Sean Pratt

"Go Forward, and Give Us Victories": From the Mud March to Gettysburg: (January-July 1863): Dissatisfaction with the Emancipation Proclamation and lack of military victory heightens the discontent with the administration. Trouble comes with the destructive rivalry within the army and the threat of the French intervening on behalf of the Confederacy. The president's decision concerning the Minnesota Sioux Uprising infuriates the West. Lincoln must decide what to do with a demoralized army of the Potomac. ...

"Hold On with a Bulldog Grip and Chew and Choke as Much as Possible": The Grand Offensive: (May-August 1864): The Spring Offensive is launched. A bogus presidential proclamation calling for volunteers and prayers causes panic throughout the North. Grant and Lee battle for six weeks until severe losses force them to a halt. Congressional Radicals pass a bill that will allow Southern States re-admittance to the Union as long as they give an oath that ...

We have just come through the worst recession many of us have ever seen, and in times like these, it's tempting to think that just having more money would solve our problems. Indeed, it is also widely believed that how wealthy you are is a result of external factors, such as job promotions or good investments. But the surprising truth is that affluence is actually based on a certain way of thinking, one which has ...

Be flexible and faster with Agile project management

As mobile and web technologies continue to evolve rapidly, there is added pressure to develop and implement software projects in weeks instead of months. Agile Project Management For Dummies can make that happen. This is the first book to provide a simple, step-by-step guide to Agile Project Management approaches, tools, and techniques. With the fast pace of mobile and web technology development, software project development must keep ...

In a brilliant book that will elevate foreign policy in the national conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens makes a powerful case for American intervention abroad.

In December 2011 the last American soldier left Iraq. "We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq," boasted President Obama. He was proved devastatingly wrong less than three years later as jihadists seized the Iraqi city of Mosul. The event cast another dark shadow over the future of ...

"If it is possible to understand the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom, Virginia is surely the place to begin," writes Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the key to this central paradox in the people and politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country. With ...

"Wherever the willingness to rethink has been squelched, wherever that sense of quest has been buried under convention and complacency, the Christian faith in all its forms is in trouble. But even there, something is trying to be born. Even now, right here, among us, inside you, inside me. You may feel it as a curiosity, a desire for better answers than you inherited so far. You may experience it as frustration, knowing that there ...

A journey inside the minds that build our world.

Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, looks nothing like Microsoft's Office Suite, and digital surround sound doesn't work like a citywide telecommunication grid. Yet these engineering feats have much in common.

Applied Minds explores the unique visions and mental tools of engineers to reveal the enormous and often understated influence they wield in transforming problems into opportunities. The resulting account pairs the innovators of modern ...

One of the foremost financial writers of his generation, Peter Bernstein has the unique ability to synthesize intellectual history and economics with the theory and practice of investment management. Now, with classic titles such as Economist on Wall Street, A Primer on Money, Banking, and Gold, and The Price of Prosperity-which have forewords by financial luminaries and new introductions by the author-you can enjoy some of the best of Bernstein in his earlier Wall Street ...

"Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. Nature's many innovations-some uncannily perfect-call for natural principles that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its innovability."

Darwin's theory of natural selection explains how useful adaptations are preserved over time. But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded him. As genetics pioneer Hugo de Vries put it, "natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest."

Can random ...