The historian James Allen Smith traces the evolution of Washington's oldest and prototypical think tank on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1991. Dedicated to bringing expertise to bear on public policy issues, Brookings has been a pioneer in bridging the disparate worlds of social science research and American policymaking. But while its efforts have been made steady, there have been frustrations and controversy over the years. Inspired by the scientific management and government efficiency movements in the Progressive Era, Brookings has evolved from an organization that consulted with government agencies on accounting and personnel practices into an institution with a wide-ranging research and publishing program as well as active public policy education and media outreach efforts. Smith vividly tells of the key individuals, beginning with Robert Brookings, who have shaped the institution. He recounts its relationships with financial supporters and presidential administrations, and he candidly discusses the problems surrounding efforts at funding. Smith places the Brookings research program in an intellectual context and within the changing policymaking environment of Washington. He reveals how Brookings has withstood seventy-five years of shifts in national politics, external perceptions on the institution, and internal leadership to emerge as one of the most prominent sources of policy expertise in the world. The proliferation of private think tanks and the expansion of governmental research agencies in the past quarter century have changed the policy environment. The Brookings Institution, on its seventy-fifth anniversary, offers a singular vantage point from which to observe the ever-changing relationship between expert knowledge and political decisionmaking in our democracy.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

As victims of their parents' unhappy marriage, both Joanne and Kate grow up with very different views of what love is but also what it is not. Kate now believes love to be a trap into which she vows never to fall, while Joanne, desperate for affection, grows up believing no one could ever fall in love with her. However, after a whirlwind romance, the handsome and charismatic Steve asks Joanne to marry him. It seems to her a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape from her bullying father and realise all her dreams. Dismissing her sister's reservations and determined to make it work, Joanne ignores the cracks that begin to appear in her marriage. That is until the day all of her illusions are blown apart and she must face the bitter truth, then attempt to make a new life for herself. The promise of redemption whispers in her ear, but she soon realises that before she can step into her future, she must turn and confront her past.

Presented for the first time in English, the recently discovered early manuscripts of the twentieth century’s most towering literary figure offer uncanny glimpses of his emerging genius and the creation of his masterpiece. One of the most significant literary events of the century, the discovery of manuscript pages containing early drafts of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time put an end to a decades-long search for the Proustian grail. The Paris publisher Bernard de Fallois claimed to have viewed the folios, but doubts about their existence emerged when none appeared in the Proust manuscripts bequeathed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962. The texts had in fact been hidden among Fallois’s private papers, where they were found upon his death in 2018. The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts presents these folios here for the first time in English, along with seventeen other brief unpublished texts. Extensive commentary and notes by the Proust scholar Nathalie Mauriac Dyer offer insightful critical analysis. Characterized by Fallois as the “precious guide” to understanding Proust’s masterpiece, the folios contain early versions of six episodes included in the novel. Readers glimpse what Proust’s biographer Jean-Yves Tadié describes as the “sacred moment” when the great work burst forth for the first time. The folios reveal the autobiographical extent of Proust’s writing, with traces of his family life scattered throughout. Before the existence of Charles Swann, for example, we find a narrator named Marcel, a testament to what one scholar has called “the gradual transformation of lived experience into (auto)fiction in Proust’s elaboration of the novel.” Like a painter’s sketches and a composer’s holographs, Proust’s folios tell a story of artistic evolution. A “dream of a book, a book of a dream,” Fallois called them. Here is a literary magnum opus finding its final form.

Long renowned as one of the world's preeminent ballet companies, San Francisco Ballet marks its seventy-fifth anniversary with a stunningly beautiful retrospective. Replete with intimate portraits of the dancers and behind-the-scenes contributors, this book is the first serious depiction of America's oldest ballet company. Included in this deluxe package is a DVD that provides insight into the company's illustrious history and together with the book, tells the story of how San Francisco Ballet has forged a fresh identity for American dance and is now pioneering a new model of internationalism in the dance world.

In the spring of 1928, a Syrian farmer was plowing on the Mediterranean coast near a bay called Minet el-Beida. His plow ran into a stone just beneath the surface. When he examined the obstruction, he found a large man-made flagstone that led into a tomb, in which he found some valuable objects that he sold to a dealer. Little did he know what he had discovered. In April of 1929, C. F. A. Schaeffer began excavation of the tombs, but a month later he moved to the nearby tell of Ras Shamra. On the afternoon of May 14, the first inscribed clay tablet came to light—thus the beginnings of the study of Ugarit and the Ugaritic language. Seventy-five years have passed, and the impact of this extraordinary discovery is still being felt. Its impact on biblical studies perhaps has no equal. In February 2005, some of the preeminent Ugaritologists of the present generation gathered at the Midwest Regional meetings of the American Oriental Society to commemorate these 75 years by reading the papers that are now published in this volume. The first five essays deal with the Ugaritic texts, while the last three deal with archaeological or historical issues.