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95 books match the query 'Fall' and 31 start with t

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The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Matthew Tuckner

Four Way Books, 2025

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend's illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person's sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.

Describing a trip to Japan, Tuckner evokes the brute force of appetite alongside the delicacy of life as he recalls "memories of its greedy koi fish, a ceramic bowl / of goji berries perfectly balanced on a tree branch." Beholden to a ticking clock, we catalogue, becoming evidentiary and encyclopedic in our impulses. "We fatten the time until it bursts into artifacts: / sixteen photographs of a single puddle // taking shape in the red glow of your darkroom." In borrowing the title of Edward Gibbon's seminal 6-volume history, Tuckner anchors the associative detours of his sprawling intellect and executes a stunning metacommentary on his own lyrics: time collapses every era into a spattering of sentences, tyrannical as it forcibly converts the present to the past, and yet the barbarous recursion of human feeling resists oblivion, evoking the eternity of emotional significance. Tuckner's shrewd balance of irony and tenderness make this cerebral inversion possible: this friendship is the poet's canon event, the Rome at which every road in his mind arrives, and yet it is also the singular dialect that will not cede to death's subsuming lingua franca.

Damien Hirst's taxidermy art, The John Keats House, superfund sites in Rome, NY, the 2023 Ohio Train Derailment, a children's book titled Oil Spill! — these poems travel widely in their topics to understand the specific ravages of disease on the human body, and in turn, the ravages of human beings on the planet. Its trenchant criticism isn't pessimistic, though — its redemption is the restorative, unending love that made these elegies possible. Equally gutted and mesmerized by our infinite, arbitrary ability to discern meaning in mess, these poems ask us to bear witness to what we can develop if we will sit in the darkness. To read the photo essay of a storm's aftermath. It tells an ancient story that becomes brand new, the one about "a puddle you glimpsed the moon in & stopped for. // A puddle that was just plain rain until it fell."

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The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract

F. H. Buckley, ed.

Duke University Press, 1999

Declared dead some twenty-five years ago, the idea of freedom of contract has enjoyed a remarkable intellectual revival. In The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract leading scholars in the fields of contract law and law-and-economics analyze the new interest in bargaining freedom.
The 1970s was a decade of regulatory triumphalism in North America, marked by a surge in consumer, securities, and environmental regulation. Legal scholars predicted the “death of contract” and its replacement by regulation and reliance-based theories of liability. Instead, we have witnessed the reemergence of free bargaining norms. This revival can be attributed to the rise of law-and-economics, which laid bare the intellectual failure of anticontractarian theories. Scholars in this school note that consumers are not as helpless as they have been made out to be, and that intrusive legal rules meant ostensibly to help them often leave them worse off. Contract law principles have also been very robust in areas far afield from traditional contract law, and the essays in this volume consider how free bargaining rights might reasonably be extended in tort, property, land-use planning, bankruptcy, and divorce and family law.
This book will be of particular interest to legal scholars and specialists in contract law. Economics and public policy planners will also be challenged by its novel arguments.

Contributors. Gregory S. Alexander, Margaret F. Brinig, F. H. Buckley, Robert Cooter, Steven J. Eagle, Robert C. Ellickson, Richard A. Epstein, William A. Fischel, Michael Klausner, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Geoffrey P. Miller, Timothy J. Muris, Robert H. Nelson, Eric A. Posner, Robert K. Rasmussen, Larry E. Ribstein, Roberta Romano, Paul H. Rubin, Alan Schwartz, Elizabeth S. Scott, Robert E. Scott, Michael J. Trebilcock

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The Fall of Empires

A Brief History of Imperial Collapse

Chad Denton

Westholme Publishing, 2020

A Historical Survey of the Many Ways Empires have Succumbed to External and Internal Pressures
There are no self-proclaimed empires today. After the twentieth century, with its worldwide wave of decolonizing and liberation movements, the very word “empire” conjures images of slavery, war, repression, and colonialism. None of this is to say that empires are confined to the past, however. By at least some reasonable definitions, empires do exist today. Many articles and books speak about the decline of the “American Empire,” for example, or compare the history of the United States to that of Rome or the British Empire. Yet no public official would speak candidly of American “imperial” interests in the Middle East or use the word “empire” in discussions of the nation’s future the same way British politicians did in the twentieth century. In addition, empires don’t have to fit the classical Roman mold; there are many kinds of empire and varieties of international authority, such as cultural imperialism and economic imperialism. But it is clear empires do not last, even those that once harnessed great wealth, strong armies, and sophisticated legal systems.
InThe Fall of Empires: A Brief History of Imperial Collapse, historian Chad Denton describes the end of seventeen empires throughout world history, from Athens to Qin China, from the Byzantium to the Mughals. He reveals—through stories of conquest, corruption, incompetence, assassination, bigotry, and environmental crisis—how even the most seemingly eternal of empires declined. For Athens and Britain it was military hubris; for Qin China and Russia it was alienating their subjects through oppression; Persia succumbed with the loss of its capital; the Khmer faced ecological catastrophe; while the Aztecs were destroyed by colonial exploitation. None of these events alone explains why the empires fell, but they do provide a glimpse into the often-unpredictable currents of history, which have so far spared no empire. A fascinating and instructive survey, The Fall of Empiresprovides compelling evidence about the fate of centralized regional or global power.

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The Fall of the King

Johannes V. Jensen

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Taking place during the first half of the sixteenth century, The Fall of the King tells the story of dreamy, slacking student Mikkel Thøgersen and the entanglements that ultimately bring him into service as a mercenary under King Christian II of Denmark. Moving from the Danish countryside to Stockholm during the execution of Swedish nobility and finally to the imprisonment of Mikkel and Christian, the narrative is a lyrical encapsulation of “the fall”—the fall of country, history, individuals, and nature.

Twice voted as the most important Danish novel of the twentieth century, The Fall of the King is both an epic depiction of real events and a complex psychological novel. Half pure narration, half prose poem, its scenes of brute realism mixed with rhapsodical passages make it a work of artistic genius.

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The Fall of the US Empire

Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order

Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bulent Gokay

Pluto Press, 2012

Whither the US empire? Despite Washington's military supremacy, its economic foundations have been weakening since the Vietnam war – accelerated by the great recession and credit-rating downgrade – and its global authority dented by the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this accessible, punchy text, Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay intervene in the debates that surround the US's status as an Empire. They survey the arguments amongst Marxist and critical scholars, from Immanuel Wallerstein and others who argue that the US is in decline, to those who maintain that it remains a robust superpower. By explaining how America's neo-imperial system of governance has been working since WWII, Fouskas and Gökay link the US's domestic and foreign vulnerabilities.

The Fall of the US Empire argues that the time has come to understand the US empire not by its power but by its systemic vulnerabilities of financialisation, resource depletion and environmental degradation. Its informed and accessible style will have wide appeal to students looking for an introduction to these issues.

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The IS-LM Model

Its Rise, Fall, and Strange Persistence, Volume 36

Michel De Vroey and Kevin D. Hoover, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

For some twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the IS-LM model dominated macroeconomics. Inspired by the work of John Maynard Keynes, this model demonstrates the relationship among savings, income, investments, and interest rates, showing the point at which the interaction of these elements produces “equilibrium” in an economy. With the advent of the new classical macroeconomics in the early 1970s, the dominance of the IS-LM model was effectively challenged. While no longer central to the graduate training of most macroeconomists or to cutting-edge macroeconomic research, the IS-LM model continues to be a mainstay of undergraduate textbooks, to find wide use in applied macroeconomics, and to lie at the conceptual core of most government and commercial macroeconometric models. This volume, the annual supplement to History of Political Economy, explores the rise, the fall, and the persistence of the IS-LM model. In addition to presenting papers from the History of Political Economy conference held at Duke University in April 2003, the volume includes the text of an address delivered at the conference by Nobel laureate Robert E. Lucas Jr., one of the central players in the intellectual movement that dethroned the IS-LM model.

Contributors. Roger E. Backhouse, Mauro Boianovsky, Michael Bordo, David Colander, William Darity Jr., Michel De Vroey, Robert W. Dimand, Kevin D. Hoover, David Laidler, Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Nelson, Goulven Rubin, Anna Schwartz, Scott Sumner, Warren Young

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The Last Neighborhood Cops

The Rise and Fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing

Umbach, Fritz

Rutgers University Press, 2011

In recent years, community policing has transformed American law enforcement by promising to build trust between citizens and officers. Today, three-quarters of American police departments claim to embrace the strategy. But decades before the phrase was coined, the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) had pioneered community-based crime-fighting strategies.

The Last Neighborhood Cops reveals the forgotten history of the residents and cops who forged community policing in the public housing complexes of New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a combination of poignant storytelling and historical analysis, Fritz Umbach draws on buried and confidential police records and voices of retired officers and older residents to help explore the rise and fall of the HAPD's community-based strategy, while questioning its tactical effectiveness. The result is a unique perspective on contemporary debates of community policing and historical developments chronicling the influence of poor and working-class populations on public policy making.

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The Luck of the Fall

Jim Ray Daniels

Michigan State University Press, 2023

In The Luck of the Fall, characters get lost; they fall, but the falls shape their lives in ways that might even be called “lucky”—if luck is defined as survival, despite the scars left behind. They take consolation in their lack of prizes, in the clarity of their failures, while approaching the future with gallows humor and faith in cynicism. Some stories read like dramatic monologues in the longer play of lives along Eight Mile Road on the edge of Detroit, a landmark location throughout Daniels’s six other fiction collections. Among the looming hulks of abandoned factories, near-nihilistic lives struggle in the absence of the comforting shadows those factories provided. Some keep score, some don’t, as they search for validation, however brief, before the curtain comes down and anonymity returns. COVID shows up with its masked consequences, along with addiction, divorce, unwanted pregnancy, and mental illness. None of these characters fit in, but all are trying to keep from being squeezed out entirely. In The Luck of the Fall, the logic of the heart wins out, even as the characters are picking up the pieces of their broken lives, looking for something shiny called hope.

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The Outsider

Albert M. Greenfield and the Fall of the Protestant Establishment

Dan Rottenberg

Temple University Press, 2018

Albert M. Greenfield (1887-1967), an ambitious immigrant outsider, was courted for his business acumen by mayors, senators, governors, and presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. As this feisty Russian Jew built a business empire that encompassed real estate, stores (including Bonwit Teller and Tiffany's), hotels (including the Ben Franklin and the Bellevue-Stratford), banks, newspapers, transportation companies, and even the Loft Candy Corporation, he challenged the entrenched business elite. Greenfield was also instrumental in bringing both major political conventions to Philadelphia in 1948.

In The Outsider, veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Rottenberg deftly chronicles the astonishing rises, falls, and countless reinventions of this savvy businessman. Greenfield's power allowed him to cross social, religious, and ethnic boundaries with impunity. He alarmed Philadelphia's conservative business and social leaders-Christians and Jews alike-some of whom plotted his downfall.

In this engaging account of Greenfield's fascinating life, Rottenberg demonstrates the extent to which one uniquely brilliant and energetic man pushed the boundaries of society's limitations on individual potential. The Outsider provides a microcosmic look at three twentieth-century upheavals: the rise of Jews as a crucial American business force, the decline of America's Protestant establishment, and the transformation of American cities.

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The Pekin

The Rise and Fall of Chicago's First Black-Owned Theater

Thomas Bauman

University of Illinois Press, 2014

In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the "Temple of Music," the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African American cultural institutions, renowned for its all-black stock company and school for actors, an orchestra able to play ragtime and opera with equal brilliance, and a repertoire of original musical comedies.

A missing chapter in African American theatrical history, Bauman's saga presents how Motts used his entrepreneurial acumen to create a successful black-owned enterprise. Concentrating on institutional history, Bauman explores the Pekin's philosophy of hiring only African American staff, its embrace of multi-racial upper class audiences, and its ready assumption of roles as diverse as community center, social club, and fundraising instrument.

The Pekin's prestige and profitability faltered after Motts' death in 1911 as his heirs lacked his savvy, and African American elites turned away from pure entertainment in favor of spiritual uplift. But, as Bauman shows, the theater had already opened the door to a new dynamic of both intra- and inter-racial theater-going and showed the ways a success, like the Pekin, had a positive economic and social impact on the surrounding community.

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The People's Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943

Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss

Brandeis University Press, 2026

Examines the final years of the Warsaw ghetto, the uprising, and the varied, nuanced ways Jewish people resisted Nazi rule.

The People’s Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943 sheds light on the lives, choices, and experiences of the tens of thousands of Jews who were not part of the underground armed resistance but nonetheless supported the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This riveting and dramatic account focuses on the final year of the Warsaw ghetto, from the Great Deportation in the summer of 1942 through the suppression of the uprising in mid-1943. Drawing on powerful contemporary testimonies, diaries, and documents—many of them previously unexplored—Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss
reveals how members of the broader Jewish population struggled to survive, maintain family and community life, and make impossible moral decisions in the face of fear, hunger, and daily violence. Looking beyond the fighters themselves, the book offers a story of devastation, but also of resilience and human dignity.

Published in association with Yad Vashem.

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The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law

Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s

Masumi Izumi

Temple University Press, 2019

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.

Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.

Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.

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The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture

Jared Gardner

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Countering assumptions about early American print culture and challenging our scholarly fixation on the novel, Jared Gardner reimagines the early American magazine as a rich literary culture that operated as a model for nation-building by celebrating editorship over authorship and serving as a virtual salon in which citizens were invited to share their different perspectives. The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture reexamines early magazines and their reach to show how magazine culture was multivocal and presented a porous distinction between author and reader, as opposed to novel culture, which imposed a one-sided authorial voice and restricted the agency of the reader.

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The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature

John Whittier Treat

University of Chicago Press, 2018

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood.

Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.

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The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade

Samantha Barbas

University of Chicago Press, 2021

A long-overdue biography of the legendary civil liberties lawyer—a vital and contrary figure who both defended Ulysses and fawned over J. Edgar Hoover.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship. He successfully defended Ulysses against obscenity charges, litigated groundbreaking reproductive rights cases, and supported the widespread expansion of protections for sexual expression, union organizing, and public speech. Yet Ernst was also a man of stark contradictions, waging a personal battle against Communism, defending an autocrat, and aligning himself with J. Edgar Hoover’s inflammatory crusades.

Arriving at a moment when issues of privacy, artistic freedom, and personal expression are freshly relevant, The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade brings this singularly complex figure into a timely new light. As Samantha Barbas’s eloquent and compelling biography makes ironically clear, Ernst both transformed free speech in America and inflicted damage to the cause of civil liberties. Drawing on Ernst’s voluminous cache of publications and papers, Barbas follows the life of this singular idealist from his pugnacious early career to his legal triumphs of the 1930s and ’40s and his later idiosyncratic zealotry. As she shows, today’s challenges to free speech and the exercise of political power make Morris Ernst’s battles as pertinent as ever.

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The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism

Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves

University of Illinois Press, 2016

For decades, amateurism defined the ideals undergirding the Olympic movement. No more. Today's Games present athletes who enjoy open corporate sponsorship and unabashedly compete for lucrative commercial endorsements.

Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves analyze how this astonishing transformation took place. Drawing on Olympic archives and a wealth of research across media, the authors examine how an elite--white, wealthy, often Anglo-Saxon--controlled and shaped an enormously powerful myth of amateurism. The myth assumed an air of naturalness that made it seem unassailable and, not incidentally, served those in power. Llewellyn and Gleaves trace professionalism's inroads into the Olympics from tragic figures like Jim Thorpe through the shamateur era of under-the-table cash and state-supported athletes. As they show, the increasing acceptability of professionals went hand-in-hand with the Games becoming a for-profit international spectacle. Yet the myth of amateurism's purity remained a potent force, influencing how people around the globe imagined and understood sport.

Timely and vivid with details, The Rise and Fall of Olympic Amateurism is the first book-length examination of the movement's foundational ideal.

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The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors

Jacqueline de Romilly

University of Michigan Press, 1991

The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors is a masterful survey of the manner in which Greek historians, from Herodotus to Polybius, explained the conditions of a state’s success and the dangers of power. Both the differences and the similarities among the major authors’ ideas are carefully analyzed: the changing notions of excess, or hybris; the common stress on public morality; and the value of goodwill and union.

The first woman to be elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and the first woman to hold a professorship at the College de France, Jacqueline de Romilly has serves as director of the Department of Greek at the Sorbonne and had lectured at numerous universities and institutions of learning around the world. The author or editor of numerous volumes concerning Thucydides, Jacqueline de Romilly has in recent years become increasingly interested in the history of moral and political ideas.

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The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers

Cooperatives, Market Regulation, and Free Enterprise

Paul Earl

University of Manitoba Press, 2019

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The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System

Detroit, 1907-81, Second Edition

Jeffrey Mirel

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Detroit's public school system, lauded as a model for the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, has become one of the city's most conspicuous failures. Jeffrey Mirel draws on Detroit's experience to offer a new interpretation of urban educational decline in the twentieth century, suggesting specific answers to what ails America's public schools and how public education can be improved.

Jeffrey Mirel has won two prestigious book awards for The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Stanford University and the American Educational Research Association awarded the book the 1994-95 "Outstanding Book Award" stating, "Mirel's documentation and interpretations serve as valuable and refreshing commentary on the current status of urban education, and by extension, all American education and society. . . . The book is admirably written with touches of drama, pathos, and hope." The American Educational Studies Association awarded Mirel the 1994 "Critics' Choice Award" for his outstanding contribution to Educational Studies.

This paperback edition includes a comprehensive epilogue focusing on recent events in Detroit educational reform. Detailing the formation and rapid collapse of a campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s to radically restructure the Detroit public schools, Mirel's new analysis of this experiment illuminates both the persistence of historical trends in the school district and the possibilities for change.

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The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press

Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox

Gerald Horne

University of Illinois Press, 2017

For nearly fifty years, the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP) fought racism at home and grew into an international news organization abroad. At its head stood founder Claude Barnett, one of the most influential African Americans of his day and a gifted, if unofficial, diplomat who forged links with figures as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Nixon.

Gerald Horne weaves Barnett's fascinating life story through a groundbreaking history of the ANP, including its deep dedication to Pan-Africanism. An activist force in journalism, Barnett also helped send doctors and teachers to Africa, advised African governments, gave priority to foreign newsgathering, and saw the African American struggle in global terms. Yet Horne also confronts Barnett's contradictions. A member of the African American elite, Barnett's sympathies with black aspirations often clashed with his ethics and a powerful desire to join the upper echelons of business and government. In the end, Barnett's activist success undid his work. Horne traces the dramatic story of the ANP's collapse as the mainstream press, retreating from Jim Crow, finally covered black issues and hired African American journalists.

Revelatory and entertaining, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press tells the story of a forgotten pioneer and the ambitious black institution he created.

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The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution

Edited by T. C. W. Blanning

University of Chicago Press, 1996

During the past twenty-five years, the historiography of the French Revolution has experienced a revolution of its own. Utilizing developments in such areas as anthropology and critical theory, scholars have begun to ask new questions and to devise new ways of understanding the period.

The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution is a collection of seventeen pathbreaking articles which originally appeared in the Journal of Modern History. Contributors include Keith Michael Baker, Suzanne Desan, Bill Edmonds, François Furet, Vivian R. Gruder, Paul Hanson, James N. Hood, Lynn Hunt, David Lansky, Colin Lucas, John Markoff, Mona Ozouf, Alison Patrick, Jeremy D. Popkin, William H. Sewell, Jr., Theda Skocpol, Timothy Tackett, and Dale Van Kley. In addition, a substantial introduction by the editor discusses the evolution of the history of the period and how the individual contributors have shaped the debate.

This volume not only chronicles the rise and fall of the French Revolution but also introduces the reader to the different approaches being employed by the most eminent historians working in the field. The result is a volume on the French Revolution that offers a compelling combination of information and opinion, narrative and interpretation.

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The Rise and Fall of the International Organization of Journalists Based in Prague 1946–2016

Useful Recollections Part III

Kaarle Nordenstreng

Karolinum Press, 2021

In this book, Finnish scholar Kaarle Nordenstreng provides a unique account of the Prague-based International Organization of Journalists, a group that was at one time the world’s largest media association. The IOJ expanded from a postwar fraternity of professional journalists in twenty countries to a truly global organization that had its hand in running journalism schools, a publishing house, a conference service, and a number of commercial enterprises in Czechoslovakia. Though the Cold War kept most Western journalists’ unions isolated from the organization, the IOJ was a major player in Communist Eastern Europe--at its peak in the late 1980s, the IOJ counted 300,000 journalists as members. Nordenstreng--who served as president of the IOJ for fourteen years--illuminates this exciting and little-explored chapter in the history of postwar Europe, from the rise of the Iron Curtain through the post-Soviet 1990s. He enlivens his firsthand account with personal testimonies from former IOJ members and a wealth of previously unpublished internal documents.

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The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870

By John Hoyt Williams

University of Texas Press, 1979

Paraguay plays a very small role in the modern world, but for part of the nineteenth century it was a significant regional force. Between 1800 and 1865 it changed from an imperial backwater into a dynamic, dictator-led, financially sound nation. Then came the terrible War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1870 Paraguay had virtually been destroyed.

John Hoyt Williams re-creates the era’s people, places, and events in rich detail and a vigorous style, but this is much more than a mere narrative. His archival research in Paraguay and several other countries enables him to offer new facts and interpretations, correct a number of misapprehensions, and explode a few myths.

He also provides the clearest, most objective portraits available of the three extraordinary men who ruled Paraguay during this time: Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, “El Supremo”; Carlos Antonio López, “the Corpulent Despot”; and López’s flamboyant son Francisco Solano López. Discussions of social, economic, and cultural conditions round out a masterly account of a remarkable historical period.

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The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State

Asbjorn Wahl

Pluto Press, 2012

In an age of government imposed austerity, and after 30 years of neo-liberal restructuring, the future of the welfare state looks increasingly uncertain. Asbjørn Wahl offers an accessible analysis of the situation across Europe, identifies the most important challenges and presents practical proposals for combating the assault on welfare.

Wahl argues that the welfare state should be seen as the result of a class compromise forged in the 20th century, which means that it cannot easily be exported internationally. He considers the enormous shifts in power relations and the profound internal changes to the welfare state which have occurred during the neo-liberal era, pointing to the paradigm shift that the welfare state is going through. This is illustrated by the shift from welfare to workfare and increased top-down control.

As well as being a fascinating study in its own right that will appeal to students of economics and politics, The Rise and Fall of the Welfare State also points to an alternative way forward for the trade union movement based on concrete examples of struggles and alliance-building.

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The Southern Maya in the Late Preclassic

The Rise and Fall of an Early Mesoamerican Civilization

Michael Love

University Press of Colorado, 2011

From 400 BC to AD 250, the southern Maya region was one of the most remarkable civilizations of the ancient Americas. Filled with great cities linked by flourishing long-distance trade, shared elite ideologies, and a vibrant material culture, this region was pivotal not only for the Maya but for Mesoamerica as a whole. Although it has been of great interest to scholars, gaps in the knowledge have led to debate on the most vital questions about the southern region.

Recent research has provided a wealth of broadly based new data that have expanded the understanding of this region and its influence on greater Mesoamerica. In The Southern Maya in the Late Preclassic, prominent contributors debate whether the southern region was indeed "Maya" or instead a region of intense multiethnic interaction, with speakers of many languages and many sources of identity. The chapters address a host of advanced developments to which this area can lay claim--urbanism and city-states, the earliest Maya writing, and the origin of the Maya calendar--as well as additional issues including the construction of social and cultural identities, economic networks of early complex societies, relationships between the Maya and the Olmec, and a comprehensive discussion of the ancient city of Kaminaljuyu and its relationship to other cities in the region.

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The Steamer Parish

The Rise and Fall of Missionary Medicine on an African Frontier

Charles M. Good

University of Chicago Press, 2003

In the mid-1800s, a group of High Anglicans formed the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). Inspired by Dr. David Livingstone, they felt a special calling to bring the Church, education, and medical care to rural Africans. To deliver services across a huge, remote area, the UMCA relied on steamer ships that were sent from England and then reassembled on Lake Malawi. By the mid-1920s, the UMCA had built a chain of mission stations that spread across four hundred miles.

In The Steamer Parish, Charles M. Good Jr. traces the Mission's history and its lasting impact on public health care in south-central Africa-and shows how steam and medicine, together with theology, allowed the Mission to impose its will, indelibly, on hundreds of thousands of people. What's more, many of the issues he discusses-rural development, the ecological history of disease, and competition between western and traditional medicine-are as relevant today as they were 100 years ago.

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The Teutonic Knights

Rise and Fall of a Religious Corporation

Aleksander Pluskowski

Reaktion Books, 2024

A gripping account of the rise and fall of the last great medieval military order.

This book provides a concise and incisive introduction to the knights of the Teutonic Order, the last of the great military orders established in the twelfth century. The book traces the Order’s evolution from a crusader field hospital into a major territorial ruler in northeastern Europe. Notably, the knights constructed distinctive fortified convents, including their headquarters in Western Christendom’s largest castle. The narrative concludes with the Order’s fifteenth-century decline due to the combined effects of a devastating war with Poland-Lithuania and the Protestant Reformation. The result is an accessible overview of this pivotal corporation in European history.

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The Twenty-five Year Century

A South Vietnamese General Remembers the Indochina War to the Fall of Saigon

Quang Thi Lam

University of North Texas Press, 2001

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Truth on Trial

The Rise and Fall of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas

Robert K. Carlson

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

In this reprinting of Truth on Trial, Robert Carlson outlines the sad state of higher education in America, where “learning” is increasingly disconnected from the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty that has always been its most important heritage, replaced by an environment where any view that is not ‘politically correct’ is persecuted and disdained. Drawing upon his own experiences in the transformational Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas (KU), Carlson details the crisis that faces education today, and uses the lessons learned through that program’s meteoric rise (and eventual demise) to propose a solution to that same crisis. Launching in the early 1970’s, the IHP was the “Great Books” brainchild of a trio of KU professors—Dennis Quinn, Franklyn Nelick, and John Senior—who understood that wonder is not only the beginning but also the sustaining principle of the best education, and who sought to offset the radical disintegration permeating Western culture in general and higher education in particular. Convinced that the fragmentation of such major cultural institutions as the family, the church, and the world of education was profoundly affecting students, these three teachers invited freshmen and sophomores at the public university to join their fledgling program, where they would study, hear, and discuss the classics of ancient and medieval literature, listen to their professors converse on “the greatest that has been thought and said,” memorize poems, stargaze, take courses in Latin and rhetoric, and much more. The program’s growth was immediate and rapid—student enrollment increased from 20 in 1970 to 140 in 1971, and 186 in 1972—but its counter-cultural stance put it on fragile ground at KU, and within a year, it was under intense scrutiny, culminating in a public, quasi-judicial proceeding in which a dean-appointed committee sought to determine whether the IHP should continue to exist. Quinn, Nelick, and Senior, professors with a combined total of 90+ years in teaching, were now on trial at the university, not because they had taught poorly, but because they had taught too well. On January 20, 1979, the Advisory Committee charged with investigating the Program rendered its verdict, placing it under the administration of a new Humanities Committee, effectively annihilating the IHP. While its initial trial felt like a defeat, God had other plans in store. Thankfully (and to paraphrase Twain’s famous words), the effects of the IHP’s death were greatly exaggerated. In the years since its untimely demise on the KU campus, its impact on the world of Catholic education has only grown stronger—the fruitfulness of its alumni and friends serving as the ultimate proof of its vision’s great worth. Since the program’s closing in 1979, it has inspired the founding of both Clear Creek Abbey and Wyoming Catholic College, as well as St. Gregory’s Academy in Pennsylvania (which eventually led to Gregory the Great Academy), and St. Martin’s Academy in Kansas. Perhaps most tellingly of all, its clear call to make wonder, beauty, and experience vital parts of any educational program has impacted countless homeschooling families, private and public school teachers, and educational programs in the subsequent years.

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Trying Home

The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound

Justin Wadland

Oregon State University Press, 2014

The true story of an anarchist colony on a remote Puget Sound peninsula, Trying Home traces the history of Home, Washington, from its founding in 1896 to its dissolution amid bitter infighting in 1921.

As a practical experiment in anarchism, Home offered its participants a rare degree of freedom and tolerance in the Gilded Age, but the community also became notorious to the outside world for its open rejection of contemporary values. Using a series of linked narratives, Trying Home reveals the stories of the iconoclastic individuals who lived in Home, among them Lois Waisbrooker, an advocate of women’s rights and free love, who was arrested for her writings after the assassination of President McKinley; Jay Fox, editor of The Agitator, who defended his right to free speech all the way to the Supreme Court; and Donald Vose, a young man who grew up in Home and turned spy for a detective agency.

Justin Wadland weaves his own discovery of Home—and his own reflections on the concept of home—into the story, setting the book apart from a conventional history. After discovering the newspapers published in the colony, Wadland ventures beyond the documents to explore the landscape, travelling by boat along the steamer route most visitors once took to the settlement. He visits Home to talk with people who live there now.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Trying Home will fascinate scholars and general readers alike, especially those interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest, utopian communities, and anarchism.

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