Author: Neil Younger Reassesses the national war effort during the Elizabethan wars against Spain (15851603). Drawing on a mass of hitherto neglected sources, it finds a political system in much better health than has been thought, revising many existing assumptions about the weaknesses of the state in the face of military change.

Author: Oliver Arnold The new practices and theories of parliamentary representation that emerged during Elizabeth's and James' reigns shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, transformed the image of the body politic, and unsettled constructs and concepts as fundamental as the relation between presence and absence. In The Third Citizen, Oliver Arnold argues that recovering the formation of political representation as an effective ideology should radically change our understanding of early modern political culture, Shakespeare's political art, and the way Anglo-American critics, for whom representative democracy is second nature, construe both. In magisterial readings of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and the First Tetralogy, Arnold discovers a new Shakespeare who was neither a conservative apologist for monarchy nor a prescient, liberal champion of the House of Commons but instead a radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering. Shakespeare believed that political representation produced (and required for its reproduction) a new kind of subject and a new kind of subjectivity, and he fashioned a new kind of tragedy to represent the loss of power, the fall from dignity, the false consciousness, and the grief peculiar to the experiences of representing and of being represented. Representationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeares tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.

Author: George W. Grayson The emergence of Latin American firebrands who champion the cause of the impoverished and rail against the evils of neoliberalism and Yankee imperialismHugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexicohas changed the landscape of the Americas in dramatic ways. This is the first biography to appear in English about one of these charismatic figures, who is known in his country by his adopted nickname of Little Ray of Hope.The book follows Lopez Obradors life from his early years in the flyspecked state of Tabasco, his university studies, and the years that he lived among the impoverished Chontal Indians. Even as he showed an increasingly messianic elan to uplift the downtrodden, he confronted the muscular Institutional Revolutionary Party in running twice for governor of his home state and helping found the leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). As the PRDs national president, he escalated his political and ideological warfare against his former president, Carlos Salinas, and other conspirators determined to link Mexico to the global economy at the expense of the poor. His strident advocacy of the have-nots lifted Lopez Obrador to the mayorship of Mexico City, which he rechristened the City of Hope. Its ubiquitous crime, traffic, pollution, and housing problems have made the capital a tomb for most politicians. Not for Lopez Obrador. Through splashy public works, monthly stipends to senior citizens, huge marches, and a dawn-to-dusk work schedule, he converted the position into a trampoline to the presidency. Although he lost the official count by an eyelash, the hard-charging Tabascan cried fraud, took the oath as the nations legitimate president, and barnstormed the country, excoriating the fascist policies of President Felipe Calderon and preparing to redeem the destitute in the 2012 presidential contest.Grayson views Lopez Obrador as quite different from populists like Chavez, Morales, and Kirchner and argues that he is a secular messiah, who lives humbly, honors prophets, gathers apostles, declares himself indestructible, relishes playing the role of victim, and preaches a doctrine of salvation by returning to the values of the 1917 Constitution fairness for workers, Indians rights, fervent nationalism, and anti-imperialism.

Author: Joyce Duriga; Foreword by Robert Ellsberg No person has worked more effectively toward the abolition of the death penalty in the United States than Helen Prejean, CSJ. Her best-selling book Dead Man Walking, and the hit Hollywood film adaptation in which she was played by Susan Sarandon, was a catalyst for drawing national attention to the issue. In the years since then, her continuing and often controversial work with death-row inmates has kept the issue near the forefront of national debate. She has confronted lawyers and judges, politicians and the media, to expose the indignity and injustice of the death penalty and inhumane prison conditions. In Helen Prejean: Death Rows Nun, Joyce Duriga explores Sister Helens life growing up in upper-middle-class Louisiana, her growing awareness of the injustice of the death penalty, and its disproportionate targeting of the poor and minorities, and her introduction to death-row inmates Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie. Through this book, readers will witness her lifes work with victims and their families, and see how she came to understand her role in prison ministry, not only as an activist but as a champion fighting for hope and restorative justice for those facing the death penalty.