Druid Magazine

The incredible tale of how ambitious oil rivals Marcus Samuel, Jr., and Henri Deterding joined forces to topple the Standard Oil empire Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889, John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the U.S. government is wary of challenging the great “anaconda” of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses—that is until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell. A riveting account of ambition, oil, and greed, Breaking Rockefeller traces Samuel’s rise from outsider to the heights of the British aristocracy, Deterding’s conquest of America, and the collapse of Rockefeller’s monopoly. The beginning of the twentieth century is a time when vast fortunes were made and lost. Taking readers through the rough and tumble of East London’s streets, the twilight turmoil of czarist Russia, to the halls of the British Parliament, and right down Broadway in New York City, Peter Doran offers a richly detailed, fresh perspective on how Samuel and Deterding beat the world’s richest man at his own game.

A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.

From 1970 onwards the disbanded Beatles were at last free to follow their individual interests. From that point on there were four separate stories... but they were stories that would form a complex overlapping history of quarrels and reconciliations, personal projects and sporadic collaborations. For the first time ever, a noted Beatles expert has meticulously documented the entire period of The Beatles after the break-up.

This is not fiction. This is the true story of how a former New York City Police Captain of Detectives used his extensive knowledge of the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes to provide the FBI and other agencies with break the case clues to some of the most baffling and horrific criminal cases of the last half century. Not only does the author provide break the case clues to The Unabomber, BTK Killer, and Son of Sam cases, but on the Anthrax Killer case he has uncovered a secret code, one not found by the FBI, which will re-open the debate on the FBIs closing of the case as solved. If you love detective stories, be they true or fiction, or a true crime deductive challenge, you shouldnt miss this fascinating journey with the author and the Worlds Greatest Detective, Sherlock Holmes.

“Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.

Protecting and promoting health is inherently a political endeavor that requires a sophisticated understanding of the distribution and use of power. Yet while the global nature of health is widely recognized, its political nature is less well understood. In recent decades, the interdisciplinary field of global health politics has emerged to demonstrate the interconnections of health and core political topics, including foreign and security policy, trade, economics, and development. Today a growing body of scholarship examines how the global health landscape has both shaped and been shaped by political actors and structures. The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics provides an authoritative overview and assessment of research on this important and complicated subject. The volume is motivated by two arguments. First, health is not simply a technical subject, requiring evidence-based solutions to real-world problems, but an arena of political contestation where norms, values, and interests also compete and collide. Second, globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of health politics in terms of the ideas, interests, and institutions involved. The volume comprises more than 30 chapters by leading experts in global health and politics. Each chaper provides an overview of the state of the art on a given theoretical perspective, major actor, or global health issue. The Handbook offers both an excellent introduction to scholars new to the field and also an invaluable teaching and research resource for experts seeking to understand global health politics and its future directions.

Any history that touts itself as unconventional is bound to raise some hackles when it challenges traditional interpretations of our nation's past. Yet history is continually under revision. This 2-volume work, covering America''s first 300 years, differs from others in seeking to debunk numerous flattering and conventionally accepted myths.aReading between the lines of what we''ve all been taught as US history, the author probes a little deeper into what perhaps was never denied ? but was never spelled out, either. Some inconvenient questions emerge. Was lust for land the driving force behind every war in US history?In a lively narrative, Kaplan demonstrates that in many ways Lincoln was our worst wartime president (save Madison), and that Reconstruction was doomed from the start.The author describes how an agricultural hinterland evolved into an industrial colossus and a society of small towns grew into a nation of large cities. When it did, what had once been the world's leading republican government gradually edged towards becoming a democracy ? a form of government abjured by the Founding Fathers.The War Between the States and the rapid industrialization of the North was made possible by tapping the vast resources which lay underneath the land. Oil, coal, iron ore, copper, zinc, and other minerals made the US the richest and most powerful nation in the world by the end of the nineteenth century, when this book concludes.The book also chronicles the fledgling Labor movement in the 19th century, handily discredited through equation with ?anarchists, ? and explores the cynicism with which McKinley embarked on the Spanish?American War.The basic thrust of this 2-volume work is neither to expose America's blemishes nor to eulogize its virtues.a Rather, the author focuses on US history from a different perspective than is usually accepted. Readers may disagree with his interpretations but will find his arguments intriguing."