From cats, spats and catacombs to the Wall Street shuffle, this book looks at how historical events didn't always unfold as we think they did. It takes the readers on a journey, century-by-century, showing how the truth we take for granted is a far cry from the facts. It is suitable for those who want to see the past as it was.

The seventh book in the bestselling Chronicles of St Mary's series which follows a group of tea-soaked disaster magnets as they hurtle their way around History. If you love Jasper Fforde or Ben Aaronovitch, you won't be able to resist Jodi Taylor. Rules are meant to be broken, aren't they? 'I've done some stupid things in my time. I've been reckless. I've broken a few rules. But never before have I ruined so many lives or left such a trail of destruction behind me.' Max has never been one for rules. They tend to happen to other people. But this time she's gone too far. And everyone at St Mary's is paying the price. With the History Department disintegrating around her and grounded until the end of time, how can she ever put things right? Readers love Jodi Taylor: 'Once in a while, I discover an author who changes everything... Jodi Taylor and her protagonista Madeleine "Max" Maxwell have seduced me' 'A great mix of British proper-ness and humour with a large dollop of historical fun' 'Addictive. I wish St Mary's was real and I was a part of it' 'Jodi Taylor has an imagination that gets me completely hooked' 'A tour de force'

No Marketing Blurb

A deeply personal exploration of Australia's colonisation past, present and future by one of Australia's finest contemporary authors

The war in Iraq may be remembered as the point at which the propaganda model perfected in the twentieth century stopped working: the world is too complex, information is too plentiful, and-as events in Iraq reveal- propaganda makes bad policy. The Best War Ever is about a war that was devised in fantasy and lost in delusion. It highlights the futility of lying to oneself and others in matters of life and death. And it offers lessons to the current generation so that, at least in our time, this never happens again. As the team of Rampton and Stauber show in their first new book since President Bush's reelection, the White House seems to have fooled no one as much as itself in the march toward a needless (from a security perspective) war in Iraq. As the authors argue, one of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on propaganda is its disdain for realistic planning in matters of war. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, U.S. policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate its version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. The result has been too few troops on the ground to maintain security; failure to anticipate the insurgency; and oblivious disregard, even contempt, for critics in either party who attempted to assess the human and economic costs of the war. Even now that withdrawal seems imminent, however, the administration and its allies continue their cover-ups: downplaying civilian deaths and military injuries; employing marketing buzzwords like "victory" repeatedly to shore up public opinion; and botched attempts, through third-party PR firms, at creating phony news. The Bush administration entered Iraq believing that its moral, technological, and military superiority would ensure victory abroad, and that its mastery of the politics would win support at home. Instead, it found a morass of problems that do not lend themselves to moralistic, technological, or propaganda-based solutions.

The Hatfield McCoy Feud was not just a conflict between two mountain families. It was, perhaps even more significantly, a series of overlapping, interlayered conflicts. While feud lore and much of what has passed for feud history focuses on the conflicts between the family of Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy, few writers have properly positioned these events as part of a broader struggle between and among all of the local residents, whether they realized it or not, and more powerful economic and political actors who attempted, quite successfully, to amplify and manipulate local conflicts as a means of advancing their own interests. These outside interests, which reached all the way to the door of the governor of Kentucky, had two distinct advantages over the local people. They had control of the press and control of the law. The feud as we know it grew from a complex interaction of various speakers, journalists, lawyers and lawmen, witnesses in court cases, each validating one another's version of events. This book is a great collection of writing about the Hatfield McCoy Feud by my friend Thomas Dotson. I added intros to all of the pieces to provide crucial context for readers who may not be as familiar with the history of the place, its people, and the social, economic, and political forces that drove these events. Everyone knows something about the Hatfield McCoy Feud, but almost everything that people think they know is wrong! Not just a little wrong, either. The feud as it is currently understood was, we argue, a fiction created by powerful men whose aim was to control hundreds of thousands of valuable acres of Pike and Mingo County real estate. This book is important, in my opinion, not just because it rewrites much of what has previously passed for history when it come to the Hatfield McCoy Feud, but also because it begins to chip away at what has passed for the history of the Appalachian people. The land grab that began as early as 1875 with the Bruen Lands Wars in West Virginia resulted in forced transfer of millions of acres of prime land and minerals from local farmers to outside industrialists, and the transformation of a thousands of independent subsistence farming families into a new landless class of impoverished mountaineers. The events of the Hatfield McCoy Feud lie at ground zero of that theft of wealth, and we are still experiencing the repercussions of that theft. If you want to understand how the people of Central Appalachia became poor, this book is an excellent place to start.

Revised and updated edition that analyses how the Office of National Drug Control Policy employs statistics to misleadingly claim the War on Drugs is a success. First published in 2007, Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics critically analyzed claims made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the White House agency of accountability in the nation’s drug war since 1989, as found in the six editions of the annual National Drug Control Strategy between 2000 and 2005. In this revised and updated second edition of their critically acclaimed work, Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen examine seven more recent editions (2006–2012) to once again determine if ONDCP accurately and honestly presents information or intentionally distorts evidence to justify continuing the drug war. They uncover the many ways in which ONDCP manipulates statistics and visually presents that information to the public. Their analysis demonstrates a drug war that consistently fails to reduce drug use, drug fatalities, or illnesses associated with drug use; fails to provide treatment for drug-dependent users; and drives up the prices of drugs. They conclude with policy recommendations for reforming ONDCP’s use of statistics, as well as how the nation fights the war on drugs. Praise for the First Edition “Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics is surprisingly easy to read, and Robinson and Scherlen have done a huge favor not only to critics of current drug policy by compiling this damning critique of ONDCP claims, but also to anyone interested in how data is compiled, presented, and misused by bureaucrats attempting to guard their domains. It should be required reading for members of Congress.” — Drug War Chronicle Book Review “The authors have performed a valuable service to our democracy with their meticulous analysis of the White House ONDCP public statements and reports. They have pulled the sheet off what appears to be an official policy of deception using clever and sometimes clumsy attempts at statistical manipulation. This document, at last, gives us a map of the truth.” — Mike Gray, author of Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out “Robinson and Scherlen make a valuable contribution to documenting how ONDCP fails to live up to basic standards of accountability and consistency.” — Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance

Here, by popular demand, is the updated edition to Joel Best's classic guide to understanding how numbers can confuse us. In his new afterword, Best uses examples from recent policy debates to reflect on the challenges to improving statistical literacy. Since its publication ten years ago, Damned Lies and Statistics has emerged as the go-to handbook for spotting bad statistics and learning to think critically about these influential numbers.

A comprehensive retrospective bibliography on the Australian film industry.

How does scientific knowledge circulate? Does scientific communication shape the making of science? Is the making of science a national endeavour or does it have an international or transnational dimension? Are teaching and research equally relevant in this endeavour? How can history of science react to the challenges posed by the changing practices of science in historical context? Beyond Borders is a book generated at the heart of these fundamental questions. In the last decades, the history of science has attained a high degree of disciplinary maturity and sophistication. However, perception of disciplinary crisis is apparent behind calls for the search of new big pictures and their implementation in teaching and communicating the history of science to wider audiences. Temporal and narrative fragmentation are seen as major drawbacks hindering the development of the discipline. In addition, national, linguistic and methodological division is increasingly afflicting its practice. Like other areas in the humanities, and in contrast to the sciences, the history of science has nowadays a pronounced local character which clearly constrains its intellectual output. Challenging this state of affairs is a major aim of this book, which argues for a resolute call for intellectual and methodological pluralism and internationalism. Through a broad diversity of subjects, periods, and geographies, covering from studies of sixteenth-century astrological texts to contextual analysis of twentieth-century X-ray spectroscopy, this collection of papers and historiographical essays offers a fresh overview of the field and its major questions. Beyond Borders revisits five major topics in history of science, namely the early modern map of knowledge, pedagogy and science, science popularization, science and the nation and the geography of scientific centres and peripheries. Engaging with a broad diversity of historiographical and methodological approaches in an international perspective, Beyond Borders is a rich and plural manifesto contributing to the reflective appraisal of history of science as a discipline.