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A masterful, nuanced, and novel examination of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s most famous and most puzzling work, one in which he makes the greatest use of poetry to explore the questions posed by philosophy. But in order to understand the movement of this drama, we must first understand the character of its protagonist: we must ask, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?

Heinrich Meier attempts to penetrate the core of the drama, following as a guiding thread the question of whether Zarathustra is a philosopher or a prophet, or, if he is meant to be both, whether Zarathustra is able to unite philosopher and prophet in himself. Via a close reading that uncovers the book’s hidden structure, Meier develops a highly stimulating and original interpretation of this much-discussed but still ill-understood masterwork of German poetic prose. In the process, he carefully overturns long-established canons in the academic discourse of Nietzsche interpretation. The result is a fresh and surprising grasp of Nietzsche’s well-known teachings of the overman, the will to power, and the eternal return.

What is moral courage? Why is it important and what drives it? An argument for why we should care about moral courage and how it shapes the world around us.

War, totalitarianism, pandemics, and political repression are among the many challenges and crises that force us to consider what humane people can do when the world falls apart. When tolerance disappears, truth becomes rare, and civilized discourse is a distant ideal, why do certain individuals find the courage to speak out when most do not?

When Conscience Calls offers powerful portraits of ordinary people performing extraordinary acts—be it confronting presidents and racist mobs or simply caring for and protecting the vulnerable. Uniting these portraits is the idea that moral courage stems not from choice but from one’s identity. Ultimately, Kristen Renwick Monroe argues bravery derives from who we are, our core values, and our capacity to believe we must change the world. When Conscience Calls is a rich examination of why some citizens embrace anger, bitterness, and fearmongering while others seek common ground, fight against dogma, and stand up to hate.

A true crime classic, the definitive account of the notorious 1954 assassination of Alabama Attorney General Albert Patterson

On June 18, 1954, just a few weeks after being elected Alabama's Attorney General, Albert Patterson was assassinated outside his law office in Phenix City, Alabama.  His campaign promised hope and inspired reform to law-abiding citizens of Phenix City, which was notorious for organized crime, prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, and political corruption. Patterson's stance on cleaning up Phenix City had been met with threats and intimidation.  With millions of dollars in illegal income and hundreds of political and professional careers at stake, the motive for his killing seemed apparent.  The primary investigation surrounding Patterson's shooting focused on who pulled the trigger.

Alan Grady has exhaustively mined the state's original murder case files; the papers of John Patterson, Albert's son; records from the Office of Alabama Attorney General (who directed the murder investigation); the case files of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation; National Guard reports; and more than 30 interviews with eyewitnesses and interested parties.

Grady takes a complex story of multiple dimensions—a large cast of judicial, criminal, and political players; a web of alliances and allegiances; and a knotted sequence of investigative revelations and dead ends—and transforms it into a readable, incisive analysis of the powers and loyalties that governed, and corrupted to the core, the body politic of the state. Readers will be enthralled and educated by this authoritative account of the most compelling crime drama in Alabama during the 20th century.
 

A Scholarly Exploration of How Relationships Shape Moral Understanding.

Whenever Two or More Are Gathered focuses on the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration. Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct.

The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior.

In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”

Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.

Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.

Will Clayton left his mark on world commerce through the development of Anderson, Clayton & Co., the world's largest cotton marketing firm; he made an equally important impress on international economics and politics through special and vital service in the State Department during three crucial years of world history.

The politico-economic philosophy that Will Clayton developed as cotton merchant to the world provided the basis for his distinguished service as Assistant Secretary of State and as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and influenced the course of international events far more than is generally realized.

"When the full story of the genesis of the Marshall Plan is told, it will become evident that the inspiration was Will Clayton's; which means he will have a firm niche in history, for this, if for nothing else," wrote John Dalgleish in Everybody's Weekly (London) in 1947. Dalgleish's opinion is supported by documentary evidence and the statements of others whose views are given in this short biography.

The principal events in Will Clayton's background that shaped his character and developed his personal philosophy are here portrayed by one who had a unique opportunity to view her subject at close range during the main periods of his careers in government and business. In this brief biography, his eldest daughter, Ellen Clayton Garwood, intimately but objectively traces the evolution of Clayton's realistic internationalism. The effectiveness of his governmental service in a fast-shrinking world had its roots in his early struggles in international cotton marketing. His marked ability to gain the support of Congress for government proposals—extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, the British Loan, the Marshall Plan—is foreshadowed in his triumphant defense of his own business before a Senate investigating committee in the early twentieth century, and by his championship of Southern delivery on futures contracts on the New York Cotton Exchange.

But the story is not all one of success. Will Clayton wanted more than anything to see his country assume membership in an International Trade Organization, for the charter of which he had worked so hard. His disappointment here—partially offset by the success of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—finds counterpart throughout these pages in the obstacles he had to overcome in his development as a human being.

And human being he emerges—son, husband, and father; businessman and statesman—whose measure, with its shadow and its highlights, should serve as strong encouragement for those who would serve their country and their world with equally intelligent devotion.

This book, therefore, brings a note of definite optimism. Will Clayton started out as a poor boy among the bewildered people of the reconstructed South. He emerged a statesman who drew out of still worse confusion in the world a program of hopeful and uplifting clarity. His own words, in a cable from Geneva, August 15, 1947, describe the challenge he met—a challenge that recurs in different form today: "A great opportunity to help Europe lift herself permanently out of a morass of bilateralism and restrictionism has floated in to us on a floodtide of destruction. If we fail to seize this opportunity now it will probably never return except possibly after a third World War."

William Gilpin (1815–1894) has been called “America’s first geopolitician.” Regarded today as both scientist and quack, Gilpin was in his own time a recognized authority whose maps were accepted by Congress as the most accurate available, and his description of trails and land in the West were read by pioneer and scientist alike as inspiration and guide.

His writings first introduced to the American public the treasures of the Great Plains (to Gilpin probably belongs the credit for introducing this well-known term) and the mountain plateaus of the Rockies. He advertised the future of the lush valleys of Oregon and the mineral riches that, he was sure, the American West contained.

Gilpin was a cultured, educated man; his studies and his hours of lonely observation on many trips across the American prairies had resulted in the theory—in part true, in part fallacious—about the importance of the Mississippi Valley to world trade and world peace. To his contemporaries and a few later historians he was “a man of rare genius and advanced thought, a prophet and pioneer of civilization,” “one of the wonderful and gifted men of the age, and to him are the citizens of the Republic, in general, and the West, in particular, immeasurably indebted.”

In this biography Thomas L. Karnes traces the life of William Gilpin from the quiet comfort of his wealthy Quaker boyhood home through an exciting and turbulent career as Indian fighter, pioneer, newspaper editor, explorer, land promoter, and first governor of Colorado Territory. But throughout his varied career there was one task to which Gilpin was always devoted: he was a publicizer of the West, first in letters to family and friends; then in newspaper articles, books, and speeches; and finally in reports that became part of the Congressional Record and that influenced the actions of Presidents.

Winner, 2024 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award, Arkansas Historical Association

Winner, 2024 Booker Worthen Literary Prize

In 1982, Tony Earl stormed into the Wisconsin governorship with a sweeping victory, rallying blue-collar Democrats around a progressive political platform. Four years later, observers were stunned when he was soundly defeated by conservative Republican Tommy Thompson—not because of any failure as governor, but because, as Dave Cieslewicz notes, the Democratic Party and American politics had undergone a dramatic transformation.

Wisconsin Watershed traces Earl’s journey from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the U.S. Navy, through his years in Wisconsin politics and his single, controversial term as Wisconsin’s governor. Earl tackled acid rain, comparable worth, AIDS policy, and tax reform with equal force; he kept American Motors in the state and pulled Wisconsin from a fiscal crisis. Yet voters could not connect his name with his accomplishments. The progressivism that energized new constituencies also alienated the working-class Catholics who had formed the Democratic Party’s backbone. “It’s not the taxes,” one legislator explained. “It’s the desks”—the name for Earl’s symbolic offices to advocate for Native Americans, African Americans, and women.

Earl refused negative campaigning, and he believed that good policy would ultimately prove good politics. His defeat marked the beginning of the end of an era of civility. Through Earl’s story, we witness the Democratic Party’s evolution from New Deal coalition to the emergence of a modern campaign culture that values image and anger over good governance.

In World War and World Peace in the Age of Digital Capitalism, Christian Fuchs asks: how do violence and war manifest themselves in global digital capitalism? How do digital capitalism and digital technologies manifest themselves in violence and warfare? What are the prospects for world peace today?

To prevent world war and advance world peace we need a better understanding of war and violence and their contexts and causes. We need to ask what war is, what violence is, what war and peace look like today and how they have changed in the 21st century. This book addresses these urgent questions and provides possible answers.