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This book focuses on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment - its meaning, legislative history, and applications. The Amendment has been criticized as vague and undemocratic. It has been praised for making possible swift and orderly successions to the presidency and vice presidency upon the occurrence of some of the most extraordinary events in American history. The Amendment has been invoked six times since its ratification. In 1973 and 1974, the resignations of the elected President and Vice President challenged the continuity of democratic government of this country. For the first time the succession mechanisms of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment were employed to select two Vice Presidents, one of whom succeeded to the presidency. In 1985, 2002, and 2007, a President underwent surgery and invoked the Amendment to temporarily transfer power to the Vice President. The Amendment has played a decisive role in assuring continuity of government and restoring the public’s confidence in its political system. Its vice presidential selection feature has been recommended as the best method for selecting Vice Presidents. Based on the attention the Amendment has received and the number of presidential and vice presidential vacancies and inabilities throughout history, one can expect that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment will receive frequent application in the future.

Angelo Tasca, a pivotal figure in the political history of twentieth-century Italy, and indeed the history of Europe, is frequently overshadowed by his Fascist opponent Benito Mussolini or his Socialist and Communist colleagues (Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti). Yet, as this biography reveals, Tasca—also known as Serra, A. Rossi, André Leroux, and XX—was in fact a key political player in the first half of the twentieth century and an ill-fated representative of the age of political extremes he helped to create. In this book, readers meet the Italian intellect and politician with fresh eyes as the text demystifies Tasca’s seemingly bizarre trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime. The book demonstrates how Tasca, an indefatigable cultural operator and Socialist militant, tried all his life to maintain his commitment to scientific analysis in the face of the rise of fascism and Stalinism, but his struggle ended in a personal and political defeat that seemed to contradict all his life when he lent his support to the Vichy government. After his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party as a result of his refusal to conform to Stalinism, Tasca reinvented his life in Paris, where he participated in the intense political debates of the 1930s. His political choices were motivated by the desperate attempt to find an alternative between Nazism and Stalinism.

In the Election of 1872 the conflict between President U. S. Grant and Horace Greeley has been typically understood as a battle for the soul of the ruling Republican Party. This book argues forcefully that the campaign was more than a narrow struggle between Party elites and a class-based radical reform movement. The election, it demonstrates, had broad consequences: in their opposition to widespread Federal corruption, Greeley Republicans unintentionally doomed Reconstruction of any kind, even as they lost the election. Based on close readings of newspapers, party documents, and other primary sources, the book confronts one of the major questions in American political history: How, and why, did Reconstruction come to an end? Its focus on the unintended consequences of liberal republican politics is a provocative contribution to this important debate.