Monumental Decisions is a fictional narrative based on factual events from American history. Beginning in the final days of the American Civil War, the drama chronicles the lives of two Southern American families and their descendants. One is a product of early European migration, and the other is rooted in slavery. Throughout the narrative, the characters are forced to encounter prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and prejudices, as well as the evolution of the American family. As time passes, issues that fueled the Civil War come back to haunt the two families. Confederate monuments built for public spaces remain a constant reminder of the conflict that divided the country. Events that occur in the lives of the characters and the decisions they make in their wake begin to threaten their very survival. Well over a century after the end of the Civil War, the controversy over the display of Confederate monuments among the general public escalates into violence and even murder.

Groundbreaking cases in the American legal system. Through its interpretations of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court issues decisions that shape American law, define the functioning of government and society,

First published in 1954, this indispensable reference quickly became the gold standard for concise summaries of important U.S. Supreme Court cases. The only reference guide to Supreme Court cases organized both topically and chronologically within chapters so that readers understand how cases fit into a historical context, the 15th edition has been extensively revised to ensure that it remains the most up-to-date resource available. An essential resource for law students, lawyers, and everyone interested in our nation's Constitution and the Supreme Court decisions that explicate it.

A concise, informative guide to the twenty most momentous Court rulings in American history, including excerpts from the written decisions and dissents. The legislative branch of government creates laws, and the executive branch signs and enforces them. But how does America make sure these laws don’t run afoul of the Constitution? That responsibility lies with the final arbiters: the nine justices of the Supreme Court. Every year, thousands of contentious cases are submitted to the court; only about eighty of them are heard. Out of those cases, many are remembered only by the people directly involved. But over the years, many cases heard by the Supreme Court have gone on to affect the lives of many, or even all, American citizens. In The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions, veteran court reporter Tony Mauro picks out the twenty most momentous Supreme Court cases in United States history. In his reviews, from Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that first affirmed the Supreme Court’s status as the country’s final legal arbiter, to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage, Mauro summarizes each case and includes cogent summaries of the justices’ decisions, as well as notable dissents. From a journalist noted by the New York Times for “explaining complex legal issues to laymen without sacrificing accuracy and subtlety,” The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions serves as your quick, concise, and informative guide to one of the most important, and sometimes least-understood, institutions in the nation.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

In 1940 the world was on a knife-edge. The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined. In Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw re-creates the ten critical decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain chose not to surrender, and December 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe’s Jews, showing how these choices would recast the entire course of history.

The enormous task of preserving the world's heritage in the face of war, natural disaster, vandalism, neglect, and technical obsolescence. The monuments—movable, immovable, tangible, and intangible—of the world's shared cultural heritage are at risk. War, terrorism, natural disaster, vandalism, and neglect make the work of preservation a greater challenge than it has been since World War II. In The Monumental Challenge of Preservation Michèle Cloonan makes the case that, at this critical juncture, we must consider preservation in the broadest possible contexts. Preservation requires the efforts of an increasing number of stakeholders. In order to explore the cultural, political, technological, economic, and ethical dimensions of preservation, Cloonan examines particular monuments and their preservation dilemmas. The massive Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban in 2001, are still the subject of debates over how, or whether, to preserve what remains, and the U. S. National Park Service has undertaken the complex task of preserving the symbolic and often ephemeral objects that visitors leave at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—to take just two of the many examples described in the book. Cloonan also considers the ongoing genocide and cultural genocide in Syria; the challenges of preserving our digital heritage; the dynamic between original and copy; efforts to preserve the papers and architectural fragments of the architect Louis Sullivan; and the possibility of sustainable preservation. In the end, Cloonan suggests, we are what we preserve—and don't preserve. Every day we make preservation decisions, individually and collectively, that have longer-term ramifications than we might expect.