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'[A] superb study of the way FDR successfully created a presidency that could renew America' - Times Literary SupplementOne of the greatest American presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt built a coalition of labour, ethnic, urban, low-income and African American voters that underwrote the Democratic Party's national ascendancy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Over his four terms, he promoted the New Deal - the greatest reform programme in US history - to meet the challenges of the Great Depression, led the United States to the brink of victory in the Second World War, and established the modern presidency as the driving force of American politics and government. Iwan Morgan takes a fresh look at FDR, showing how his leadership enabled the United States of America to become the most successful country of the twentieth century. This astute and original assessment of a highly consequential presidency explains how Roosevelt enhanced the governing capacity of his office, promoted a constitutional revolution through his dealings with the Supreme Court, and forged a new intimacy between the president and the American people through his genius for political communication. It also demonstrates the significance of his organizational and strategic leadership as commander-in-chief in America's greatest foreign war, his role in holding together the US-British-Soviet Grand Alliance against the Axis powers, and his pioneering development of the national-security presidency that sought to promote a lasting post-war peace for the world. In fluid, immensely readable prose, Morgan focuses on the ways in which FDR transformed the presidency into an institution of domestic and international leadership to establish the modern ideal of the office as an assertive, democratic executive charged with meeting the challenges facing the US at home and abroad.

'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book explores laughter and awkwardness in late-medieval English literature. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. The hypothesis of this book is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. In exploring this, Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England reveals how and why these texts generate awkwardness and questions and in turn contemplates what it meant to live together in an awkward age.

Saudi Arabia, with its US alliance and abundance of oil dollars, has a very different economic story to that of Iran, which despite enormous natural gas reserves, has been hit hard by economic, trade, scientific and military sanctions since its 1979 revolution.

This book examines the hero-cults of Sparta on the basis of the archaeological and literary sources. Nicolette Pavlides explores the local idiosyncrasies of a pan-Hellenic phenomenon, which itself can help us understand the place and function of heroes in Greek religion. Although it has long been noted that hero-cult was especially popular in Sparta, there is little known about the cults, both in terms of material evidence and the historical context for their popularity. The evidence from the cult of Helen and Menelaos at the Menelaion, the worship of Agamemnon and Alexandra/Kassandra, the Dioskouroi, and others who remain anonymous to us, is viewed as a local phenomenon reflective of the developing communal and social consciousness of the polis. What is more, through an analysis of the typology of cults, it is concluded that in Sparta, the boundaries of the divine/heroic/mortal were fluid, which allowed a great variation in the expression of cults. The votive patterns, topography, and architectural evidence permit an analysis of the kinds of offerings to hero-cults and an evaluation of the architecture that housed such cults. Due to the material and spatial distribution of the votive deposits, it is argued that Sparta had a large number of hero shrines scattered throughout the polis, which attests to an enthusiastic and long-lasting local votive practice at a popular level.

A young woman is torn between her Korean heritage and American upbringing. Min Jin Lee's acclaimed debut novel.