This is the first comprehensive history of America's involvement in the Middle East from George Washington to George W. Bush. Drawing on thousands of government documents and personal letters, this book reconstructs the diverse and remarkable ways in which Americans have interacted with this alluring yet often hostile land. Covering over 230 years of history, "Power, Faith, and Fantasy" is an indispensable work for anyone interested in understanding the roots of America's Middle East involvement today.
As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began.1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents' faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal. It set Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.
St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) was the first great systematic Christian philosopher. He attempted to combine the philosophical insights of Plato with the faith explicated in the Bible. Augustine thought of Plato's eternal forms as ideas in the mind of God; he believed that the Eternal Christ provides the light of knowledge to the human mind. For Augustine, every time we make a judgment of relative value, we implicitly acknowledge an absolute standard of value, which is God. His Confessions constitutes one of the timeless statements of faith and self-surrender.
Volume IV, The Age of Faith (1950), was another Leviathan, running to 1,196 pages, but it covered three civilizations -- Christian, Moslem and Judaic -- through a thousand years, from Constantine to Dante, A. D. 325 to 1321. It included some 200 pages on Mohammedan culture in its great days at Baghdad, Cairo and Cordova. Never before has a Christian scholar, in one volume on the Middle Ages, given such ample recognition to the achievements of Islam in government, literature, medicine, science and philosophy. And the three chapters on medieval Jewish life show a surprisingly sympathetic understanding of what might have seemed an alien culture.
Henry Warren was already a wealthy man and money was his sole interest. Then he found a woman with faith in the future and a town that needed to win back its self-respect.
