.S. Constitution and states’ rights.
 
The life of John Archibald Campbell reflects nearly every major development of 19th-century American history. He participated either directly or indirectly in events ranging from the Indian removal process of the 1830s, to sectionalism and the Civil War, to Reconstruction and redemption. Although not a defender of slavery, he feared that abrupt abolition would produce severe economic and social dislocation. He urged southerners to reform their labor system and to prepare for the eventual abolition of slavery. In the early 1850s he proposed a series of reforms to strengthen slave families and to educate the slaves to prepare them for assimilation into society as productive citizens. These views distinguished him from many southerners who steadfastly maintained the sanctity of the peculiar institution.
 
Born and schooled in Georgia, Campbell moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1830s, where he joined a successful law practice. He served in the Alabama legislature for a brief period and then moved with his family to Mobile to establish a law practice. In 1853 Campbell was appointed an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. His concurring opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857 derived not from the standpoint of protecting slavery but from an attempt to return political power to the states. As the sectional crisis gathered heat, Campbell counseled moderation. He became widely detested in the North because of his defense of states’ rights, and he was distrusted in the South because of his moderate views on slavery and secession. In May 1861 Campbell resigned from the Court and later became the Confederacy's assistant secretary of war. After the war, Campbell moved his law practice to New Orleans. Upon his death in 1889, memorial speakers in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans recognized him as one of the nation's most gifted lawyers and praised his vast learning and mastery of both the common law and the civil law.
 
In this first full biography of Campbell, Robert Saunders, Jr., reveals the prevalence of anti-secession views prior to the Civil War and covers both the judicial aspects and the political history of this crucial period in southern history.
 

A Southern voice on a national bench—McKinley’s legacy in antebellum law.

John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court offers the first comprehensive biography of Justice John McKinley (1780–1852), a largely forgotten figure in American legal history who played a pivotal role during a formative period of the U.S. Supreme Court. Steven P. Brown rescues McKinley from historical obscurity, presenting a compelling portrait of a man deeply embedded in the political, legal, and financial life of the early 19th-century South.

Born in Kentucky and later settling in northern Alabama, McKinley served in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Martin Van Buren in 1837. His tenure on the bench coincided with the creation of the Ninth Circuit, a vast and challenging judicial territory encompassing Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Brown details McKinley’s arduous circuit-riding duties, which required extensive travel and exposed him to the legal complexities of a rapidly expanding frontier.

More than a biography, the book provides a penetrating analysis of antebellum legal culture, Alabama state politics, and the internal workings of the Supreme Court during a time of national transformation. Brown challenges the prevailing view of McKinley as a mediocre jurist, arguing instead that his contributions—particularly his dissents defending states’ rights—deserve renewed scholarly attention. With rich historical context and meticulous research, John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court sheds light on the burdens of justice in a divided nation and the legacy of a justice whose career mirrored the tensions of his time.
 

Reassessing the colonial official at the center of Central America's turbulent path to independence.

Latin American independence histories of the last 150 years have tended to stereotype Captain General Bustamante, governor of the Spanish colony of Guatemala from 1811 to 1818, as a tyrannical arch-villain who personified colonial oppression. Timothy Hawkins, in contrast, examines Bustamante and his administration within the context of preservation of empire, the effort by colonial officials and partisans to maintain the integrity of the Spanish empire in spite of internal and external unrest.

Based on extensive primary research in the archives of Guatemala, Mexico, and Spain, Hawkins’s approach links the Central American experience to that of areas such as Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico, that also responded equivocally and haphazardly to rebellious uprisings against colonial rule. While conceding that Bustamante’s role in the suppression of unrest turned him into one of the more controversial figures in Latin American history, Hawkins argues that the Bustamante administration should not be seen as an isolated and perverse case of Spanish repression but as an example of a relatively successful, if short lived, campaign by Spain to preserve its empire.