During America's founding period, poets and balladeers engaged in a series of literary "wars" against political leaders, journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. Political poems and songs appeared regularly in newspapers (and as pamphlets and broadsides), commenting on political issues and controversies and satirizing leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Drawing on hundreds of individual poems-including many that are frequently overlooked-Poetry Wars reconstructs the world of literary-political struggle as it unfolded between the Stamp Act crisis and the War of 1812. Colin Wells argues that political verse from this period was a unique literary form that derived its cultural importance from its capacity to respond to, and contest the meaning of, other printed texts-from official documents and political speeches to newspaper articles and rival political poems. First arising during the Revolution as a strategy for subverting the authority of royal proclamations and congressional declarations, poetic warfare became a ubiquitous part of early national print culture. Poets representing the emerging Federalist and Republican parties sought to wrest control of political narratives unfolding in the press by engaging in literary battles. Tracing the parallel histories of the first party system and the rise and eventual decline of political verse, Poetry Wars shows how poetic warfare lent urgency to policy debates and contributed to a dynamic in which partisans came to regard each other as threats to the republic's survival. Breathing new life into this episode of literary-political history, Wells offers detailed interpretations of scores of individual poems, references hundreds of others, and identifies numerous terms and tactics of the period's verse warfare.

This history of the Roman Empire, from 44 BC to AD 235, has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration of the Empire; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. The book comprises a vivid account of the most intriguing period in ancient history.

Disease resistance is one of the major factors that can be improved to sustain yield potential in cultivated crops. This book looks at disease resistance in wheat, concentrating on all the economically important diseases their economic impact and geographical spread, breeding for resistance, pathogen variability, resistance mechanisms and recent advances made on resistance genes. Newer strategies for identifying resistance genes and identify resistance mechanisms are discussed, including cloning, gene transfer and the use of genetically modified plants. "

At the close of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight - poet, clergyman, and, later, president of Yale College - waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of ""infidelity."" The Devil and Doctor Dwight reexamines this episode by focusing on The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), the verse satire that launched Dwight's campaign and, Colin Wells argues, the key to recovering the deeper meaning of the threat of infidelity in the early years of the American republic. Modeled after Alexander Pope's satiric masterpiece, the Dunciad, Dwight's poem took aim at a number of his contemporaries, but its principal target was Congregationalist Charles Chauncy, author of a controversial treatise asserting ""the salvation of all men."" To Dwight's mind, a belief in universal salvation issued from the same naive faith in innate human virtue and inevitable progress that governed all forms of Enlightenment thought, political as well as religious. Indeed, in subsequent works he traced with increasing dismay a shift in the idea of universal salvation from a theological doctrine to a political belief and symbol of American national identity. In this light, Dwight's campaign against infidelity must also be seen as an early and prescient critique of the ideological underpinnings of Jeffersonian democracy.

This sweeping history of the Roman Empire from 44 B.C. to A.D. 235 has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration and in the entourage of the emperor; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. Colin Wells's vivid account is now available in an up-to-date second edition.