Civil Act

CIVIL: Life After the Foreign Legion is the author's follow-up to Appel: A Canadian in the French Foreign Legion. During his recent return to France, he shares with you his past in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Algeria as a security contractor and more.

Iron Man and Captain America are two core members of the Avengers, the world's greatest superhero team. But when a tragic battle blows a hole in the city of Stamford, killing hundreds of people, the US government demands that all superheroes unmask and register their powers. To Tony Stark - Iron Man - it's a regrettable but necessary step. To Captain America, it's an unbearable assault on civil liberties.

For the past half century, John Keegan, the greatest military historian of our time, has been returning to the scenes of America’s most bloody and wrenching war to ponder its lingering conundrums: the continuation of fighting for four years between such vastly mismatched sides; the dogged persistence of ill-trained, ill-equipped, and often malnourished combatants; the effective absence of decisive battles among some two to three hundred known to us by name.

Roark von Graf - former noble and hedge mage, current mid-level mob in a MMORPG - has his sights set on taking down the tyrannical dungeon lord. But the reigning troll despot is nearly as devious as Roark, and his followers are at a much higher level. With forever-death on the line, civil war breaks out in the Citadel, pitting Roark’s new regime against Azibek’s horde of loyalists. To survive, Roark will have to outfox the dungeon lord, forge new, dirtier weapons and shady alliances, and above all, evolve....

The Civil War is Julius Caesar’s personal account of his war with Pompey the Great - the war that destroyed the five-hundred-year-old Roman Republic. Caesar the victor became Caesar the dictator. In three short books, Caesar describes how, in order to defend his honor and the freedom of both himself and the Roman people, he marched on Rome and defeated the forces of Pompey and the Senate in Italy, Spain, and Greece.

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began. 1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents' faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of US immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out.

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade dominated the American scene, terrified politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands of our citizens. In this masterful history, Haynes Johnson re-creates that time of crisis. Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when fear again affects American behavior and attitudes.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the single most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in American history. It gave the government sweeping powers to strike down segregation, to enforce fair hiring practices, and to rectify bias in law enforcement and in the courts. The Act so dramatically altered American society that, looking back, "it seems preordained", as Everett Dirksen, the GOP leader in the Senate and a key supporter of the bill, said, "no force is more powerful than an idea whose time has come." But there was nothing predestined about the victory.

The history of the United States was shaped by a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, the country nevertheless remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations system suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading to a nearly fatal rupture in the union, described here by David S. Brown in riveting detail.

The first significant book on the history and impact of the ADA - the "eyes on the prize" moment for disability rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the widest-ranging and most comprehensive piece of civil rights legislation ever passed in the United States, and it has become the model for disability-based laws around the world. Yet the surprising story behind how the bill came to be is little known.

From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act traces the fight for free speech from the turn of the 19th century through the War on Terror. Christopher Finan has given us a vital history of our most fundamental, and most vulnerable, constitutional right.

On June 25, 2013, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, invalidating a key provision of voting rights law. The decision - the culmination of an eight-year battle over the power of Congress to regulate state conduct of elections - marked the closing of a chapter in American politics. That chapter had opened a century earlier in the case of Guinn v. United States, which ushered in national efforts to knock down racial barriers to the ballot.

From acclaimed legal historian, author of a biography of Louis Brandeis and Dissent and the Supreme Court a history of affirmative action from its beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to the first use of the term in 1935 with the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) to 1961 and John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, mandating that federal contractors take "affirmative action" to ensure that there be no discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin" down to today’s American society.

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led the 7th U.S. Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn. By sunset, Custer and five of his companies lay dead - killed in battle against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Through the passage of time, Custer’s last fight has come to overshadow the rest of his military career, which had its brilliant beginning in the American Civil War. Plucked from obscurity by Maj. Gen. George McClellan, Custer served as a staff officer through the early stages of the war.

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies built the case that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit the North and South alike.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of Black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the act was initially used to repress rebellion against slavery, during Reconstruction it was invoked by President Grant to quell white-supremacist uprisings in the South.