An intimate and hilarious look inside the spin room of the modern politician: a place where ideals are crushed, English is mangled, people are humiliated, and the opportunity for humor is everywhere.
Everyone knows this kind of politician: a charismatic maverick who goes up against the system and its ways, but thinks he doesn’t have to live by the rules. Through his own experience as the speechwriter for a controversial governor, Barton Swaim tells the story of a band of believers who attach themselves to this sort of ambitious narcissist—and what happens when it all comes crashing down.

In the United States, political argumentation occurs in institutionalized settings and the broader public forum, in efforts to resolve conflict and efforts to foster it, in settings with time limits and controversies that extend over centuries. From the ratification of the U.S. Constitution to the presidency of Barack Obama, this book contains twenty studies of U.S. political argumentation, grouped under four themes: early American political discourse, Abraham Lincoln’s political argumentation, argumentation about foreign policy, and public policy argumentation since the 1960s.

This volume delivers a cutting–edge analysis on vernacular globalization, or how local forces mediate global trends. It delves into the vital facets of the quest for global competitiveness, including: Global university rankings, World–class universities, University mergers, Quality assurance, Cross–border higher education, International education hubs.

Who are the real citizens of America? Which people truly qualify for equality under the law? Two hundred years ago, an honest answer to these questions would have excluded not only women, slaves, and Indians, but also Germans, Scotch-Irish, Catholics, and Jews. Yet the Declaration of Independence expresses a profound commitment to the ideal of equal citizenship.

There are few people in the Western world who know nothing of the Great Pyramids of Giza & the treasures of Tutankhamon's tomb, but, for most, that is the full scope of their knowledge of Egyptian art. It is extraordinary how little general awareness there is of the fantastic wealth of this best-preserved art of all the ancient civilizations, so overshadowed has it been by the later and--for the West--more influential achievements of Greece and Rome.