This insightful look into the long-ignored treatment of slaves by the Jesuit order sheds new light on The Society of Jesus during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

William Tecumseh Sherman is known primarily for having cut a swath of destruction through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. From the fame of these years, however, he moved into an eighteen-year phase of "insuring the tranquility" of the vast region of the American West. As commander of the Division of the Missouri from 1865 to 1869 and General of the Army of the United States under President Grant from 1869 to 1883, Sherman facilitated expansion and settlement in the West while suppressing the raids of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, Comanche, and Crow Indians. Robert G. Athearn explores Sherman's and his army's roles in the settling of the West, especially within the broad framework of railroad construction, Indian policy, political infighting, and popular opinion.

Gabriel Catren is a philosopher and a physicist working at the Institut SPHERE--Science, Philosophie, Histoire (Universite Paris Diderot--CNRS, Paris).The great poets and thinkers of modernity described a situation we still inhabit today: the catastrophic undermining of all foundations, the disorienting relativization of all reference points, the prospect of abandonment to chance and contingency alone--the shipwreck of Mallarme's Coup de des. In this precise and poetic work of philosophy, Gabriel Catren sketches out a new "phenoumenodelic" solution to this momentous ungrounding, defiantly refusing both unrestrained contingency and arbitrary refoundation. Mobilizing a formidable knowledge of the major currents of modern thought, deftly articulating Kantian transcendentalism and Spinozan immanentism, phenomenological reduction and scientific realism, Catren argues that the projects oriented by the infinite ideas of reason (Truth, Beauty, Justice, Love) need not be abandoned in the face of the "exquisite crisis" of modernity. Instead, the "shipwreck" is to be understood as a suspension of finite subjectivity in the fullness of a "phenoumenodelic pleroma," an atonal milieu ringing with unheard-of possibilities. Announcing an ambitious program for the renewal of transcendental philosophy, in Pleromatica Catren recomposes the primary elements of modern thought into a startling new configuration, introducing a vivid constellation of new concepts with which to map out and navigate the vast space of this "worldless daydream."

From the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, Father Thomas J. Murphy writes a compelling chronology and in depth analysis of Jesuit slaveholding in the state of Maryland.

Education is a perennially vexing issue in American life. What, exactly, is the best system for teaching? Proponents of charter schools believe that competition is the key; public schools will improve if they have to compete for students. Charters themselves are public schools, but ones run by any group accepting the challenge of improving student performance in return for fewer regulations and tight budget restrictions. In short, charter schools have defined focus and clear accountability. Those opposing the charter movement though, claim that charter schools are divisive and distract attention from public school needs. Some politicians have shown approval of charter schools, as evidenced by President George W Bush's bill for funding charter programs. This book aims to clear up some of the questions around charter schools and can help answer the questions surrounding the future of the American education system.

In April 1871, a constable walking a beat near Greenwich found a girl dying in the mud - her face cruelly slashed and her brains protruding from her skull. The girl was Maria Jane Clouson, a maid for the respectable Pook family, and who was pregnant at the time of her death. When the blood-spattered clothes of the 20-year-old Edmund Pook, alleged father of the dead girl's unborn child, were discovered, the matter seemed open and shut. Yet there followed a remarkable legal odyssey full of unexpected twists as the police struggled to build a case. Paul Thomas Murphy recreated the drama of an extraordinary murder case and conclusively identifies the killer's true identity.