What role did drug abuse play in John F. Kennedy's White House, and how was it kept from the public? How did general anesthetics and aging affect the presidency of Ronald Reagan? Why did Winston Churchill become more egocentric, Woodrow Wilson more self- righteous, and Josef Stalin more paranoid as they aged -- and how did those qualities alter the course of history?Was Napoleon poisoned with arsenic or did underlying disease account for his decline at the peak of his power? Does syphilis really explain Henry VIII's midlife transformation? Was there more than messianism brewing in the brains of some zealots of the past, among them Adolf Hitler, Joan of Arc, and John Brown? Most important of all, when does one man's illness cause millions to suffer, and when is it merely a footnote to history?To answer such questions requires the clinical intuition of a practicing physician and the scholarly perspective of a trained historian. Bert Park, who qualifies on both counts, offers here fascinating second opinions, basing his retrospective diagnoses on a wide range of sources from medicine and history.Few books so graphically portray the impact on history of physiologically compromised leadership, misdiagnosis, and inappropriate medical treatment. Park not only untangles medical mysteries from the past but also offers timely suggestions for dealing with such problems in the future. As a welcome sequel to his first work, The Impact of Illness on World Leaders, this book offers scholars, physicians, and general readers an entertaining, albeit sobering, analysis.

In this collection of fourteen essays, scholars of Appalachian culture and society examine how the people contend with and adapt to the pressures of change thrust upon them. Appalachia and America will appeal to a broad range of people interested in the southern mountains or in the policy issues of social welfare. It deals cogently with the newest form of conflict affecting not only communities in Appalachia, but urban and rural communities in America at large -- the struggle for local values and ways of life in the face of distant and powerful bureaucracies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Developmental change and the related problems of modernization have attracted the attention of scholars in many discipliness. In this bibliography -- derived and expanded from an earlier compilation by Mr. Spitz and Edward Weidner -- the author orders and annotates nearly 2,500 articles appearing between 1945 and 1969 in 234 journals from 25 countries. Organized by subject and indexed by both author and journal, the citations include studies of social problems, economic factors, political questions, public administration, and international cooperation and assistance. Special emphasis has been given to new and little-known sources. In addition, a selected bibliography of monographs and book-length studies dealing with the modernization of underdeveloped countries and areas is included in the volume.

Eight well-known political scientists, economists, and sociologists here explore the interrelationships between the various levels of economic strength and political stability attended by newly emerged nations and the formulation of their foreign policies. These essays provide testimony not only to the importance of these problems, but also to contributions that can be made by various methodological approaches by scholars from the different social sciences. Contributing to the volume are Rupert Emerson, Benjamin Higgins, Gayl Ness, Ivo and Rosalind Feierabend, Henry Bienen, Lloyd Jensen, and Wilson C. McWilliams.

Until late in the eighteenth century, the peasantry of the German states had been dismissed contemptuously by the aristocracy and middle classes as brutish and virtually subhuman. With the advent of organized movements for peasant emancipation and agrarian reform, however, many German writers and publicists began also to reassess the role of the peasant in society. Within less than a century, the public image of the German peasant had been completely changed. Where formerly he had been scorned as untermenschlich, by 1840 he was firmly established in the public mind as an embodiment of the highest national virtues -- a patriotic citizen with special qualities of singular importance to the fatherland. Mr. Gagliardo's study is a suggestive inquiry into the origins and development of a modern rural ideology and its relationship to German doctrines of nationality.

This comprehensive survey of the changes in Kentucky's population and economy furnishes graphic evidence of the value of demographic data to all who must plan health programs and offers an example to Kentucky and to other states and areas.

The need to find solutions to the grave economic and political problems faced by Indonesia presents a constant challenge. In this volume, scholars in a variety of fields study a broad spectrum of the problems of this new nation. Their overall focus centers on Indonesia's land and population with emphasis on the most efficient means of developing physical and human resources.

These original essays by major scholars of judicial behavior explore the frequency, intensity, and especially the causes of conflict and consensus among judges on American appellate courts. Together, these studies provide new insights into judges' attitudes and values, role perceptions, and small group interactions.

Irwin T. Sanders has translated his own experience as a social scientist into a practical, easy-to-read guide to community improvement. An impressive array of additional experts has teamed up with him to supply selected guideposts on twenty-one special problems in community organization. This popular handbook has been called by many civic workers the most practical, down-to-earth tool they have known for community engineering. Issued in two editions with a total of seven printings, it is now republished in a convenient, paper-bound form containing the complete text of the 1953 revision.

Modern man is beginning, painfully, to learn that he can continue to enjoy basic resources like water only through careful planning and control. This book indicates what social scientists have contributed in the past and seeks to encourage their future participation in this critical area.The study first describes the background of water use planning and defines the specific problems of control. Then five social scientists, representing the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology, review the contributions their disciplines have made and discuss the problems they can do most toward solving. Concluding chapters offer additional commentary and provide an overall evaluation of the present situation in water resource management and suggestions for more meaningful participation by social scientists.

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG.The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects.Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population.Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.