A list of the one hundred most influential people in history features descriptions of the careers, contributions, and accomplishments of the political and religious leaders, inventors, writers, artists, and others who changed the course of history. Simultaneous.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A scalding history of twenty-five years of Republican attempts to hold on to political power by any means necessary, by a hugely popular Washington Post political columnist In 1994, more than 300 Republicans under the command of obstructionist and rabble-rouser Congressman Newt Gingrich stood outside the U.S. Capitol to sign the Contract with America and put bipartisanship on notice. Twenty-five years later, on January 6, 2021, a bloodthirsty mob incited by President Trump invaded the Capitol. Dana Milbank sees a clear line from the Contract with America to the coup attempt. In the quarter century in between, Americans have witnessed the crackup of the party of Lincoln and Reagan, to its current iteration as a haven for white supremacists, political violence, conspiracy theories and authoritarianism. Following the questionable careers of party heavyweights Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell, and Rudy Giuliani, and those of many lesser known lowlights, Millbank recounts the shocking lengths the Republican Party has gone to to maintain its grip on the American people.

"By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. [This] is their story"--

"For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret "too loathsome to mention" paradoxically held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, from FDR through Clinton is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of "the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States," award-winning journalist and author James Kirchick illuminates how the idea of homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America's earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement. Celebrating the men and women who courageously decided that the source of their private shame could instead be galvanized for public pride, Kirchick offers a reinterpretation of American history told from the perspective of the citizens who lived in its shadows. Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history"--

From Jeff Pearlman--the New York Times best-selling author of Three Ring Circus--comes the rollicking, outrageous story of the USFL, full of larger-than-life characters and you-can't-make-this-up stories featuring some of the biggest celebrities and buffoons in the game. The United States Football League--known fondly to millions of sports fans as the USFL--did not merely challenge the NFL, but cause its owners and executives to collectively shudder. In its three seasons from 1983-85, it secured multiple television deals, drew millions of fans and launched the careers of legends such as Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, and Reggie White. But then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic team owner--a New York businessman named Donald J. Trump. In Football for a Buck, Jeff Pearlman draws on more than four hundred interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America. From 1980s drug excess to airplane brawls and player-coach punch outs, to backroom business deals and some of the most enthralling and revolutionary football ever seen, Pearlman transports readers back in time to this crazy, boozy, audacious, unforgettable era of the game. He shows how fortunes were made and lost on the backs of professional athletes and how, forty years ago, Trump was already a scoundrel and a spoiler. For fans of Terry Pluto's Loose Balls or Jim Bouton's Ball Four and of course Pearlman's own stranger-than-fiction narratives, Football for a Buck is sports as high entertainment--and a cautionary tale of the dangers of ego and excess.

The outspoken political advisor and commentator offers a survey of history's most memorable coups and failures. Dick Morris is one of the frankest and most incisive political observers in America today. A fiercely intelligent advisor to candidates at the highest levels of government, Morris is a popular columnist and a political analyst for the Fox News Channel, bringing his brilliant strategic mind and insider's political savvy to a weekly audience of millions. Now, in Power Plays, Morris reaches into history to create this fresh and fascinating survey of the most dramatic political moves ever made, from the wildly effective to the disastrous. The result is a strategy playbook that holds lessons equally valuable to the planning of a political campaign, a business venture -- or even the War on Terror. Drawing on American and international examples, Morris identifies five different types of power play, and focuses on politicians whose careers have skyrocketed after implementing them successfully -- or foundered in the wake of misjudgment. Morris explores ideologues like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill, who stood on principle and waited for their moment to shine, and "triangulators" like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and François Mitterrand, who seized the opportunity to defang their opponents by stealing their pet issues and solving them. He looks at figures as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon -- who rose to power by dividing and conquering their enemies -- and at reformers like Britain's Tony Blair and Japan's Junichiro Koizumi, who ascended by purging their parties of corruption. And he shines a light on how Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used technology and new media to electrify their political careers. In a chapter inspired by the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Morris also reviews the efforts of FDR and Churchill to mobilize their nations in the face of Nazi Germany -- and compares their performance to that of George W. Bush in mounting America's ongoing campaign against terrorism. Morris also devotes attention to unsuccessful power plays, from Woodrow Wilson's failed attempt to launch the League of Nations to the disavowal of environmental issues that, he argues, cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000. His analysis is surprising, often irreverent, but always enlightening. And the conclusion he draws -- that candidates who best serve the people also serve themselves -- is a breath of fresh air in the often bloodthirsty arena that is politics. - Jacket flap.

'Punk was a new kind of music, a new social critique, but most of all it was a new kind of free speech. It inaugurated a moment - a long moment, that still persists - when suddenly countless odd voices, voices no reasonable person could have expected to hear in public, were being heard all over the place: sometimes as monstrous shouts in the marketplace, sometimes as whispers from an alleyway.' In the Fascist Bathroom collects Greil Marcus's responses to that new free speech in a series of essays that vividly recapture the diversity and impact of punk. Sometimes working from seemingly random songs and shows, sometimes following careers - the Clash, the Mekons, Elvis Costello, Margaret Thatcher - in essence Marcus write about whatever moves him, scares him, disgusts him, and about those things he feels privileged to have witnessed. Marcus's chronicle goes far beyond the disintegration of the Sex Pistols, focusing especially on the reaction of the pop work, which reformed itself against the punk challenge and exiled new voices to cult stations scattered along its borders. Yet punk has shown an extraordinary resilience, resurfacing and reasserting its message again and again, in forms as varied as the voices the carried it: things do not have to be as they seem.

"The years following 1945 witnessed a massive change in American intellectual thought and in the life of American universities. The vast effort to mobilize intellectual talent during the war established new links between the government and the academy. After the war, many of those who had worked with the military or the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) took jobs in the burgeoning postwar structure of university-based military research and the intelligence agencies, bringing infusions of government money into many fields." "Little has been written about the long-term impact of this close association, despite considerable study of the McCarthy period's destructive impact on academic careers. The Cold War and the University is a groundbreaking collection of newly commissioned essays that takes a bold first step toward the reconstruction of this history. In it, some of the country's most prominent intellectuals use their own experiences to explore what happened to the university in the postwar years and why." "In wide-ranging and revealing essays, these writers show the many ways existing disciplines, such as anthropology, were affected by the Cold War ethos; they discuss the rise of new fields, such as area studies; and they explore the changing nature of dissent and academic freedom during and since the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In this riveting account of the explosive relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, renowned journalist and author Burton Hersh sets their highly publicized clashes in the context of Joe Kennedy's ongoing manipulation of Congress and his children's careers, and his lifelong connections to organized crime. Theirs was a unique triumvirate, marked by conflict and betrayal, and culminating in a near-Shakespearean tragedy. Based on compelling new research, and told in gripping anecdotal style, Hersh chronicles the complex relationship between the two antagonists, from their early brushes during the McCarthy years to their controversial deaths.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE to win a major championship and reach the absolute pinnacle of golf? Through a season of the four tournaments -- the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship -- known collectively as the majors, John Feinstein takes us where the television cameras never go, both off the links and "inside the ropes", as he reveals the special challenges and rituals, the frustrations and exhilaration, that mark the lives and careers of the world's greatest golfers.

Prince Albert Victor, known to his family as 'Eddy', was the eldest child of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. This is the story of Prince Eddy's alleged involvement in a Victorian cause célèbre - the Cleveland Street brothel case. The discovery of this homosexual brothel in 1889 led to an extraordinary cover-up by the British government - a cover-up which is explicable only in the light of Prince Eddy's involvement. Working from original sources (including the files of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Esher Papers), Theo Aronson has written the first full account of the strange life of Prince Eddy, setting it in perspective against a vivid backcloth of the astonishingly active homosexual underworld during the last decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld explores Prince Eddy's upbringing, his university and military careers, his curious personality, his alleged "secret marriage", his links with the Jack the Ripper murders, his early death and, above all, his sexual orientation. For it was this that linked the young prince's name to the Cleveland Street Scandal. Praise for Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld: 'Students of the erotic will love this book, and so will royal-watchers, but arbiters of sexual purity should hate it, for Mr. Aronson displays an underground culture that exposed its judges as upright liars' - New York Times Book Review

The last quarter century has been an extraordinary and turbulent period in the art world. It was a time of creative intensity during which a handful of artists, like Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, managed, in their different ways, to cross over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture. It was also a time when other promising careers and even whole movements, like Graffiti, spurted to life and then just as suddenly disappeared. During the astonishing boom years of the 1980s, the newly vigorous art market transformed the role of dealers and collectors to give them unprecedented power as tastemakers and the dangerous glamour of Hollywood power agents. And then came the bust. Writer Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within the art world, known the players, and reported on the scene for this entire span of time. True Colors draws on two decades of reporting to deliver an authoritative and deliciously inside account of the contemporary art world that will be the most talked-about book on art since The Shock of the New. Haden-Guest gives vivid portraits of the art world's key players and dramatizes the pivotal moments in the always evolving scene. Skillfully conveying a sense of the intricate geography of the art world, he tells of its clashes of ambition, its intrigues, its power plays. This is how artists survive, or don't survive. True Colors is filled with telling anecdotes and expertly told stories that cohere to give a sense of how the art world works, its current state, and where it may be going.

The man in the street would not, perhaps, recognize all the names of the brilliant scientists whose careers and personalities animate this book, but doctors know them. Morgan, who founded the first medical school in American and, fighting beside Washington, was ruined b the petty politics of the Revolution; McDowell, who, although on the fringe of the wilderness, dared the operation that prepared the way for all abdominal surgery; Rush, the equivocal personality who, for better or worse, dominated American medicine for more than fifty years; Beaumont, who, saving a life, won a living laboratory; Drake, who brought modern medicine to the New West; Long and Morton, who banished pain from surgery and earned it for themselves these men are honored in their profession today.

This is the untold story of how some of Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe, especially in Britain, where their contacts included the press baron and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. Using previously unexplored sources from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the USA, this book unravels the story of top-level go-betweens such as the Duke of Coburg, grandson of Queen Victoria, and the seductive Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who rose from a life of poverty in Vienna to become a princess and an intimate of Adolf Hitler. As Urbach shows, Coburg and other senior aristocrats were tasked with some of Germany's most secret foreign policy missions from the First World War onwards, culminating in their role as Hitler's trusted go-betweens, as he readied Germany for conflict during the 1930s and later, in the Second World War. Tracing what became of these high-level go-betweens in the years after the Nazi collapse in 1945, from prominent media careers to sunny retirements in Marbella, the book concludes with an assessment of their overall significance in the foreign policy of the Third Reich.

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.

Jews and the Military is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jews' involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600's until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Derek Penslar shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. Penslar demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs. Spanning Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Penslar discusses the myths and realities of Jewish draft dodging, how Jews reacted to facing their coreligionists in battle, the careers of Jewish officers and their reception in the Jewish community, the effects of World War I on Jewish veterans, and Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Penslar culminates with a study of Israel's War of Independence as a Jewish world war, which drew on the military expertise and financial support of a mobilized, global Jewish community. He considers how military service was a central issue in debates about Jewish emancipation and a primary indicator of the position of Jews in any given society. Deconstructing old stereotypes, Jews and the Military radically transforms our understanding of Jews' historic relationship to war and military power.

Examines the role of women as leaders, activists, and members of the labor movement in New York and Chicago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Originally published in 1939, this book examines the critical careers of a number of English poets. Bronowski looks at the reasons why English poets took an interest in criticism and how the role of poets as critics affected English criticism at large by taking Sidney, Dryden, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Swinburne, Housman and Yeats as his examples. This book will be of value to anyone with an in English literature and literary criticism.

This volume presents two works by acclaimed Polish journalist Hanna Krall: The Subtenant, a semi-autobiographical novel, and To Outwit God, a remarkable interview with Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Subtenant explores the troubled and ever-shifting relationships between Poles and Jews, beginning with the author's concealment as a child during the Nazi years and ending in 1981 when martial law was declared in Poland. In To Outwit God, Edelman's words assault conventional assumptions about heroes and heroism, taking in his time not only in the Warsaw Ghetto but his careers as a physician and a Solidarity activist. Taken together, the two works form a powerful memoir of Jewish survival, a meditation on Polish-Jewish relations, and a commentary on the forces that have produced modern Polish opposition movements.

In this new edition of his landmark book, John Gross traces the shifting fortunes of the men who shaped literary opinion in England during the Victorian, Edwardian, and contemporary eras. He brings together famous or forgotten critics and editors-prophets, aesthetes, statesmen, dons, radicals, social climbers, idealists, gossipmongers, and literary lions-and explores not only their critical ideas but also their personalities, careers, social backgrounds, and politics. He looks at "the higher journalism;" the expansion of the reading public, the byways of British liberalism, and the rise of literature as an academic subject, and the impact of modernism. In all a remarkable survey, to which Mr. Gross has now added updates on several literary careers, the new style of critics who have evolved from the universities, and the dominant role of the media. "A brilliant account of English literary culture which is as engaging as it is illuminating"-Lionel Trilling. "Extremely readable.... The book is strewn with marvelous bits: deft aperçus, biographical portraits of great subtlety and force, wit, commonsensical intelligence everywhere. It is a book that no one who cares about the state of literature can afford to neglect."-Joseph Epstein.