"A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas, the Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The Expanding Blaze reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event--and that it didn't end with the transformation and independence of America. Rather, the revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the revolution's international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas--including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty--helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context."--

One of the world’s foremost historians of Western political and legal thought proposes a bold new model for thinking about equality at a time when its absence threatens democracies everywhere. How much equality does democracy need to survive? Political thinkers have wrestled with that question for millennia. Aristotle argued that some are born to command and others to obey. Antiphon believed that men, at least, were born equal. Later the Romans upended the debate by asking whether citizens were equals not in ruling but in standing before the law. Aldo Schiavone guides us through these and other historical thickets, from the first democracy to the present day, seeking solutions to the enduring tension between democracy and inequality. Turning from Antiquity to the modern world, Schiavone shows how the American and the French revolutions attempted to settle old debates, introducing a new way of thinking about equality. Both the French revolutionaries and the American colonists sought democracy and equality together, but the European tradition (British Labour, Russian and Eastern European Marxists, and Northern European social democrats) saw formal equality—equality before the law—as a means of obtaining economic equality. The American model, in contrast, adopted formal equality while setting aside the goal of economic equality. The Pursuit of Equality in the West argues that the United States and European models were compatible with industrial-age democracy, but neither suffices in the face of today’s technological revolution. Opposing both atomization and the obsolete myths of the collective, Schiavone thinks equality anew, proposing a model founded on neither individualism nor the erasure of the individual but rather on the universality of the impersonal human, which coexists with the sea of differences that makes each of us unique.

There's a wedding happening at Thunder Mountain Ranch, and cowboy Liam Magee couldn't be happier for his foster brother. Of course, the occasion just got a whole heap more interesting now that gorgeous Hope Caldwell is a guest at the ranch.

What happens on the road...

How has feminism matured over the years? What are the pressing agendas for todayâ (TM)s feminists working in the arts? Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism, emerges as a navigational text, celebrating past victories while charting new directions for todayâ (TM)s second wave and third wave feminists. A feminist anthology, Blaze is comprised of feminist artists, art historians, critics, journalists, curators, interdisciplinary artists, and arts administrators of diverse backgrounds, living across the United States. The book grows out of the 2006 Annual National Womenâ (TM)s Caucus for Art (WCA) conference, held in Boston, Massachusetts. Blaze features 15 detailed and well-documented feminist histories that narrate a number of pertinent strands of activism regarding feminist art, scholarship, and organizational development while exploring current crossroads. Conversations occur between myriad groups of women: second wave to third wave; third wave to second wave; second wave to second wave; third wave to women who do not identify themselves as feminists. The book addresses a number of timely issues related to representation, work, collaboration, environmental interventions, and social justice platforms. Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism captures feminists arts professionals working together across differences. In a world filled with strife, it is this form of engagement that inspires continued activism. For further information, please also see www.blazediscourse.com