For more than a century, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance has been a central part of the American Experience. And perhaps because of its ubiquity, this simple flag salute has served not only as a unifying ritual but also as a lightning rod for bitter controversy.

Congress's 1954 decision to add "under God" to the Pledge has made it the focus of three U.S. Supreme Court cases and at least one other landmark appellate decision. The debate continues today, but along with it exists a widely held admiration and support for this simple affirmation of our shared patriotism.

As Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer show in their illuminating history, this brief salute to the flag has had an almost magical power to galvanize people's deepest feelings and beliefs about who we are and ought to be as a nation. In that sense, the story of the Pledge of Allegiance is the story of America and the American people.

"Advanced Option Pricing Models" details specific conditions under which current option pricing models fail to provide accurate price estimates and then shows option traders how to construct improved models for better pricing in a wider range of market conditions. Model-building steps cover options pricing under conditional or marginal distributions, using polynomial approximations and "curve fitting," and compensating for mean reversion. The authors also develop effective prototype models that can be put to immediate use, with real-time examples of the models in action.