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\"One could almost use the word momentous, or the word epoch-making though epoch-ending might be more to the point ... I don't see how anyone henceforth can repeat the old cliches which Beard put into circulation forty years ago.\"—Frederick B. Tolles, Swarthmore College. \"American historians, particularly those who have given lectures or written books based on the Beard thesis, ignore Brown's book at their peril.\"—American Historical Review. Originally published in 1956. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.

Even worse, having agreed that [William Pierce Rogers] should determine US middle eastern policy in the period following the six-day war of 1967, [Richard Nixon] and [Henry Kissinger] deliberately undermined the so-called Rogers plan for a return of the Israeli-occupied west bank territories, with consequences that we are living with to this day. The Clinton administration's recent negotiations have been largely based on what Rogers proposed three decades ago. Rogers was born in Norfolk, New York, and educated at Colgate and Cornell universities. He first met his patron on Capitol Hill in 1947; he was a senate committee lawyer, Nixon a recently-elected Republican congressman. Their collaboration began when Rogers encouraged Nixon to pursue charges against Alger Hiss, a senior state department official accused of secret Communist party membership. In spite of President Truman's dismissal of the allegations, Rogers was convinced they were true and persuaded Nixon to keep up the pressure. Amid huge controversy, Hiss was eventually jailed for perjury. The inevitable result was a growing alienation between the president and Rogers, and a ferocious bureaucratic war between Rogers and Kissinger. In the end, even Nixon found it intolerable and, in 1973, abruptly dem- anded Rogers's resignation, turning the job over to Kiss- inger. \"Neither Rogers nor I,\" Kissinger commented later, \"mustered the grace to transcend an impasse that we should have recognised was not in the national interest. If we had been prepared to overcome our not inconsiderable egos, we could have complemented each other's efforts.\"