This is the untold story of the secret scandal behind baseball's most legendary moment:The Shot Heard Round the World. A Washington Post Best Book of the Year. At 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The ball sailed over the left field wall and into history. The Giants won the pennant. That moment—the Shot Heard Round the World—reverberated from the West Wing of the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo Grounds clubhouse, where hitter and pitcher forever turned into hero and goat. It was also in that centerfield block of concrete that, after the home run, a Giant coach tucked away a Wollensak telescope. The Echoing Green places that revelation at the heart of a larger story, re-creating in extravagant detail and illuminating as never before the impact of both a moment and a long-guarded secret on the lives of Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca.

The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And not once in major league baseball’s 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant. The Echoing Green follows the reverberations of that one moment–the Shot Heard Round the World–from the West Wing of the White House to the Sing Sing death house to the Polo Grounds clubhouse, where a home run forever turned hitter and pitcher into hero and goat. It was also in that centerfield block of concrete that, after the home run, a Giant coach tucked away a Wollensak telescope. The spyglass would remain undiscovered until 2001, when, in the jubilee of that home run, Joshua Prager laid bare on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a Giant secret: from July 20, 1951, through the very day of that legendary game, the orange and black stole the finger signals of opposing catchers. The Echoing Green places that revelation at the heart of a larger story, re-creating in extravagant detail the 1951 pennant race and illuminating as never before the impact of both a moment and a long-guarded secret on the lives of Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca. A wonderfully evocative portrait of the great American pastime, The Echoing Green is baseball history, social history and biography–irresistible reading from any angle.

The New York Times bestselling author of Rise of ISIS exposes the dangers of radical Islam and the effects it has on the American way of life in this informative and eye-opening new book. In Unholy Alliance , Jay Sekulow highlights and defines the looming threat of radical Islam. A movement born in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979, radical Islam has at its heart the goal of complete world domination. As this movement has grown, Iran has entered into alliances with Syria and Russia, leading to a deadly game of geopolitical threats and violence. Not only will you better understand jihadist terror, but you will also learn about Sharia law—a legal code that removes all personal liberty and is starkly incompatible with the US Constitution. All Muslims are required to follow Sharia—as are all who live in lands controlled by Islam. It is the goal of radical Islam to see Sharia instituted across the globe. If we are to combat radical Islam’s agenda of domination, we must arm ourselves with knowledge. With carefully researched history, legal-case studies, and in-depth interviews, Unholy Alliance lays out the ideology and strategy of radical Islam, as well as the path we must take to defeat it.

Howard Zinn on History brings together Zinn's shorter writings on activism, electoral politics, the Holocaust, Marxism, the Iraq War, and the role of the historian, as well as portraits of Eugene Debs, John Reed, and Jack London, effectively showing how Zinn's approach to history evolved over nearly half a century, and at the same time sharing his fundamental thinking that social movements—people getting together for peace and social justice—can change the course of history. That core belief never changed. Chosen by Zinn himself as the shorter writings on history he believed to have enduring value—originally appearing in newspapers like the Boston Globe or the New York Times; in magazines like Z, the New Left, the Progressive, or the Nation; or in his book Failure to Quit—these essays appear here as examples of the kind of passionate engagement he believed all historians, and indeed all citizens of whatever profession, need to have, standing in sharp contrast to the notion of "objective" or "neutral" history espoused by some. "It is time that we scholars begin to earn our keep in this world," he writes in "The Uses of Scholarship." And in "Freedom Schools," about his experiences teaching in Mississippi during the remarkable "Freedom Summer" of 1964, he adds: "Education can, and should, be dangerous."

This is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that shaped modern Judaism. The book's unique blend of intellectual, religious, and social history offers perspectives on the movement's leaders as well as its followers, and demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, Hasidism is a product of modernity that forged its identity as a radical alternative to the secular world. Hasidism originated in southeastern Poland, in mystical circles centered on the figure of Israel Baal Shem Tov, but it was only after his death in 1760 that a movement began to spread. Challenging the notion that Hasidism ceased to be a creative movement after the eighteenth century, this book argues that its first golden age was in the nineteenth century, when it conquered new territory, won a mass following, and became a mainstay of Jewish Orthodoxy. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust decimated eastern European Hasidism. But following World War II, the movement enjoyed a second golden age, growing exponentially. Today, it is witnessing a remarkable renaissance in Israel, the United States, and other countries around the world. Written by an international team of scholars, Hasidism is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand this vibrant and influential modern Jewish movement

This is the second volume of Friedell's monumental A Cultural History of the Modern Age . A key figure in the flowering of Viennese culture between the two world wars, this three volume work is considered his masterpiece. The centuries covered in this second volume mark the victory of the scientifi c mind: in nature-research, language-research, politics, economics, war, even morality, poetry, and religion. All systems of thought produced in this century, either begin with the scientifi c outlook as their foundation or regard it as their highest and fi nal goal. Friedell claims three main streams pervade the eighteenth century: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Classicism. In ordinary use, by "Enlightenment" we mean an extreme rationalistic tendency of which preliminary stages were noted in the seventeenth century. Th e term "Classicism", is well understood. Under the term "Revolution" Friedell includes all movements directed against what has been dominant and traditional. Th e aims of such movements were remodeling the state and society, banning all esthetic canons, and dethronement of reason by sentiment, all in the name of the "Return to Nature." Th e Enlightenment tendency might be seen as laying the ground for an age of revolution. Th is second volume continues Friedell's dramatic history of the driving forces of the twentieth century.

The men of the Holdfast had long treated with contempt the degenerated creatures known as "fems." To give themselves the drive to survive and reconquer the world, the men needed a common enemy. Superstitious belief had ascribed to the fems the guilt for the terrible Wasting that had destroyed the world. They were the ideal scapegoat. The truth was lost in death and decay and buried in history. It was going to be a long journey back...

A compelling look at the problem of evil in modern thought, from the Inquisition to global terrorism Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts—combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade—eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense. Featuring a substantial new afterword by Neiman that raises provocative questions about Hannah Arendt's take on Adolf Eichmann and the rationale behind the Hiroshima bombing, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on good and evil, life and death, and suffering and sense.

With a new foreword by Scott Austin 'I hope that these essays may illustrate the thesis that all history is or should be the history of problem situations, and that in following this principle we may further our understanding of the Presocratics and other thinkers of the past. The essays also try to show the greatness of the early Greek philosophers, who gave Europe its philosophy, its science, and its humanism.' - Karl Popper, from the preface The World of Parmenides is a brilliant exploration of the complexity of ancient Greek thought and science by one of the twentieth century's leading philosophers. It reveals the great importance of Presocratic philosophy to Popper's thought as a whole and shows the profound enlightenment he experienced reading not only Parmenides but the wider world of Greek science and philosophy including Xenophanes and Heraclitus. Edited by Arne F. Petersen, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.

For dozens of developing countries, the financial upheavals of the 1980s have set back economic development by a decade or more. Poverty in those countries have intensified as they struggle under the burden of an enormous external debt. In 1988, more than six years after the onset of the crisis, almost all the debtor countries were still unable to borrow in the international capital markets on normal terms. Moreover, the world financial system has been disrupted by the prospect of widespread defaults on those debts. Because of the urgency of the present crisis, and because similar crises have recurred intermittently for at least 175 years, it is important to understand the fundamental features of the international macroeconomy and global financial markets that have contributed to this repeated instability. Developing Country Debt and the World Economy contains nontechnical versions of papers prepared under the auspices of the project on developing country debt, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The project focuses on the middle-income developing countries, particularly those in Latin America and East Asia, although many lessons of the study should apply as well to other, poorer debtor countries. The contributors analyze the crisis from two perspectives, that of the international financial system as a whole and that of individual debtor countries. Studies of eight countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey—explore the question of why some countries succumbed to serious financial crises while other did not. Each study was prepared by a team of two authors—a U.S.-based research and an economist from the country under study. An additional eight papers approach the problem of developing country debt from a global or "systemic" perspective. The topics they cover include the history of international sovereign lending and previous debt crises, the political factors that contribute to poor economic policies in many debtor nations, the role of commercial banks and the International Monetary Fund during the current crisis, the links between debt in developing countries and economic policies in the industrialized nations, and possible new approaches to the global management of the crisis.

Herman Wouk has ranged in his novels from the mighty narrative of The Caine Mutiny and the warm, intimate humor of Marjorie Morningstar to the global panorama of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. All these powers merge in this major new work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature. Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival. Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews: the apocalyptic experience of the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish state, the precarious American diaspora, and deepening religious schisms. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world, especially the troubled wonder of Israel, and the remarkable, though dwindling, American Jewry. The book is peppered with wonderful stories of the author's encounters with such luminaries as Ben Gurion, Isidor Rabi, Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Bellow, and Richard Feynan. Learned in general culture, warmly tolerant of other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own faith with a passion that gives the book its fire and does so in the clear, engaging style tha-as in all Wouk's fiction -- makes the reader want to know what the next page will bring.

The official companion to the second season of the PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria by award-winning creator and screenwriter Daisy Goodwin. More than 16 million viewers watched the first season of the Masterpiece presentation of Victoria, created and written by Daisy Goodwin—the highest-rated PBS drama in twenty years, second only to Downton Abbey . But what happened after the Queen married her handsome prince? Did they live happily ever after, or did their marriage, like so many royal marriages past and present, fizzle into a loveless round of duty? This all-new companion book by Daisy Goodwin and Sara Sheridan transports us to the private world of Victoria and Albert. Though first cousins, they could not have been more different: Victoria was impulsive, emotional, and capricious, Albert cautious, self-controlled, and logical. But together they forged a bond with each other and with their people that would change the world. Drawing on letters and diaries and fresh insights into royal history, this gorgeous book charts the constant ebb and flow of power within the couple’s surprisingly ardent and modern marriage. Sumptuously illustrated and full of rich insider detail, Victoria & Albert takes us behind the scenes of the magnificent TV drama, including fascinating, in-depth information on the actors, the props, and the costumes – and bringing an extraordinary royal marriage even more fully to life.

In this highly influential book, Ruth Levitas provides an excellent introduction to the meaning and importance of the concept of utopia, and explores a wealth of material drawn from literature and social theory to illustrate its rich history and analytical versatility. Situating utopia within the dynamics of the modern imagination, she examines the ways in which it has been used by some of the leading thinkers of modernity: Marx, Engels, Karl Mannheim, Robert Owen, Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, William Morris, and Herbert Marcuse. Utopia remains the most potent secular concept for imagining and producing a 'better world', and this classic text will be invaluable to students across a wide range of disciplines.

"As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new history, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a ragtag collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most formidable empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state, and democracy, that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die-many more followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans. Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a shambolic and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics-international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever. This new world of nation-states is the world in which we still live. Mark Mazower's reckoning with its birth pangs in Greece is a masterpiece of the historian's art"--

A fascinating and timely biography of J. Edgar Hoover from a Sibert Medalist. "King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. . . . You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” Dr. Martin Luther King received this demand in an anonymous letter in 1964. He believed that the letter was telling him to commit suicide. Who wrote this anonymous letter? The FBI. And the man behind it all was J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's first director. In this unsparing exploration of one of the most powerful Americans of the twentieth century, accomplished historian Marc Aronson unmasks the man behind the Bureau- his tangled family history and personal relationships; his own need for secrecy, deceit, and control; and the broad trends in American society that shaped his world. Hoover may have given America the security it wanted, but the secrets he knew gave him — and the Bureau — all the power he wanted. Using photographs, cartoons, movie posters, and FBI transcripts, Master of Deceit gives readers the necessary evidence to make their own conclusions. Here is a book about the twentieth century that blazes with questions and insights about our choices in the twenty-first. Back matter includes an epilogue, an author’s note, source notes, a bibliography, and an index.

When Lenin died and the Russian Revolution began to devour its leaders, Trotsky survived longer than most as an exile in Mexico, until his assassination in 1940. The Essential Trotsky , first published in 1963, demonstrates the significance of this innovative and radical thinker's contribution to the Bolshevik success, the magnetism of his personality, and also a certain tragic heroism discernible throughout his life. The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk was written immediately after the events it describes, when Trotsky was attending the negotiations that extracted Russia from the First World War; The Lessons of October , an answer to his opponents in 1924, matches Lenin in power of analysis; and Stalin Falsifies History , written in 1927, presents the beginning of the distorting process by which Stalin secured his position, and defeated a range of attitudes, many more benign than his own, towards the future of the Revolution. This is a fascinating reissue that will be of value to students with an interest in early-twentieth century Russia, the Russian Revolution and the writings of Trotsky more generally.

"The New York Times-bestselling author of A Fierce Radiance and City of Light returns with a new powerful and passionate novel--inspired by historical events--about two women, one European and one American, and the mysterious choral masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach that changes both their lives. In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted mansion and mistakenly kills the girl who tries to stop him. In America in 2010, Henry's niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after she experiences a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City. When Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript. She becomes determined to discover what it is and to return it to its rightful owner, a journey that will challenge her preconceptions about herself and her family's history--and also offer her an opportunity to finally make peace with the past. In Berlin, Germany, in 1796, amid the city's glittering salons where aristocrats and commoners, Christians and Jews, mingle freely despite simmering anti-Semitism, Sara Itzig Levy, a renowned musician, conceals the manuscript of an anti-Jewish cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, an unsettling gift to her from Bach's son, her teacher. This work and its disturbing message will haunt Sara and her family for generations to come. Interweaving the stories of Susanna and Sara, and their families, And After the Fire traverses over two hundred years of history, from the eighteenth century through the Holocaust and into today, seamlessly melding past and present, real and imagined. Lauren Belfer's deeply researched, evocative, and compelling narrative resonates with emotion and immediacy"--

"An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artefacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and-at times-white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race-as well as on the role of religion in racial shift-in the first half of the nineteenth century"--

A clear-eyed view of Winston Churchill, the workings of his historical imagination, and his successes and failures as a statesman, by the celebrated historian of World War II and best-selling author of Five Days in London, May 1940 John Lukacs has spent a lifetime considering the complex personality and statesmanship of Winston Churchill. In previous books Lukacs has told the story of Churchill's titanic struggle with Adolf Hitler in the early days of World War II. Now, in Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian., he turns his attention to Churchill the man and visionary statesman. Each chapter of this book provides an essential portrait of Churchill. Lukacs treats Churchill's vital relationships with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, as well as his complex, farsighted political vision concerning the coming of World War II and the Cold War. Lukacs also assesses Churchill's abilities as a historian looking backward into the origins of the conflicts of which he was so much a part. In addition, the author examines the often contradictory ways Churchill has been perceived by critics and admirers alike. The last chapter is a powerful and deeply moving evocation of the three days Lukacs spent in London attending Churchill's funeral in 1965. In Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian., Lukacs deftly sets forth the essence of this towering figure of twentieth-century history with the consummate mastery of a great historian.

"NOT FUNNY is a FUNNY, whipsmart essay collection on gender, politics, the entertainment industry, and work. Jena Friedman is an acclaimed writer and performer, with multiple credits to her name in the fields of tv comedy (The Daily Show and The Late Show with David Letterman), film (an Academy Award nomination for writing on Sacha Baron Cohen's 2020 blockbuster Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), humor writing (The New Yorker), and live performance. More recently, her skill for keen social observation is seen in her acclaimed tv series Indefensible-a comedic takedown of the true-crime tv craze. With incisive cultural criticism, acerbic wit, and an interdisciplinary mind, Jena sheds light on her life as a millennial woman, treated as too smart, brash, and fearless for her own good through this collection of essays. We see her at her highest highs and lowest lows. We see her struggle to accept mistreatment in exchange for career advancement. We see her cope with "cancel culture" first-hand, as mentors she trusts are called to account for misdeeds she herself did not witness. We watch her unpack the roots of humor, and her lifelong goal to change minds through political incitement. And we see a bright-lights big-city version of a classic young women's career struggle; an immensely talented creative who refuses to soften herself for others. In her debut essay collection NOT FUNNY, Friedman fearlessly jousts with a label so often placed on women like her-perceptive, opinionated, ready to call out hypocrisy wherever she finds it, and... funny! Friedman pushes just past the edge of comfort on matters of gender, politics, decency, and class: Why do we look to celebrities to decide whether other celebrities deserve forgiveness? Why don't we ask men whether their careers might get in the way of starting a family? What does it mean to still hold admiration for a mentor you learn in hindsight to have been a predator? And what's so wrong with telling a dead baby joke? As she notes, one of the first jokes in recorded history was just that. Friedman challenges us to reconsider why we do and do not laugh, with whom we choose to empathize, and when we decide to grant attention in a world that demands we laugh to keep from crying. At once brainy, insightful, and absurd, NOT FUNNY reclaims power using the sharpest tool in bold satirist's arsenal: humor"--