In introducing the English version of this book I venture to bespeak a welcome for it, not only for the light which it throws on some little-known incidents of the South African war, but also because of the keen personal interest of the events recorded. It is more than a history. It is a dramatic picture of the hopes and fears, the devotion and bitterness with which some patriotic women in Pretoria watched and, as far as they could, took part in the war which was slowly drawing to its conclusion on the veld outside...

After the American Civil War, John R. Lynch, who had been a slave in Mississippi, began his political career in 1869 by first becoming Justice of the Peace, and then Mississippi State Representative. He was only 26 when he was elected to the US Congress in 1873. There, he continued to be an activist, introducing many bills and arguing on their behalf. Perhaps his greatest effort was in the long debate supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to ban discrimination in public accommodations.In 1884 Lynch was the first African American nominated after a moving speech by Theodore Roosevelt to the position of Temporary Chairman of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois...

Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippman, is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially the irrational, and often self-serving, social perceptions that influence individual behavior, and prevent optimal societal cohesion. (Introduction by author)

This is the first book in the bibliography of Walter Lippmann, written three years after emerging from Harvard where he studied under the pragmatists Santayana and James. Although the work is a century old, the reader of today may still find in it, with its focus on practical human needs, a refreshing view towards the fundamental purpose (and persistent flaws) of politics, and indeed government itself, just as relevant and meaningful today as when it was written.

What Is Property?: or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (French: Qu'est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernment) is an influential work of nonfiction on the concept of property and its relation to anarchist philosophy by the French anarchist and mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, first published in 1840. In the book, Proudhon most famously declared that “property is theft”. Proudhon believed that the common conception of property conflated two distinct components which, once identified, demonstrated the difference between property used to further tyranny and property used to protect liberty...

Margaret Sanger was an American sex educator and nurse who became one of the leading birth control activists of her time, having at one point, even served jail time for importing birth control pills, then illegal, into the United States. Woman and the New Race is her treatise on how the control of population size would not only free women from the bondage of forced motherhood, but would elevate all of society. The original fight for birth control was closely tied to the labor movement as well as the Eugenics movement, and her book provides fascinating insight to a mostly-forgotten turbulent battle recently fought in American history.

Paris in 1792 is no longer what it was in 1789. In 1789, the old French society was still brilliant. The past endured beside the present. Neither names nor escutcheons, neither liveries nor places at court, had been suppressed. The aristocracy and the Revolution lived face to face. In 1792, the scene has changed."France was now on the verge of the Reign of Terror (la Terreur), the violent years following the Revolution, and this book chronicles the terrible period of French history which culminated in the proclamation: "Royalty is abolished in France...

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) is written by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Davis wrote the book as a straightforward history of the Confederate States of America and as an apologia for the causes that he believed led to and justified the American Civil War. Davis spared little detail in describing every aspect of the Confederate constitution and government, in addition to which he retold in detail numerous military campaigns...

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was an American feminist, writer, and intellectual associated with the Transcendentalist movement. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Her life was short but full. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College...

Philip Dru: Administrator: a Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 is a futuristic political novel published anonymously in 1912 by Edward Mandell House, an American diplomat, politician and presidential foreign policy advisor. His book's hero leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms that resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.