From its earliest days, the United States has provided fertile ground for reform movements to flourish. In this volume, twelve eminent historians assess religious and secular reform in America from the eighteenth century to the present day.

The essays offer a mix of general overviews and specific case studies, addressing such topics as radical religion in New England, leisure in antebellum America, Sabbatarianism, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Evangelicalism, social reform, and the U.S. welfare state.

Suitable for students, the essays, each based on original research, will also be of interest to researchers and academics working in this area, as well as to all those with an interest in the history of religious and secular reform in America.

The Big Bend, the Big Country, the Big Empty. The High Plains, the Permian, and the Panhandle. Cowboys, Cowtown, and the curl of a killer tornado. A place where "you can stretch your eyeballs". Where the Hale-Bopp comet, "hardly visible above some smoggy, light-polluted cities, looked like it could drop into the Pecos River at any moment".

West Texas, home to the state's biggest legends, is chronicled by two authors who have spent most of their careers crisscrossing it. Mike Cochran and John Lumpkin, Associated Press journalists, bring their experiences to the pages of this handsome volume, accompanied by fifty photographs of the West Texas landscape, its people and its history.

Converse with West Texas characters like Stanley Marsh 3, conman Billy Sol Estes, and Big Spring's merry messiah, Marj Carpenter. Meet Gordon Wood, Friday night football's most winningest coach, and Groner Pitts, Brownwood's liveliest undertaker. Remember ranching icon Watt Matthews, the founders of Santa Rita No. 1, and Lubbock's C. W. Stubblefield, magnet to blues and country music stars. Honor Hallie Stillwell, Frenchy McCormick, and even modern art's Georgia O'Keeffe, who put their stamp on Texas's most fascinating region.

A West Texan once said, "They show no pictures of my province or even neighboring provinces. They leave a big hole in Texas". No more is that the case, thanks to Mike Cochran and John Lumpkin.

On the morning of November 20, 1820, in the Pacific Ocean, an enraged sperm whale rammed the Nantucket whaler Essex. As the boat began to sink, her crew of thirty had time only to collect some bread and water before pulling away in three frail open boats. Without charts, alone on the open seas, and thousands of miles from any known land, the sailors began their terrifying journey of survival. Ninety days later, after much suffering and death by starvation, intense heat, and dehydration, only eight men survived to reach land. One of them was Owen Chase, first mate of the ill-fated ship, whose account of the long and perilous journey has become a classic of endurance and human courage. The elements of his tale inspired Herman Melville (who was born the year the Essex sank) to write the classic Moby Dick. A gallant saga of the sea, this riveting narration of life and death, of man against the deep, will enthrall readers.

TWO HUNDRED YEARS after Henry "Lighthorse Harry" Lee's funeral oration for George Washington, the eloquence of his words "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen" has caused most Americans to forget the clause that followed in which Lee located Washington's character firmly in his private life. George Washington: The Man behind the Myths redresses this historical imbalance in our image of Washington by examining our conceptions and misconceptions about him through a fascinating collection of documents and images.

Washington's own accounts, observations by his contemporaries, narratives by the first generation of Washington biographers, decorative objects, and visual images, which were assembled for a major exhibition sponsored by the Virginia Historical Society, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and Washington and Lee University, invite a fresh evaluation of Washington. William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton trace the ways in which Washington's origins in the peculiar colonial society of Virginia prepared him for success on the national stage. Chronologically arranged chapters examine Washington's early exposure to the wealthy Fairfax family, his command of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War and later the Continental Army, his decision to attend the Constitutional Convention, and his two elections to the presidency. Rasmussen and Tilton argue that the major transitions we see in Washington's public image were made possible by the stability of his private life and his love of Mount Vernon.

The image of Washington created by antebellum writers and artists after his death was intended to capture what he signified to the fledgling republic. This myth has survived largely because of its usefulness to our national culture. George Washington: The Man behind the Myths takes a crucial step in restoring our understanding of Washington as he actually was.

Born in Carthage, North Carolina, Lucean Arthur Headen (1879-1957) grew up amid former slave artisans. Inspired by his grandfather, a wheelwright, and great-uncle, a toolmaker, he dreamed as a child of becoming an inventor. His ambitions suffered the menace of Jim Crow and the reality of a new inventive landscape in which investment was shifting from lone inventors to the new "industrial scientists." But determined and ambitious, Headen left the South, and after toiling for a decade as a Pullman porter, risked everything to pursue his dream. He eventually earned eleven patents, most for innovative engine designs and anti-icing methods for aircraft. An equally capable entrepreneur and sportsman, Headen learned to fly in 1911, manufactured his own "Pace Setter" and "Headen Special" cars in the early 1920s, and founded the first national black auto racing association in 1924, all establishing him as an important authority on transportation technologies among African Americans. Emigrating to England in 1931, Headen also proved a successful manufacturer, operating engineering firms in Surrey that distributed his motor and other products worldwide for twenty-five years. Though Headen left few personal records, Jill D. Snider recreates the life of this extraordinary man through historical detective work in newspapers, business and trade publications, genealogical databases, and scholarly works. Mapping the social networks his family built within the Presbyterian church and other organizations (networks on which Headen often relied), she also reveals the legacy of Carthage's, and the South's, black artisans. Their story shows us that, despite our worship of personal triumph, success is often a communal as well as an individual achievement.

In Dead Presidents, public radio host and reporter Brady Carlson takes readers on an epic trip to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials from sea to shining sea. With an engaging mix of history and contemporary reporting, Carlson explores the death stories of our greatest leaders, and shows that the ways we memorialize our presidents reveal as much about us as they do about the men themselves.

Now available in paperback, Tracy K'Meyer's book is a thoughtful and engaging portrait of Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian cooperative founded in 1942 by two white Baptist ministers in southwest Georgia. The farm was begun as an expression of radical southern Protestantism, and its interracial nature made it a beacon to early civil rights activists, who rallied to its defense and helped it survive attacks from the Ku Klux Klan and others.

Based on over fifty interviews with current and former Koinonia members, K'Meyer's book provides a history, of the farm during its period of greatest influence. K'Meyer outlines the conceptual flaws that have troubled the community, but she finds that Koinonia's enduring effect as a social movement -- including Millard Fuller's founding of Habitat for Humanity, prompted by a 1965 visit to the farm -- is far more meaningful than its internal conflicts. For anyone in search of a hardy strain of Christian progressivism in the Bible Belt, reading K'Meyer's book is an inspiring and intellectually fulfilling experience in its own right.

The gunfight at the O.K. Corral has excited the imaginations of Western enthusiasts ever since that chilly October afternoon in 1881 when Doc Holliday and the three fighting Earps strode along a Tombstone, Arizona, street to confront the Clanton and McLaury brothers. When they met, Billy Clanton and the two McLaurys were shot to death; the popular image of the Wild West was reinforced; and fuel was provided for countless arguments over the characters, motives, and actions of those involved.

"And Die in the West" presents the first fully detailed, objective narrative of the celebrated gunfight, of the tensions leading up to it, and the bitter, bloody events that followed. Paula Mitchell Marks places the events surrounding the gunfight against a larger backdrop of a booming Tombstone and the fluid, frontier environment of greed, factions and violence. In the process, Marks strips away many of the myths associated with the famous gunfight and of the West in general.

After years of divided government, countless Republicans campaigned on a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Yet when they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2017--after six years that included more than fifty symbolic votes and innumerable pledges--they failed to repeal the bulk of the law. Pundits were shocked, and observers and political scientists alike were stuck looking for an explanation. What made Obamacare so hard to repeal? And in a larger sense: What explains why some laws are repealed, and yet others endure in spite of considerable efforts? Are repeals different from law-making or do they mirror one another? Why are repeals more likely at some times than others? What theories of legislative behavior and policymaking explain when repeals happen? Congress in Reverse is the first book to attempt to answer these questions. Jordan M. Ragusa and Nathaniel A. Birkhead examine when and why existing statutes are successfully "undone," arguing that repeals are most common when the parties are united on the issue--which was not the case when it came to Obamacare for the Republican Party--and the majority party wins control of Congress after a long stint in the minority. By shifting focus from the making of laws to their un-making, Congress in Reverse opens up a new arena for studying legislative activity in Congress.

Describes the people and events that have shaped the state's history.

Despite his promising start as a young man, by his early fifties Chester A. Arthur was known as the crooked crony of New York machine boss Roscoe Conkling. For years Arthur had been perceived as unfit to govern, not only by critics and the vast majority of his fellow citizens but by his own conscience. As President James A. Garfield struggled for his life, Arthur knew better than his detractors that he failed to meet the high standard a president must uphold. And yet, from the moment President Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave, going up against the very forces that had controlled him for decades. He surprised everyone--and gained many enemies--when he swept house and took on corruption, civil rights for blacks, and issues of land for Native Americans. A mysterious young woman deserves much of the credit for Arthur's remarkable transformation. Julia Sand, a bedridden New Yorker, wrote Arthur nearly two dozen letters urging him to put country over party, to find "the spark of true nobility" that lay within him. At a time when women were barred from political life, Sand's letters inspired Arthur to transcend his checkered past--and changed the course of American history. This beautifully written biography tells the dramatic, untold story of a virtually forgotten American president. It is the tale of a machine politician and man-about-town in Gilded Age New York who stumbled into the highest office in the land, only to rediscover his better self when his nation needed him.