In a sweeping history of centuries, Ted Widmer's Ark of the Liberties recounts America's ambition to be the world's guarantor of liberty. The United States stands at a historic crossroads; essential to the world yet unappreciated. America's decline in popularity over the decades has been nothing short of astonishing. With wit, brilliance, and deep affection, Ted Widmer, a scholar and a former presidential speechwriter, reminds everyone why this great nation had so far to fall. It is a success story that America, and the world, forgets at its peril. From the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States, for all its shortfalls, has been by far the world's greatest advocate for freedom. Generations of founders imbued America with a surprisingly global ambition that a series of remarkable presidents, often Democratic, advanced through the confident wielding of military and economic power. Ark of the Liberties brims with new insights: America's centuries-long favorable relationship with the Middle East; why Wilson's presidency deserves reappraisal; Bill Clinton's underappreciated achievements; how America's long history of foreign policy immediately touches on the choices we face. Fully addressing America's disastrous occupation of Iraq, Ark of the Liberties colorfully narrates America's long and laudatory history of expanding world liberty.

There is a lot of material on the Carroll family because of their being the proprieters of the colony.

Through careful research and colorful accounts, historian Paul A. Gilje discovers what liberty meant to an important group of common men in American society, those who lived and worked on the waterfront and aboard ships. In the process he reveals that the idealized vision of liberty associated with the Founding Fathers had a much more immediate and complex meaning than previously thought. In Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution, life aboard warships, merchantmen, and whalers, as well as the interactions of mariners and others on shore, is recreated in absorbing detail. Describing the important contributions of sailors to the resistance movement against Great Britain and their experiences during the Revolutionary War, Gilje demonstrates that, while sailors recognized the ideals of the Revolution, their idea of liberty was far more individual in nature—often expressed through hard drinking and womanizing or joining a ship of their choice. Gilje continues the story into the post-Revolutionary world highlighted by the Quasi War with France, the confrontation with the Barbary Pirates, and the War of 1812.

This book argues that the “clash of civilizations” that is supposed to be a feature of the post-Cold War environment is not necessarily caused by the dogma of world religions or cultural incompatibilities but by the inflexible and hegemonic universalisms that have characterized world history since 1492—a cultural outlook that Majid terms post-Andalusianism. The all-encompassing worldviews of Euro-American ideologies have resulted in the retreat of Islam and other non-European traditions into dangerous orthodoxies and a growing climate of suspicion, fear, and terror. Freedom and Orthodoxy offers an alternative to perennial discord, suggesting that the world needs a philosophy of the “provincial,” one that reattaches individuals and societies to their heritages and memories but connects them to the rest of the world in solid, non-alienating, meaningful ways. For this to happen, Majid contends, globalization must be reimagined as a network of human solidarities and rigorous conversations across the world’s multiple cultures, not as a mechanical process of economic expansionism.

Five-term Florida Democrat Rep. Wexler gives fascinating insights into the workings of Congress and puts readers at the center of some of the most significant political events of the last ten years. 8-page b&w photo insert.

A guide to the science of prophecy, why so many predictions never come to pass, and the Golden Age ahead • Presents a mathematical means of divining the future, revealed in the Oahspe Bible, using the Egyptian Tables of Destiny, a 12,000-year-old system so exact it can foretell every day of the year • Reveals that we are not headed for Rapture and the Apocalypse but for “the Quickening,” the embryonic stage of a Utopian Age • Examines the cycles of history and explains why many prophecies have not come true Reviewing the cycles of history from biblical times to the present and prophecies of the future from Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon, Susan B. Martinez reveals that our current “time of troubles” is not the beginning of Rapture, the Apocalypse, or Armageddon, but of the embryonic stage of a Utopian Age--the “Quickening” of the human race. Reviving the lost science of prophecy, Martinez explains why so many “great prophecies” have failed and presents the 12,000-year-old Egyptian system of prediction so exact it can foretell every day of the year, a method based not on the planets, astrology, or intuition but on Earth’s magnetic rhythms. Using Earth science, historical research, religious texts, spiritualism, and patterns within the cycles of war and political milestones, she demonstrates that the past is the hidden key to the future and uncovers the prophetic numbers of Earth’s cycles--11, 33, 99, and 363--as set forth in the Egyptian Tables of Destiny, ancient texts brought to light by the 19th-century Oahspe Bible. Explaining how readers can use the Tables of Destiny to make their own predictions of the future, she presents her own forecasts of the risks and costs of technological progress, the destiny of America, the up-and-coming global religion, the truth behind climate change and the cause of earthquakes, and the true life expectancy of planet Earth as well as offering a preview of the Paradigm Shift and Golden Age ahead, a time of global unity and awakening of the soul of the world.