Washington's Spies - The Story of America's First Spy Ring

Cokie Roberts's number one New York Times bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, examined the nature of women's roles throughout history and led USA Today to praise her as a "custodian of time-honored values." Her second bestseller, From This Day Forward, written with her husband, Steve Roberts, described American marriages throughout history, including the romance of John and Abigail Adams. Now Roberts returns with Founding Mothers, an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families -- and their country -- proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it.

While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history. Roberts brings us the women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. While the men went off to war or to Congress, the women managed their businesses, raised their children, provided them with political advice, and made it possible for the men to do what they did. The behind-the-scenes influence of these women -- and their sometimes very public activities -- was intelligent and pervasive.

Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favored recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington -- proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might never have survived.

Social history at its best, Founding Mothers unveils the drive, determination, creative insight, and passion of the other patriots, the women who raised our nation. Roberts proves beyond a doubt that like every generation of American women that has followed, the founding mothers used the unique gifts of their gender -- courage, pluck, sadness, joy, energy, grace, sensitivity, and humor -- to do what women do best, put one foot in front of the other in remarkable circumstances and carry on.

This myth-shattering book explains the evidence for the veracity of psychic phenomena, uniting the teachings of mystics, the theories of quantum physics, and the latest in high-tech experiments. With painstaking research and deft, engaging prose, Radin dispels the misinformation and superstition that have clouded the understanding of scientists and laypeople alike concerning a host of fascinating oddities. Psychokinesis, remote viewing, prayer, jinxes, and more--all are real, all have been scientifically proven, and the proof is in this book.

Radin draws from his own work at Princeton, Stanford Research Institute, and Fortune 500 companies, as well as his research for the U.S. government, to demonstrate the surprising extent to which the truth of psi has already been tacitly acknowledged and exploited. The Conscious Universe also sifts the data for tantalizing hints of how mind and matter are linked. Finally, Radin takes a bold look ahead, to the inevitable social, economic, academic, and spiritual consequences of the mass realization that mind and matter can influence each other without having physical contact.

Djerejian, an American diplomat who served eight presidents, both Democratic and Republican, from John F. Kennedy to William Jefferson Clinton, publicly shares for the first time intimate details and colorful anecdotes of his service in the Middle East. During his tenure, he developed close professional relationships with many of the region's secular and religious leaders and was a key advisor to Washington's highest-ranking officials and political leaders. He was instrumental in formulating U.S. policy in the region, and participated actively in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, and the formation of the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

A leading expert on the Middle East, Djerejian asserts that Americans are confronted with one of the most important challenges of our time: the struggle of ideas between the forces of extremism and moderation in the Arab and Muslim world. Mistakenly assuming that radical political ideologies fell with communism at the end of the Cold War, policy makers are employing insufficient strategies to promote the important political, economic, commercial, cultural, and security interests that the United States -- and the rest of the world -- have in the region.

Djerejian explains what has gone wrong with U.S. policy and suggests a way forward for future admin-istrations. The United States must learn to deal with the complex religious, ethnic, and cultural factors at play in the Middle East. We must not impose our own political structure on the Arab and Muslim world, but we can help marginalize the radicals and champion a democratic way of life in conformity with the cultural context of the region's own mainstream values and ideals. In his captivating and illuminating book -- the only one of its kind to address the full scope of issues that U.S. leaders face in the Middle East -- Djerejian outlines specific coherent strategies necessary to respond effectively to the imminent danger and dynamic opportunity presented by the struggle within the Islamic world.

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is a powerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.

Here also is the Revolution as experienced by American Loyalists, Hessian mercenaries, politicians, preachers, traitors, spies, men and women of all kinds caught in the paths of war.

At the center of the drama, with Washington, are two young American patriots, who, at first, knew no more of war than what they had read in books -- Nathanael Greene, a Quaker who was made a general at thirty-three, and Henry Knox, a twenty-five-year-old bookseller who had the preposterous idea of hauling the guns of Fort Ticonderoga overland to Boston in the dead of winter.

But it is the American commander-in-chief who stands foremost -- Washington, who had never before led an army in battle.

The book begins in London on October 26, 1775, when His Majesty King George III went before Parliament to declare America in rebellion and to affirm his resolve to crush it. From there the story moves to the Siege of Boston and its astonishing outcome, then to New York, where British ships and British troops appear in numbers never imagined and the newly proclaimed Continental Army confronts the enemy for the first time. David McCullough's vivid rendering of the Battle of Brooklyn and the daring American escape that followed is a part of the book few readers will ever forget.

As the crucial weeks pass, defeat follows defeat, and in the long retreat across New Jersey, all hope seems gone, until Washington launches the "brilliant stroke" that will change history.

The darkest hours of that tumultuous year were as dark as any Americans have known. Especially in our own tumultuous time, 1776 is powerful testimony to how much is owed to a rare few in that brave founding epoch, and what a miracle it was that things turned out as they did.

Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history–and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awaited their arrival. Courtesans named Doll, Suzy Poon Tang, and Brick Top devoured raw meat to the delight of Prince Henry of Prussia and recited poetry for Theodore Dreiser. Whereas lesser madams pocketed most of a harlot’s earnings and kept a “whipper” on staff to mete out discipline, the Everleighs made sure their girls dined on gourmet food, were examined by an honest physician, and even tutored in the literature of Balzac.

Not everyone appreciated the sisters’ attempts to elevate the industry. Rival Levee madams hatched numerous schemes to ruin the Everleighs, including an attempt to frame them for the death of department store heir Marshall Field, Jr. But the sisters’ most daunting foes were the Progressive Era reformers, who sent the entire country into a frenzy with lurid tales of “white slavery”——the allegedly rampant practice of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into brothels. This furor shaped America’ s sexual culture and had repercussions all the way to the White House, including the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

With a cast of characters that includes Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., William Howard Taft, “Hinky Dink” Kenna, and Al Capone, Sin in the Second City is Karen Abbott’s colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters, their world-famous Club, and the perennial clash between our nation’s hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers, Sin in the Second City offers a vivid snapshot of America’s journey from Victorian-era propriety to twentieth-century modernity.