In the Balkans today Communism, with its dynamic drive for power and sense of mission, is charging against the Balkan peasant mass, a patient, religious, tradition-bound people tilling their beloved soil. Dragalevtsy, the Balkan village described by Mr. Sanders, brings this struggle into focus. The book details the way of life of a tranquil rural folk clinging to a Bulgarian mountainside, in the shadow of a twelfth- century monastery -- their history, economic system, marriage customs, family life, and reluctant yielding to the ways of the western world. On September 6, 1944, Dragalevtsy peasants awoke to find posters in the streets proclaiming the advent of Communism. The concluding chapters of the book give a vital, personalized insight into the economic and social forces now at work in the Balkans.

Few European nations are so little known to the world at large as Belorussia. For centuries this Eastern European country has served as a pawn in the power plays of predatory neighbors. In this, the first detailed study of Belorussia's recent history, the author depicts the successive invasions of German, Polish, and Russian armies in two world wars and the upheavals stemming from the Russian Revolution. The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, established in 1919, progressed culturally, educationally, and economically during Lenin's lifetime. Under Stalin, however, her leaders were liquidated in a series of purges, and hundreds of thousands of her people were shot or exiled to Siberia. Thousands more died in the famine that followed the forced collectivization of agriculture. Although Stalin gained the admission of Belorussia to the United Nations, the author concludes that Russian hegemony over Belorussia is as complete today under the Communists as it was for a century under the tsars.

What was the role of the black church in the rise of militancy that marked the sixties? Was it a calming influence that slowed that rise? Or did it contribute a sense of moral purpose and thus help inspire a wider participation in the civil rights movement? In Black Church in the Sixties the Nelsens attack the view that the church tended to inhibit civil rights militancy. The Nelsens reach their conclusions through the examination of thirty data sets derived from published surveys and from their own research conducted in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The data, subjected to Multiple Classification Analysis, reflect the attitudes of many different population groups and span the decade of the 1960s. The many tables make possible the presentation of an impressive amount of hard evidence.

Tracing the evolution of the Ashland Oil & Refining Company whose growth was phenomenal even in a rapidly expanding industry, author Joseph L. Massie attributes the success of the company to the flexible management policies of Paul G. Blazer.

Ebenezer Hiram Stedman, whose lively reminiscences of antebellum Kentucky were written as a series of letters to his daughter, was one of the pioneer papermakers of the state. Stedman paints a vivid picture of the life of the numerous and thriving middle class who sought opportunity in the expanding economy of the new West. The vivid detail of Stedman's personal experiences is supplemented by a more formal account of early Kentucky papermaking.

The Inner Bluegrass Region of Kentucky is a shining jewel of geography -- synonymous in the minds of many with the state of Kentucky. It is unique in many respects: the character of its land, its native vegetation, and its indigenous animal life. The way of life developed by its human inhabitants over the past two hundred years, especially its focus on the Thoroughbred horse, is also unique. The interaction of these two forces -- natural and human -- is the focus for this important work.The book includes color plates of representative plant and animal species and typical habitats. The annotated lists of 474 animal and nearly 1,200 plant species describe habitat, frequency, and distribution.Bluegrass Land and Life is a book that will delight all who share an interest in the Bluegrass region's past and present and a concern for its future.

Edmund Burke in recent years has assumed extraordinary stature in American political thinking as the father of neoconservatism. In this book, the first of a two-volume biography of this eighteenth-century English statesman, Mr. Cone brings important new evidence to his thesis that during the age of the American Revolution Burke was significant more as the politician and the party man than as a systematic political philosopher. This volume deals with Burke's career to 1782, when the Marquis of Rockingham, to whom Burke had attached himself seventeen years earlier, stood once again on the threshold of the prime ministership. In this period Burke was the voice -- and frequently the behind-the-scenes leader -- of the parliamentary opposition to George III, Lord North, and the "King's Friends." Ever since the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, he and his colleagues had struggled against the government over the great imperial questions of America, India, and Ireland and over the "influence" of the crown in domestic affairs through the patronage of the royal household offices.Mr. Cone stresses the importance of Burke's practical contributions to the art of government. By his partisan activities, his leadership in parliament, and his political writings, Burke gave expression to new ideas about the nature of English politics and emphasized the value of political parties as necessary instruments of free government. Indeed, Mr. Cone states, in so far as Burke the conservative championed the cause of party government, he did more than the political radical to change the nature of the cabinet, of parliament, of their relationship to one another, of the monarchy and its relationship to the cabinet and parliament -- in short, to revolutionize the practical working of the political and constitutional system of England.Based upon manuscript sources which were not opened to general scholarship until 1949, this book contains much new information about Burke's private life and provides a provocative reevaluation of his political career in the age of the American Revolution.

In this second of two volumes, Carl B. Cone demonstrates once again that only through a study of Edmund Burke's active political life can one understand his thought. To Burke's important practical contributions to the art of government made prior to 1782 (Volume I, The Age of the American Revolution) must now be added the extension of his thought to new problems of empire and finally, in more theoretical directions, to the French Revolution, which Burke saw as the greatest crisis in the history of the Christian community. Mr. Cone frankly acknowledges the flexibility of view Burke displayed while active in politics, but he also reveals Burke's basic continuity of principle. His career as a public man was a quest for justice and good order in the affairs of men. Each of the great problems he encountered served to develop in him the belief that the duty of the statesman was to bring his society into harmony with the moral order of the universe.Burke was absorbed in four great causes after 1782. One was domestic the constitutional and social order of England. Burke championed the independence of parliament, the supremacy of the House of Commons, and the aristocratic political system against those who asserted the prerogative powers of the crown or the necessity for parliamentary reform. As before 1782, he continued to advocate party as the instrument for giving effect to the constitutional principles that would preserve the liberties of Englishmen.For the people of the British Empire too, Burke sought justice. With America gone, he turned his attention to the administration of India. Deeply entangled with domestic politics, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, governor general of India, for abuse of his office engrossed Burke through almost all of the last fifteen years of his life. Mr. Cone's account of the impeachment is the fullest that any student of Burke has published.Another great imperial problem, justice for the people of Ireland, also runs through the entire period 1782--1797. As during the American Revolution, Burke desired to preserve the unity of the British Empire and the integrity of the protectionist commercial system, and so he approached the Irish problem with the conviction that justice could be attained within the superintending authority of the imperial government.The crisis of the French Revolution dominates the last half of the book. Because it was based upon principles of man and society, the Revolution forced Burke, as no earlier crisis had done, to give the fullest expression to his philosophy in one of the great political documents of the world. Mr. Cone presents here a discerning analysis both of the nature of Burke's opposition to the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and an exposition of the historical-legal principle which had emerged in Burke's own thought from the experience of a full life.

The great beef-cattle industry of the American West was not born full grown beyond the Mississippi. It had its antecedents in the upper South, the Midwest, and the Ohio Valley, where many Texas cattlemen learned their trade. In this book Mr. Henlein tells the story of the cattle kingdom of the Ohio Valley -- a kingdom which encompassed the Bluegrass region in Kentucky and the valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Wabash, and Sangamon in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.The book begins with the settlement of the Ohio Valley, by emigration from the South and East, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; it ends with the westward movement of the cattlemen, this time to Missouri and the plains, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Mr. Henlein describes the intricate pattern of agricultural activities which grew into a successful system of producing and marketing cattle; the energetic upbreeding and extensive importations which created the great blooded herds of the Ohio Valley; and the relations of the cattlemen with the major cattle markets.An interesting part of this story is the chapter which tells how the cattlemen of the Ohio Valley, between 1805 and 1855, drove their fat cattle over the mountains to the eastern markets, and how these long drives, like the more famous Texas drives of a later day, disappeared with the advent of the railroads. This well-documented study is an important contribution to the history of American agriculture.

Cincinnati in the 1870's was the largest inland city in the nation. Much of its prosperity and growth it owed to the commerce which floated along its Ohio River boundary on the way between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. This traffic also sustained a unique African American culture -- saloonkeepers, boardinghouse operators, entertainers, and women who served the steamboat hands between trips. Into this great western metropolis came young Lafcadio Hearn, who after several tentative starts became a newspaper reporter first for the Enquirer and then for the Commercial. Drawn to the Ohio River by his interest in the unusual, Hearn found beneath the rough surface of levee life a kind of cosmopolitan tolerance which emphasized the essential humanity of the community.Hearn's twelve sketches -- here reprinted as a unit for the first time -- are perceptive and sympathetic, yet not highly subjective and romanticized. Collectively they form an important comprehensive picture of African American life in a border city just after the Civil War. Among the earliest of his writings, they also foreshadow the course Hearn's life was to take in New Orleans, the West Indies, and finally Japan.

Historical and systematic in its treatment, this work reviews the idea of progress in Western thought as it relates to civilization, in a more comprehensive survey than is to be found in previous writings on the subject. In the author's view, the history of civilization reveals an increasing range of human capacity, both for good and for evil, depending upon men's choice between contending values.From this standpoint, the work proceeds to the exploration of such fields of social activity as the evolution of the family, the emancipation of women, economic conditions and technology, intellectual and aesthetic values, moral and religious experience. Civilization and Progress is marked by balanced and judicious treatment, very broad learning, and a lucid and forceful style. The author asks us to consider the alternatives we face and to reflect on the choices which men have made in the past, which confront us in the present world crisis, and on which our destiny hangs in the future. Seminal in scholarship and creativity, this work will interest those concerned with the Western intellectual tradition and with the condition of mankind.

Spanning most of the years of the one-party South, the public career of Virginian Claude A. Swanson, congressman, governor, senator, and secretary of the navy, extended from the second administration of Grover Cleveland into that of Franklin Roosevelt. His record, writes Henry C. Ferrell, Jr., in this definitive biography, is that of "a skillful legislative diplomat and an exceedingly wise executive encompassed in the personality of a professional politician."As a congressman, Swanson abandoned Cleveland's laissez faire doctrines to become the leading Virginia spokesman for William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic platform of 1896. His achievements as a reform governor are equaled by few Virginia chief executives. In the Senate, Swanson worked to advance the programs of Woodrow Wilson. In the 1920s, he contributed to formulation of Democratic alternatives to Republican policies. In Roosevelt's New Deal cabinet, he helped the Navy obtain favorable treatment during a decade of isolation.The warp and woof of local politics are well explicated by Ferrell to furnish insight into personalities and events that first produced, then sustained, Swan-son's electoral success. He examines Virginia educational, moral, and social reforms; disfranchisement movements; racial and class politics; and the impact of the woman's vote. And he records the growth of the Hampton Roads military-industrial complex, which Swanson brought about.In Virginia, Swanson became a dominant political figure, and Ferrell's study challenges previous interpretations of Virginia politics between 1892 and 1932 that pictured a powerful, reactionary Democratic "Organization," directed by Thomas Staples Martin and his successor Harry Flood Byrd, Sr., defeating would-be progressive reformers. A forgotten Virginia emerges here, one that reveals the pervasive role of agrarians in shaping the Old Dominion's politics and priorities.

Through the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans looked upon industrial accidents with callous disregard; they were accepted as an unfortunate but necessary adjunct to industrial society. A series of mine disasters in December 1907 (including one in Monongah, West Virginia, which took a toll of 361 lives) shook the public, at least temporarily, out of its lethargy.In this award-winning study, author William Graebner traces the development of mine safety reform in the years immediately following these tragic events. Reform activities during the Progressive period centered on the Bureau of Mines and an effort to obtain uniform state legislation; the effect of each was minimal. Mr. Graebner concludes that these idealistic solutions of the time were at once the great hope and the great failure of the Progressive coal-mining safety movement.

As World War II drew to a close, the United States and the Soviet Union began to maneuver for position in postwar Europe, in the first exploratory moves of what would soon become a worldwide contest for power and prestige. In Bulgaria, Michael Boll finds a unique vantage point for study of the processes of international politics during these years of the emergence of the Cold War. Bulgaria, he writes, was to assume a significance for both the United States and the Soviet Union greater than that small nation's intrinsic importance to either Great Power. Bulgaria had joined the Axis -- under pressure -- during the war, though it alone among the Axis satellites had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union. Willing in 1943 to lend support to an American plan devised to bring about Bulgaria's surrender and its participation in the war against Germany, the Soviet by the fall of 1944 was to invade Bulgaria and form an alliance with the Bulgarian Communists, who offered dependable support in the Red Army's continuing war effort. When military objectives were replaced by the Soviet's political drive for consolidation of its newly won empire, the Bulgarian Communists remained indispensable allies and continued the determined campaign that culminated in 1947 in declaration of the People's Republic of Bulgaria.Boll refutes the frequent charge of American "nonpolicy" toward Eastern Europe in this period, concluding that the "loss" of Bulgaria was the result not of the lack of determined policy, but of a realistic assessment of American capabilities and strategic priorities. Cold War in the Balkans, drawing on important new Eastern European sources and newly declassified British and American archives, relates international diplomatic history to local political developments in a way that gives new depth to the study of Cold War origins.

Collectivization of agriculture is an essential feature of the Communist program for the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. It is a means of extending state control of agriculture as well as the basis for developing large-scale industrial and military power. Irwin T. Sanders has edited this excellent group of papers by specialists on Eastern Europe and American rural social scientists, which collectively serve as an analysis of efforts to regiment the East European peasant.To those for whom the terms "collective farm" and "collectivization" have little meaning, this book will provide an actual picture of Communist effort to organize millions of peasants into a standard pattern of production and control. Such regimentation, these writers show, has led to less efficient agriculture from the standpoint of total production although it facilitates the delivery of produce to state economic enterprises.

Faced by the disaster of depression, Congress in the early 1930s proved amenable to the far-reaching demands and programs presented to it by the newly elected President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, but by 1937 it showed increasing resistance, even outright opposition, to many New Deal measures. In this study, James T. Patterson examines this resurgence of conservative strength in Congress, focusing upon the personalities and backgrounds of the men involved and upon the key domestic issues which brought them together in an informal coalition opposed to executive plans, especially for the years 1937--1939.From the first the Roosevelt Congress had had its "irreconcilables" -- men like Carter Glass, Millard Tydings, and Harry Byrd -- who viewed the New Deal with dismay, and in the voting on the public utilities holding company bill and the surprise tax measure of 1935 they were joined by a significant number of other congressmen who had hitherto supported the administration. It was, however, Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court that proved to be the turning point. This controversial measure provided a common issue on which conservatives, both Republican and Democratic, could unite -- the "irreconcilables," Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg, others like Charles McNary, and nominal Democratic progressives like Burton K. Wheeler. Following this crucial confrontation, the bipartisan conservative coalition was able to control enough votes to oppose the administration on such key measures as the fair labor standards and housing bills of 1937, the reorganization and tax bills of 1938, and the relief and tax bills of 1939. Incited by grievances over patronage, a feeling that the emergency was past, and fears of radicalism, congressmen increasingly asserted their independence of executive leadership.In this 1966 Organization of American Historians award-winning book, Patterson has provided a new exploration of one of the most significant developments in recent American history-the creation by conservative congressmen of a pattern of cooperation that continues to exert a potent influence upon the course of legislation.