The documentary biography of Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, an officer in the Troupes de la Marine, who served throughout New France, sheds new light on the business activity of French colonial officers stationed in the West. Many of the eighty previously untranslated documents in Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre demonstrate the extent and profitability of Saint-Pierre's pursuit of business activities while performing official duties in eighteenth-century French North America. The quest for profit permeated Saint- Pierre's career, particularly his command of the Western Sea Post after he succeeded the fabled Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye. Saint-Pierre and his secret partner General Jacques-Pierre de Taffanel de La Jonquière, Intendant François Bigot, and Meret, secretary to La Jonquière, used their positions to engage in extensive trade, especially brandy, with the Cree and Assiniboine northwest of Lake Superior. Saint-Pierre's activities provide fresh insights into the North American fur trade.

Behind James Baldwin’s uncanny ability to evoke a nation’s crisis and potential hope lies his use of religious language to describe social and sexual transformation. The first study of its kind, James Baldwin and the Heavenly City shows that Baldwin’s novels use biblical ideas in partly but not fully secularized ways to express the possible human attainment of a new life embodying a real but undefinable holiness. Focusing on Baldwin’s six novels, along with essays, stories, and drama, the book first shows Baldwin’s method of recasting biblical and African American prophetic traditions to reveal their liberating core. It then examines several key themes: the prophet’s selection, seen in Baldwin’s debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain; the three linked ideas of prophetic art, the “apocalyptic body,” and the “apocalyptic city,” as presented in all his novels; and the polarity between prophecy and doubt, the subject of his last novel, Just Above My Head. This important work provides new readings of Baldwin’s novels, reassesses his once-neglected later fiction, and shows Gospel music’s centrality (with blues) in his fictional imagination.
 

James Baldwin’s Later Fiction examines the decline of Baldwin’s reputation after the middle 1960s, his tepid reception in mainstream and academic venues, and the ways in which critics have often mis-represented and undervalued his work. Scott develops readings of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head that explore the interconnected themes in Baldwin’s work: the role of the family in sustaining the arts, the price of success in American society, and the struggle of black artists to change the ways that race, sex, and masculinity are represented in American culture. 
     Scott argues that Baldwin’s later writing crosses the cultural divide between the 1950s and 1960s in response to the civil rights and black power movements. Baldwin’s earlier works, his political activism and sexual politics, and traditions of African American autobiography and fiction all play prominent roles in Scott’s analysis.

Since the earliest days of the British fur trade, Jewish pioneers have made Michigan their home. Judith Levin Cantor's Jews in Michigan captures the struggles and triumphs of Michigan's Jews as they worked to establish farms, businesses and synagogues, sparking commercial and residential development throughout the state, and even into the far reaches of the Upper Peninsula. Cantor celebrates both urban and rural immigrants, who supplied essential goods and services to those in lumbering, mining, and automobile manufacturing. She also deals honestly with questions of anti-Semitism and prejudice. Cantor's book shows how, in the quest to build strong communities, Jewish residents also helped create the foundations of the Michigan we know today.

The first serious study of his discourse in nearly a quarter century, John F. Kennedy and the Liberal Persuasion examines the major speeches of Kennedy’s presidency, from his famed but controversial inaugural address to his belated but powerful demand for civil rights. It argues that his eloquence flowed from his capacity to imagine anew the American liberal tradition—Kennedy insisted on the intrinsic moral worth of each person, and his language sought to make that ideal real in public life. This book focuses on that language and argues that presidential words matter. Kennedy’s legacy rests in no small part on his rhetoric, and here Murphy maintains that Kennedy’s words made him a most consequential president. By grounding the study of these speeches both in the texts themselves and in their broader linguistic and historical contexts, the book draws a new portrait of President Kennedy, one that not only recognizes his rhetorical artistry but also places him in the midst of public debates with antagonists and allies, including Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, Richard Russell, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Ultimately this book demonstrates how Kennedy’s liberal persuasion defined the era in which he lived and offers a powerful model for Americans today.
 

John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad provides a look at the principles and personal values that guided John H. Burdakin through a long, successful career as a top manager at three railroads—the Pennsylvania, the Penn Central, and finally the Grand Trunk Western, where he was president of the regional carrier from 1974 to 1986. The book, written from interviews with Burdakin before his death in 2014, gives real-life examples of how Burdakin’s management principles and personal qualities helped him solve labor- management problems, update railroad technology, protect worker safety, and improve employee morale while managing a four thousand–person workforce. It introduces colorful characters who were involved in American railroads, as well as the serious, life-threatening issues that confronted railroads in the last half of the twentieth century in America. This book will provide insights for managers of any business as well as for those seeking to balance a successful career and a rewarding home life.
 
 

Genuinely talented and successful managers in any field—business, government, military, academia—are scarce. John Howard Burdakin was a happy exception to the norm. This engaging biography examines Burdakin’s life in the railroad industry—at Pennsylvania Railroad, Penn Central, and finally at Grand Trunk Corporation—during a tumultuous time in the transportation business and underscores his core principles and how he employed them in the management of people and property. Some contemporary observers may consider Burdakin’s often conservative style as quite out of date, but a more sober assessment reveals that his approach has utility in any time and in any field. An excellent resource for leadership professionals, this study focuses on Burdakin’s career in management, ever stressing his foundational convictions—how he came by them, how he employed those principles as a manager, and how they were understood by those who worked for him or with him. Through teamwork, trust, hard work, honesty, diligence, and integrity, Burdakin would become respected as one of the railroad industry’s brightest guiding lights.

This eye-opening personal history tells the story of an American college professor’s twenty-year engagement with a thriving Africa rarely encountered by Western visitors, including an extraordinary connection to poets across the continent. At once adventurous, spiritual, political, dreamlike, and humorous, Joining Africa is a unique documentary of a journey through the continent, including an intense five-year encounter with economically struggling but culturally fertile Eritrea. The Africa presented here is neither a postcolonial study nor an exotic tourist destination. It is rich with the voices of its people, whose languages, Cantalupo argues, have greater potential to effect change than any NGO or high-profile celebrity. In vibrant prose, Cantalupo’s book extends a stirring invitation to reevaluate how we engage—both individually and collectively—with this remarkable part of the world.

General Jeffery Amherst served as commander in chief of the British army in North America during the Seven Years’ War from 1758 until 1763. Under Amherst’s leadership the British defeated French forces enabling the British Crown to claim Canada. Like many military officers, Amherst kept a journal of his daily activities, and the scope of this publication is from March 1757, while he was Commissary to the troops of Hesse-Kassel on British service in Germany, until his return to Great Britain in December 1763. The daily journal contains a record of and a commentary on events that Amherst witnessed or that he learned of through his correspondence. Where he mentions letters or orders received or sent, where possible, the present-day source locations of documents are identified. The Daily and Personal Journals are the record of the man who played a decisive role in British victories at Louisbourg, on Lake Champlain, and at Montreal. Amherst wrote the personal journal after he returned home. It does not have entries made on a daily basis. It is replete with lists, diagrams, and compendia to more fully explain events. Colored diagrams show dispositions or “Orders of Battle,” organizational structures, and evidence of uniform colors of units for campaigns at Louisbourg, Quebec, Niagara, Lake Champlain, the Carolinas, Montreal, and the Caribbean. In addition, Amherst made mileage charts and lists of ships, currency values, and officers who died during the war.

A Dictionary of People, Places, and Ships has more than 1,400 biographies of people mentioned by General Jeffery Amherst in his journals or identified by Robert J. Andrews in his notes. Included are entries for military and naval personnel, aboriginal leaders and warriors, and civilians. Where possible, a commission history is included for each officer of the French Forces, the Royal Navy, provincial officers, and regulars of the British Army. There is an extensive section about various types of commissions, ranks, units, regiments, and appointments. National origins of British army officers are discussed along with roles played by women of the army. Andrews identifies and analyzes units of “The American Army” that fought Great Britain’s war against the French during the Seven Years’ War in North America. Entries for sites that are named in Amherst’s journals contain descriptions or brief histories for each place. It also describes ships that are mentioned in the journals, including vessels that took part in the Louisbourg operation in 1758, Men of War employed at New York, and British and French vessels on the Great Lakes.

This volume questions the motives of Supreme Court justices in a landmark case: The Supreme Court's intervention in the presidential election of 2000, and its subsequent decision in favor of George W. Bush, elicited immediate, heated, and widespread debate. Critics argued that the justices used weak legal arguments to overturn the Florida Supreme Court's ruling, ending a ballot recount and awarding the presidency to Bush. More fundamentally, they questioned the motives of conservative judges who arrived at a decision in favor of the candidate who reflected their political leanings.
     Judging the Supreme Court examines this controversial case and the extensive attention it has received. To fully understand the case, Clarke Rountree argues, we must understand "judicial motives." These are comprised of more than each judge's personal opinions. Judges' motives, which Rountree calls "rhetorical performances," are as influential and publicly discussed as their decisions themselves. Before they are dissected in the media, judges' motives are carefully crafted by the decision- makers themselves, their critics, and their defenders. Justices consider not only the motives of the government, of military officials, of criminals, of public speakers, and of others, they also consider, construct, construe, spin, and deconstruct the motives of dissenters (whom they want to show are "misguided"), earlier courts, lower courts, and, especially, themselves. 
     Every judicial opinion is essentially a portrait of motives that says, "Here's what we did and here's why we did it." Well-constructed judicial motives reinforce the idea that we live under "the rule of law," while motives articulated less successfully raise questions about the legitimacy not just of individual judicial decisions but also of our political system and its foundation on an impartial judiciary. In Bush v. Gore, Rountree concludes, the judges of the majority opinion were not motivated by judicial concerns about law and justice, but rather by their own political and personal motives.

Smith Morrill: Almost every land-grant college or university in the United States has a building named for him; but are his contributions truly recognized and understood? Here is the first biography on this renowned statesman in six decades. Representative and then senator from Vermont, Morrill began his tenure in Congress in 1855 and served continuously for forty-three years. His thirty- one years in the upper chamber alone earned him the title "Father of the Senate." Coy F. Cross reveals a complex and influential political figure who, as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and then the Senate Finance Committee, influenced American economic policy for nearly fifty years.  
     Morrill's most-recognized achievements are the pieces of legislation that bear his name: the Morrill land-grant college acts of 1862 and 1890. His legacy, inspired by the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated electorate, revolutionized American higher education. Prior to this legislation, colleges and universities were open primarily to affluent white men and studies were limited largely to medicine, theology, and philosophy. Morrill's land-grant acts eventually opened American higher education to the working class, women, minorities, and immigrants. Since 1862, more than 20 million people have graduated from the 104 land-grant colleges and universities spawned by his grand vision. In this long-overdue study, Cross shows the "Father of Land-Grant Colleges" to be one of America's formative nineteenth- century political figures.