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My Declaration Of Independence
by James M. JeffordsSenator James Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party on May 24, 2001, when he could no longer reconcile his beliefs with the policies of the party he had supported his whole Ault life."Looking ahead," Jeffords said, "I can see more and more instances where I will disagree with the President on very fundamental issues." In My Declaration of Independence, Jeffords explains the issues that led to this dramatic break. Foremost among them was the Bush administration's and the Republican leadership's failure to recognize the need to invest in education, now and in the future. Tracing the genesis of his decision, Jeffords describes his attempts to effect change within its party, and the pain of hurting Republican colleagues and friends. His decision came just at he moment when his defection would deprive them of the Washington trifects they had recently achieved-Republican control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of representatives. It was also going to cost many of his friends committee chairmanships they had acquired only a few months before. "But in he end," he writes, "I had to be true to what I hought was right, and leave the consequences to sort themselves out in the days ahead." In a contemporary Profiles in Courage, Senator Jeffords provides a moving, witty, and instructive example of what can happen in public life. Whether you agree with his views or not, his account of his tough decisions, and of his anguish at rejecting the last-minute appeals of the leadership of his party, the President, and his wife, is a riveting story that has wide implications for the whole country.
Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801
by Emma DonoghueA groundbreaking work of lesbian scholarship, Passions Between Women discovers and brings together for the first time stories of lesbian desires, acts, and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Where previous historians have concluded that a combination of censorship and ignorance excluded lesbian experience from written history before our era, Emma Donoghue has decisively proved otherwise. She dispels the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture was rarely registered in language and that lesbians of this period had no words with which to describe themselves. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a "hermaphrodite," revered as a "romantic friend," or jailed as a "female husband." By examining a wealth of new medical, legal, and erotic source material, and rereading the classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue has uncovered narratives of an astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities in Britain between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in her intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and revisionist and frankly sexual in its outlook, Passions Between Women boldly asserts that relationships between women were, more passionate than the "romantic friendships" oked by other scholarly works.