Crossing The Centuries

Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington--and many other Americans--refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis's best troops, then were almost trapped by the British force. Under cover of night, Washington's men stole behind the enemy and struck them again, defeating a brigade at Princeton. The British were badly shaken. In twelve weeks of winter fighting, their army suffered severe damage, their hold on New Jersey was broken, and their strategy was ruined. Fischer's richly textured narrative reveals the crucial role of contingency in these events. We see how the campaign unfolded in a sequence of difficult choices by many actors, from generals to civilians, on both sides. While British and German forces remained rigid and hierarchical, Americans evolved an open and flexible system that was fundamental to their success. The startling success of Washington and his compatriots not only saved the faltering American Revolution, but helped to give it new meaning.

It is time for Tyrell to go through the ritual of cleansing to clear his mind for another century, however it seems that something new has occurred and a new evil is unleased…

Nonfiction. Literary History & Criticism. Poetics. This long-awaited history of contemporary American poetry, Talisman Nos. 23-26, is more than 700 pages long. This special volume surveys major developments in avant-garde American poetry from 1970 to the present. THE WORLD IN TIME AND SPACE includes contributions by major critics and poets including Bruce Andrews, Daniel Barbiero, Christopher Beach, Michael Boughn, Peter Bushyeager, David Clippinger, Michel Delville, Brent Edwards, Steve Evans, Dan Featherston, Thomas Fink, Norman Finkelstein, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, W. Scott Howard, Andrew Joron, Burt Kimmelman, David Landrey, Kathryne V. Lindberg, Stephen-Paul Martin, Stephen Paul Miller, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Alice Notley, Peter O'Leary, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Russo, Standard Schaefer, Julie Schmid, Susan M. Schultz, Leonard Schwartz, Mark Scroggins, Mary Margaret Sloan, Gustaf Sobin, Brian Kim Stefans, Susan Vanderborg, and the editors, Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster.

The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it. For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection. Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.

Second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project Today's health care providers have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. Crossing the Quality Chasm makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: A set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system. A set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships. A suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality. Key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, Crossing the Quality Chasm also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

This is the edition you have been waiting for! A clear, detailed explanation of more than 400 prophecies of Nostradamus pertaining to the 20th and 21st centuries. The destinies of the European Union, the current Russian Commonwealth, Asia, the Middle East, and America are incredibly revealed. Not only are the U.S. presidencies of Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton described, but the future of the first president and vice-president of the 21st Century. Wars, past and future, inventions, and earth-shaking events and personalities are unveiled from their former clouded obscurity. Perhaps you believe your opinions of the oracles of Nostradamus are quite strong one way or the other. Either way, Across Centuries: Nostradamus will rock your opinions as the former cryptic quatrains are deciphered in time to prepare you to live in the 21st Century.

A collection of stories about the Biblical Jesus and others by the writers, Dostoyevsky, Bradbury, and Hemingway.

Introduces students in grade 7 to world history and geography from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even an "ism" left to challenge it. An All-Consuming Century is a rich history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism. By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism—with reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans. Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.