What makes young aspiring politicians take the leap and enter the electoral arena? Born to Run tells the stories of nine young politicians from all walks of life who enter races at the state and local levels in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Georgia, Nebraska, and Maine. Across the board, Gaddie finds a great range of motivations, strategies, and success rates among his carefully selected group. He doesn't rely strictly on interviews (although they provide lots of colorful detail), but hit the campaign trail along with his subjects to observe firsthand the pressures and challenges with which a new candidate is faced. Five years of fieldwork are amplified by survey data on candidates, legislators, and activists that bear out in greater numbers what Gaddie discovered on the ground. Working in the tradition of Richard Fenno's esteemed Home Style, Born to Run contributes to developing a more comprehensive model of political ambition that accounts for the origins of aspiration and the uncertainties that accompany every political career, but especially the early ones. Born to Run is irresistible for students of the same age as some of the candidates, invaluable to anyone who has studied campaigns and elections from the top down, and intriguing to anyone who wants insight into some potential rising stars within both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Begun in 1927 by University of Oklahoma history professor Edward Everett Dale, the Western History Collections gathers and preserves rare research materials for scholars in anthropology, Native American studies, Oklahoma history, and the history of the American West. This guide has been compiled to make the photographs in the collections more accessible. The second edition adds descriptions of 165 new collections comprising 159,000 photographs.
The 826 photograph collections that this guide thus details encompass Native American culture; frontier and pioneer life in Oklahoma and Indian territories; Wild West shows; the range cattle industry; the petroleum industry; and gunfighters, outlaws, and lawmen. New additions include the Lucille Clough Collection of 1,800 prints, postcards, and stereograph cards of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and First Peoples of Canada.

Keeping ahead of terrorists requires innovative, up-to-date training. This follow-up to Stephen Sloan's pioneering 1981 book, "Simulating Terrorism," takes stock of twenty-first-century terrorism--then equips readers to effectively counter it. Quickly canvassing the evolution of terrorism--and of counterterrorism efforts--over the past thirty years, co-authors Sloan and Robert J. Bunker draw on examples from the early 2000s, following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, to emphasize the need to prevent or respond quickly to "active aggressors"--terrorists who announce their presence and seek credibility through killing. Training for such situations requires realistic simulations--whose effectiveness, the authors show, depends on incorporating red teams; that is, the groups that play the part of active aggressors.

In "Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training," Sloan and Bunker, developers of simulation-driven counterterrorist training, take readers through the prerequisites for and basic principles of conducting a successful simulation and preparing responders to face threats--whether from teenage shooters or from sophisticated terrorist organizations. The authors clearly explain how to create an effective red team whose members can operate from within the terrorists' mindset. An innovative chapter by theater professional Roberta Sloan demonstrates how to use dramatic techniques to teach red teams believable role-playing.

Rounding out this book, a case study of the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood illustrates the cost of failures in intelligence and underscores the still-current need for serious attention to potential threats. First responders--whether civilian or military--will find "Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training" indispensible as they address and deter terrorism now and in the future.

""Apartheid South Africa was on fire around me.""

So begins the memoir of Career Foreign Service Officer Edward J. Perkins, the first black United States ambassador to South Africa. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave him the unparalleled assignment: dismantle apartheid without violence.

As he fulfilled that assignment, Perkins was scourged by the American press, despised by the Afrikaner government, hissed at by white South African citizens, and initially boycotted by black South African revolutionaries, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His advice to President-elect George H. W. Bush helped modify American policy and hasten the release of Nelson Mandela and others from prison.

Perkins's up-by-your-bootstraps life took him from a cotton farm in segregated Louisiana to the white elite Foreign Service, where he became the first black officer to ascend to the top position of director general.

This is the story of how one man turned the page of history.

The Declaration of Independence has been the subject of competing interpretations since its adoption by the Continental Congress on the Fourth of July 1776, and for nearly two and a half centuries the political ideas expressed in its preamble have inspired reform movements both at home and abroad. From the early debates on the nature of the American Republic to abolitionism, progressivism, the civil rights movement, and contemporary debates about American economic and foreign policy, the Declaration is, as it has been, a vibrant and dynamic, though perennially disputed, source of American ideals. The present volume brings together a variety of speeches and writings related to the contested meaning and legacy of the Declaration of Independence, and the various documents assembled together demonstrate how competing interpretations of the Declaration have shaped, and been shaped by, political conflict in America. The Declaration is perhaps our "national soul," as Charles Sumner wrote in 1860, but Americans have rarely spoken of it with one voice. American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence paints, with broad strokes, a picture of the debates that have shaped a nation.