Each the work of a specialist on the antebellum South, these essays address broad issues such as the slavery system, the growth of the cotton industry, and the growing sectional self-consciousness of the South. The authors' local, microcosmic approaches permit examination of subjects such as local justice, economic failure, slave marriages, and slave insurrection with an in-depth attention rarely possible in general works.

Those ignorant of the mistakes of the past are bound to lose a lot of money.  That's why Bob McMath founded the New Products Showcase and Learning Center--a "Smithsonian for Stinkers," Business Week dubbed it.  There, executives from top corporations pay huge amounts of money to rummage through some 80,000 products gone awry.  Their mission: to avoid the misguided, expensive, and occasionally ludicrous mistakes that trip up even top companies.

In What Were They Thinking?, McMath shows you how to avoid such mistakes, with more that eighty marketing lessons he's learned  from his long experience with clods and clunkers.  As People magazine put it "McMath knows his goods--and his uglies, too"--and here he shows you how to:

  Steer clear of the number one killer of new products  (page 129)

  Develop a marketing campaign based on a "Significant Point of Difference"  (page 183)

  Take advantage of eight  "Hot Buttons for Success in the Millennium"  (page 101)

  Keep out of the "Buy-This-If-You're-a-Loser School of Marketing"  (page 28)

  Combat "Corporate Alzheimer's"  (page 4)

and much more !

From the first crises in America's farming regions in the 1870s through the fracture and demise of grass-roots protest organizations at the end of the century. American Populism chronicles the Populists' battles with the dominant institutions of an industrializing nation. In this readable and balanced account, Robert McMath examines Populism's relation to the social and economic networks of rural communities and to churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and trade unions, showing how it became a natural response to dramatically changing times.