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"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles

"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
---Keith Baker, Stanford University

When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.

Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan Press, 2005), and winner of the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Soll edited a special issue of Journal of the History of Ideas titled "The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe"; has cofounded the online journal Republics of Letters; and is editor, along with Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World.

The Lives of Cato the Younger from Ancient Rome to Modern America traces the reception and influence of Cato from his suicide at the fall of the Roman Republic to the twenty-first century. In preferring death to Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, Cato became a symbol of resistance to tyrannical rulers during the Roman Empire. In the years that followed, three interpretations of Cato became predominant: Cato lived and died with the resolve of a philosopher; he was a traitor to Caesar’s legitimate rule; or he was a republican statesman defending liberty. Beginning with these interpretations, Thomas E. Strunk explores Cato’s reception in antiquity with chapters on Tacitus and Plutarch; and he later discusses medieval Christian writers such as Augustine, who considered Cato’s suicide sinful, and Dante, who made him the noble guardian of Purgatory. In Europe, playwrights composed dramas on Cato’s death that ignited the revolutionary spirit of the age, later inspiring American general George Washington and his soldiers. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass invoked Cato and his revolutionary spirit, yet after the Civil War, Cato’s name was appropriated as a symbol of allegiance for Confederates and their descendants, and lines memorializing Cato were inscribed on the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. As the first book to provide an in-depth study of Cato and his lasting influence, Strunk’s study seeks to explore the contemporary nature of his principles and their influence on present-day American politics.

Tracing the troubled roots of American capitalism and imperialism
 
Coedited by noted Masters scholar, Jason Stacy, and his class, “Editing History,” this annotated edition of Edgar Lee Masters’s The New Star Chamber and Other Essays reappears at a perilous time in US history, when large corporations and overseas conflicts once again threaten the integrity of American rights and liberties, and the United States still finds itself beholden to corporate power and the legacy of imperial hubris. In speaking to his times, Masters also speaks to ours.
 
These thirteen essays lay bare the political ideology that informed Spoon River Anthology. Masters argues that the dangerous imperialism championed by then-President Theodore Roosevelt was rooted in the Constitution itself. By debating the ethics of the Philippine-American War, criticizing Hamiltonian centralization of government, and extolling the virtues of Jeffersonian individualism, Masters elucidates the ways in which America had strayed from its constitutional morals and from democracy itself. The result is a compelling critique of corporate capitalism and burgeoning American imperialism, as well as an exemplary source for understanding its complicated author in the midst of his transformation from urban lawyer to poet of rural America.
 
In print again for the first time since 1904, this edition includes an introduction and historical annotations throughout. Edited and annotated by students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and designed and illustrated by students at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, this volume traces economic and political pathologies to the origins of the American republic. The New Star Chamber and Other Essays is as vital now as it was over 100 years ago.

The One Thomas More carefully studies the central humanist and polemical texts written by More to illustrate a coherent development of thought.

A deeply researched and definitive account of the climactic battle at the end of the Haitian Revolution 

Among the many rebellions against European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution against France is among the most dramatic and complex. Having begun in 1791 as France was in the throes of its own young revolution, the conflict reached its dramatic climax when Napoleon dispatched a heavily armed expeditionary force led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc to re-establish slavery and the sugar economy that had so enriched France. Philippe Girard’s Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon is a deeply researched and engrossing account of this invasion and its spectacular defeat.

For this ambitious account, Philippe Girard has studied not only primary records in Haiti itself but also rare documents from nineteen public and private archives and research libraries in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections. His more inclusive approach provides a fuller, more accurate and detailed narrative. He reveals not only key military movements, but also less-known aspects like the activities of U.S. merchants, in-fighting within Napoleon’s government, and communication between both sides and other European powers. Girard fills the work with unforgettable stories of those who led or were caught up in the war, people like poorly armed Black soldiers who ambushed Bonaparte’s columns, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and mixed-raced people struggling to preserve their freedom against both Black and white opponents.

Transcending pat ideological and racial categories, the book brings into focus an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals.