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History is always full of surprises as it unfolds before us. The Soviet Union, for decades a seemingly frozen monolith of totalitarian rigidity and paranoid bellicosity, suddenly finds itself under a leader in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev who calls for'radical restructuring,'openness,'and even a'revolution.'Outsiders justly wonder if this m

In 1850, America hovered on the brink of disunion. Tensions between slave-holders and abolitionists mounted, as the debate over slavery grew rancorous. An influx of new territory prompted Northern politicians to demand that new states remain free; in response, Southerners baldly threatened to secede from the Union. Only Henry Clay could keep the nation together.At the Edge of the Precipice is historian Robert V. Remini's fascinating recounting of the Compromise of 1850, a titanic act of political will that only a skillful statesman like Clay could broker. Although the Compromise would collapse ten years later, plunging the nation into civil war, Clay's victory in 1850 ultimately saved the Union by giving the North an extra decade to industrialize and prepare. A masterful narrative by an eminent historian, At the Edge of the Precipice also offers a timely reminder of the importance of bipartisanship in a bellicose age.

Distinguished historian of the Soviet period Robert V. Daniels offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. In a tightly woven series of analyses written during his career-long inquiry into the Soviet Union, Daniels explores the Soviet experience from Karl Marx to Boris Yeltsin and shows how key ideological notions were altered as Soviet history unfolded.The book exposes a long history of American misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, leading up to the'grand surprise'of its collapse in 1991. Daniels's perspective is always original, and his assessments, some worked out years ago, are strikingly prescient in the light of post-1991 archival revelations. Soviet Communism evolved and decayed over the decades, Daniels argues, through a prolonged revolutionary process, combined with the challenges of modernization and the personal struggles between ideologues and power-grabbers.

The USA has been going through a new kind of revolution, which though it did not literally overthrow the government, transformed racial, gender, and other social relationships, and bequeathed the deep divisions now felt in the nation's politics and culture.

Daniels strives to put perestroika in its long-term historical perspective by placing it in a broad theory of revolutionary process, within the context of Leninism, Stalinism and Brezshnevism.