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Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology version 1.2
by John GallaugherInformation Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology V1.2 is intended for use in undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Management Information Systems and Information Technology. Version 1.2 of John's book retains the same structure and theory of version 1.1, but refreshes key statistics, examples, and brings case material up to date (vital when covering firms that move as fast as Facebook, Google, and Netflix). Adopting version 1.2 guarantees your students will have the most current text on the market, drawing real and applicable lessons from material that will keep your class offerings current and accessible.
Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology version 1.3
by John GallaugherInformation Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology V 1.3 is intended for use in undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Management Information Systems and Information Technology. Version 1.3 of John's book retains the same structure and theory of version 1.1 and V 1.2, but refreshes key statistics, examples, and brings case material up to date (vital when covering firms that move as fast as Facebook, Google, and Netflix). For example; the Netflix chapter - Updates address the major changes impacting Netflix in 2011, including the response to the firm's pricing changes, the failed Qwikster service split, recent developments impacting the streaming and DVD-by-mail businesses, a comparison table detailing the stark differences between the firm's two offerings (DVD & streaming), updated statistics, learning objectives, and additional exercises and updates to the Google chapter - Updated text/images for currency, additional sub-sections on the firm's Google+ launch and the acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Adopting version 1.3 guarantees your students will have the most current text on the market, drawing real and applicable lessons from material that will keep your class offerings current and accessible.
Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology version 1.4
by John GallaugherInformation Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology V 1.4 is intended for use in undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Management Information Systems and Information Technology. Version 1.4 of John's book retains the same structure and theory of the earlier versions, but Version 1.4 updates key statistics and examples, and includes up-to-date case material, such as Pinterest and Facebook’s Instagram acquisition. Adopting version 1.4 guarantees your students will have the most current text on the market, drawing real and applicable lessons from material that will keep your class offerings current and accessible.
Intermediate Algebra
by John ReddenIt is essential to lay a solid foundation in mathematics if a student is to be competitive in today's global market. The importance of algebra, in particular, cannot be overstated, as it is the basis of all mathematical modeling used in applications found in all disciplines. Traditionally, the study of algebra is separated into a two parts, Elementary and Intermediate Algebra. This textbook by John Redden, Intermediate Algebra, is the second part. Written in a clear and concise manner, it carefully builds on the basics learned in Elementary Algebra and introduces the more advanced topics required for further study in applications found in most disciplines. Used as a standalone textbook, Intermediate Algebra offers plenty of review as well as something new to engage the student in each chapter. Written as a blend of the traditional and graphical approaches to the subject, this textbook introduces functions early and stresses the geometry behind the algebra. While CAS independent, a standard scientific calculator will be required and further research using technology is encouraged.
Introduction to Economic Analysis
by R. Preston Mcafee Tracy R. LewisThis book presents standard intermediate microeconomics material and some material that, in the authors' view, ought to be standard but is not. Introductory economics material is integrated. Standard mathematical tools, including calculus, are used throughout. The book easily serves as an intermediate microeconomics text, and can be used for a relatively sophisticated undergraduate who has not taken a basic university course in economics. The focus of this book is on the conceptual tools and not on fluff. As such, it reflects the approach actually adopted by the majority of economists for understanding economic activity. There are lots of models and equations, and no pictures of economists ;-) Economic analysis is used in many situations. When British Petroleum sets the price for Alaskan crude oil, it uses an estimated demand model, both for gasoline consumers and also for the refineries to which BP sells. Economic analysis was used by experts in the antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice both to understand Microsoft s incentive to foreclose (eliminate from the market) rival Netscape and consumer behavior in the face of alleged foreclosure. Stock market analysts use economic models to forecast the profits of companies to predict the price of their stocks. When the government forecasts the budget deficit or considers a change in environmental regulations, it uses economic models. This book presents the building blocks of the models in common use by an army of economists thousands of times per day. This book, plus econometrics, provides most of the economic analysis tools to take upper division economics courses of any type.
Introduction to Economic Analysis
by R. Preston Mcafee Tracy R. LewisThis book presents standard intermediate microeconomics material and some material that, in the authors' view, ought to be standard but is not. Introductory economics material is integrated. Standard mathematical tools, including calculus, are used throughout. The book easily serves as an intermediate microeconomics text, and can be used for a relatively sophisticated undergraduate who has not taken a basic university course in economics. The focus of this book is on the conceptual tools and not on fluff. As such, it reflects the approach actually adopted by the majority of economists for understanding economic activity. There are lots of models and equations, and no pictures of economists ;-) Economic analysis is used in many situations. When British Petroleum sets the price for Alaskan crude oil, it uses an estimated demand model, both for gasoline consumers and also for the refineries to which BP sells. Economic analysis was used by experts in the antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice both to understand Microsoft s incentive to foreclose (eliminate from the market) rival Netscape and consumer behavior in the face of alleged foreclosure. Stock market analysts use economic models to forecast the profits of companies to predict the price of their stocks. When the government forecasts the budget deficit or considers a change in environmental regulations, it uses economic models. This book presents the building blocks of the models in common use by an army of economists thousands of times per day. This book, plus econometrics, provides most of the economic analysis tools to take upper division economics courses of any type.
Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning, and Insurance
by Don Mayer Daniel M. Warner George J. Siedel Jethro K. LiebermanMayer, Warner, Siedel and Lieberman's Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance is an up-to-date textbook that covers legal issues that students must understand relating to real estate (an especially important business asset), as well as estate planning and insurance. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to property rights and duties, estate planning, insurance, secured transactions, mortgages, and related topics. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy they will need when working with these concepts, which are critical to business planning and success. With Introduction to the Law of Property, Estate Planning and Insurance, the authors have created a text that not only has both case summaries and excerpted cases, but one that you can easily customize by deleting chapters, reordering the content, adding your own material, and even editing at the line level with Flat World's easy-to-use MIYO (Make It Your Own) Platform. The free online version of the text includes embedded links to law-related videos at YouTube and other online sites for easy access by students and instructors.
Law for Entrepreneurs
by Don Mayer Daniel M. Warner George J. Siedel Jethro K. LiebermanMayer, Warner, Siedel and Lieberman's Law for Entrepreneurs is an up-to-date textbook that covers the broad spectrum of legal issues that entrepreneurs must understand when starting and running a business. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style. After introductory chapters covering the legal environment of business, Law for Entrepreneurs provides students with context and essential legal concepts relating to contracts, product liability, intellectual property, insurance, agency law, partnerships, corporations, and employment law. The text provides the vocabulary and legal savvy that entrepreneurs need to talk in an educated way to customers, suppliers, employees, creditors, shareholders, government regulators and other stakeholders — and to their own lawyers. With Law for Entrepreneurs, the authors have created a text that not only has both case summaries and excerpted cases, but one that you can easily customize by deleting chapters, reordering the content, adding your own material, and even editing at the line level with Flat World's easy-to-use MIYO (Make It Your Own) Platform. The free online version of the text includes embedded links to law-related videos at YouTube and other online sites for easy access by students and instructors.
The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business
by Terence Lau Lisa JohnsonTerence Lau & Lisa Johnson's The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business is a book for today's student, who expects learning to be comprised not only of substance, but also of interactive exercises and multimedia. This book streamlines the presentation of material to ensure that every page is relevant, engaging, and interesting to undergraduate business students, without losing the depth of coverage that they need to be successful in their academic journeys and in their professional careers. This is not Legal Environment of Business (LEB) "light." Rather, this is LEB without risk of students' eyes glazing over in boredom or from lack of comprehension. This is LEB presented in an exciting way, where every page is interesting to students and relevant to real life.
The Legal Environment of Business
by Don Mayer Daniel M. Warner George J. Siedel Jethro K. LiebermanMayer, Warner, Siedel and Lieberman's The Legal Environment of Business is an up-to-date textbook with comprehensive coverage of legal and regulatory issues for your introductory Legal Environment of Business course. The text is organized to permit instructors to tailor the materials to their particular approach. The authors take special care to engage students by relating law to everyday events with their clear, concise and readable style.
Macroeconomics: Theory Through Applications
by Russell Cooper A. Andrew JohnThis textbook, Macroeconomics: Theory Through Applications, centers around student needs and expectations through two premises: ... Students are motivated to study economics if they see that it relates to their own lives. ... Students learn best from an inductive approach, in which they are first confronted with a problem, and then led through the process of solving that problem. Many books claim to present economics in a way that is digestible for students; Russell and Andrew have truly created one from scratch. This textbook will assist you in increasing students' economic literacy both by developing their aptitude for economic thinking and by presenting key insights about economics that every educated individual should know.
Macroeconomics
by Russell Cooper A. Andrew JohnThis book studies the implications of macroeconomic complementarities for aggregate behavior. The presentation is intended to introduce Ph. D. students into this sub-field of macroeconomics and to serve as a reference for more advanced scholars. The initial sections of the book cover the basic framework of complementarities and provide a discussion of the experimental evidence on the outcome of coordination games. The subsequent sections of the book investigate applications of these ideas for macroeconomics. The topics Professor Cooper explores include: economies with production complementarities, search models, imperfectly competitive product markets, models of timing and delay and the role of government in resolving and creating coordination problems.
Organizational Behavior, V 2.0
by Talya Bauer Berrin ErdoganIn writing Organizational Behavior, v.2.0, Talya Bauer and Berrin Erdogan, two leading researchers in management, had one simple aim: To bridge the gap between theory and practice of management with a distinct “experiential” approach.<P><P> WHAT’S NEW IN 2.0<P> UPDATED SECTIONS:<P> Updated to include many new case studies, statistics, data, figures, and graphics. Notably added are sections or new information on stress, communication and women in leadership. Toolboxes and related key terms are also updated in this new version.
The Power of Selling
by Kim RichmondThe Power of Selling is the perfect textbook to teach students about the proven process of selling. More important, it teaches students how to apply the tenets of selling to how to sell themselves and get the job they want, with the same process professional sales people learn (or brush up) on their own selling skills. What makes someone successful in sales? Are great sales people born or made? Is there one magic selling process, or does the process change based on the business...or the customer? How can the selling process really come alive for students in the classroom? How do students learn how to sell for life, not just for a course? The Power of Selling by Kim Richmond answers these questions and makes the principles of selling come alive. Kim looks at the topic of selling through a different lens, and provides inspiration and ideas. The Power of Selling provides an exciting and interactive experience for both professors and students through the use of 4 unique elements: 1. Content The content is based on the core selling tenets so instructors will find the familiar principles of selling. In addition, the impact of Sales 2.0 is addressed at every stage including how to use interactive tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and wikis effectively. 2. Selling U The last section of each chapter is called Selling U. It applies the concepts covered in the chapter to a student's job search. Selling U topics include how to think about yourself as a brand, how to create a powerful cover letter and resume, how to create your personal elevator pitch, how to use networking and informational interviews to get the word out about your brand, how to prepare and dress for an interview, and how to negotiate and accept the right job offer. What makes The Power of Selling different is that Selling U is integrated into every chapter, which makes this text the ultimate guide to selling yourself. 3. Video Resources Videos are used throughout the book. Additional videos that are not included in the text are available for instructor use. Here are videos that are available: * Video Ride-alongs - One of the best ways to learn about sales is by going on ride-alongs. So every chapter starts with an exclusive feature called a Video Ride-along. These short videos feature seven different sales professionals - one that starts each chapter. Each one talks about how he or she applies one of the key concepts covered in the chapter in their job. These videos are designed to be "virtual ride-alongs" so the students can actually feel as though they are getting insights first hand from selling professionals. * The Power of Selling YouTube Channel here (youtube.com/thepowerofselling) - Over 50 videos are included featuring the sales professionals who are highlighted in the Video Ride-alongs. About half of the videos are used in the textbook. The balance are available for instructor use. Several are included in Video Learning Segments (see below). These videos are excellent resources for use in the classroom, exercises, and assignments. * Video Learning Segments In addition to the traditional supplements of Instructor Manual, PowerPoints, and Test Bank, there are also Video Learning Segments. These are PowerPoint slides embedded with videos designed to supplement the course PowerPoints and focus on one concept, like an ethical dilemma, pre-call preparation, or effective presentations, how to use email effectively. Each segment includes slides, videos, discussion questions, or exercises. 4. The Power of Selling LinkedIn Group. here This group was created on LinkedIn.com expressly as a resource for the faculty and students who use this textbook. The group includes sales professionals from across the country and from different industries. This is a great tool for faculty and students alike to network, participate in discussions, ask questions, and connect with "real world" selling professionals.
A Primer on Corporate Governance
by Cornelis A. de KluyverThis book is a primer on corporate governance--the system that defines the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants in the corporation, such as the board, managers, shareholders, and other stakeholders, and spells out the rules and procedures for making decisions on corporate affairs. Corporate governance also deals with how a company's objectives are set and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance. The importance of this subject can hardly be overstated. As recent corporate scandals have shown and the current financial crisis reminds us, the efficacy of corporate decision making and our regulatory systems directly affect our well-being. Sound corporate governance not only pays by producing value for all stakeholders of the firm but also, even more importantly, it is the right thing to do--for investors, other stakeholders, and society at large. In other words, sound corporate governance is also a moral imperative. This book is designed to help you become a more effective participant in the corporate governance system--as an executive dealing with a board, as a director, or as a representative of a company's other numerous stakeholders. The book contains two major parts, an epilogue, and appendices. The first part looks at corporate governance from a macro perspective. It describes the U.S. corporate governance system and its principal actors and briefly surveys the history of U.S. corporate governance, including the wave of governance scandals that occurred around the turn of the century. The second part focuses on the board itself and its principal challenges: CEO selection and succession planning, the board's responsibilities in the areas of oversight, compliance and risk management, the board's role in strategy development, the issue of CEO performance appraisal and executive compensation, a board's challenges in dealing with unexpected events and crises, and finally, a board's most difficult challenge--managing itself. The epilogue briefly looks into the future and deals with subjects that are just beginning to appear on boardroom agendas. It assesses the emerging global convergence of governance systems, requirements, and practices; it looks at the prospects of further U.S. governance reform; and it discusses the changing relationship between business and society and its likely impact in the boardroom.
Principles of Economics v 1.1
by Libby Rittenberg Timothy TregarthenVersion 1.1 boasts improved coverage throughout the text including significant updates to: Chapters 20 (GDP, Price Level Changes, Business Cycles, and Unemployment) Chapter 21 (Measuring Total Output and Income) Chapter 27 (Government and Fiscal Policy) Chapter 32 (Macroeconomics for the 21st Century).
Principles of Macroeconomics v 1.1
by Libby Rittenberg Timothy TregarthenVersion 1.1 boasts improved coverage throughout the text including significant updates to: Chapters 5 (GDP, Price Level Changes, Business Cycles, and Unemployment) Chapter 6 (Measuring Total Output and Income) Chapter 12 (Government and Fiscal Policy) Chapter 17 (Macroeconomics for the 21st Century)
Sociology
by Steven E. BarkanThis best selling software-based workbook lets students explore dozens of sociological topics and issues, using data from the United States and around the world. With the workbook and accompanying ExplorIt software and data sets, students won't just read about what other sociologists have done, they will discover sociology for themselves. DISCOVERING SOCIOLOGY will add an exciting dimension to the introductory sociology course.
Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World
by Steven E. BarkanThe founders of sociology in the United States wanted to make a difference. A central aim of the sociologists of the Chicago school was to use sociological knowledge to achieve social reform. A related aim of sociologists like Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett and others since was to use sociological knowledge to understand and alleviate gender, racial, and class inequality. It is no accident that many sociology instructors and students are first drawn to sociology because they want to learn a body of knowledge that could help them make a difference in the world at large. Steve Barkan's Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World is designed for this audience. It presents a sociological understanding of society but also a sociological perspective on how to change society, while maintaining the structure and contents of the best mainstream texts.
Sociology, Brief Edition, Version 1.2: Understanding and Changing the Social World
by Steven E. BarkanSteve Barkan presents a sociological understanding of society but also a sociological perspective on how to change society, while maintaining the structure and contents of the best mainstream texts. Version 1.2 of his “Brief Version” includes the most recent data on crime and victimization, income and poverty, life expectancy and aging, employment, marriage and divorce, education
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume I, 1809–1836
by William Cullen BryantThis is the only collection ever made of Bryant's letters, two-thirds of which have never before been printed. Their publication was foreseen by the late Allan Nevin as "one of the most important and stimulating enterprises contributory to the enrichment of the nation's cultural and political life that is now within range of individual and group effort.William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was America's earliest national poet. His immediate followers—Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman—unquestionably began their distinguished careers in imitation of his verses. But Bryant was even more influential in his long career as a political journalist, and in his encouragement of American art, from his lectures at the National Academy of Design in 1828 to his evocation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Between the appearance of his first major poem, "Thanatopsis," in 1817, and his death sixty-one years later at the age of eight-three, Bryant knew and corresponded with an extraordinary number of eminent men and women. More than 2,100 of his know letters have already been recovered for the present edition.When William Cullen Bryant signed the first of 314 letters in the present volume, in 1809, he was a frail and shy farm boy of fourteen who had nonetheless already won some fame as the satirist of Thomas Jefferson. When he wrote the last, in 1836, he had become the chief poet of his country, the editor of its principal liberal newspaper, and the friend and collaborator of its leading artists and writers. His collected poems, previously published at New York, Boston, and London, were going into their third edition. His incisive editorials in the New York Evening Post were affecting the decisions of Andrew Jackson's administration. His poetic themes were beginning to find expression in the landscape paintings of Robert Weir, Asher Durand, and Thomas Cole.The early letters gathered here in chronological order give a unique picture of Cullen Bryant's youth and young manhood: his discipline in the classics preparatory to an all-too-brief college tenure; his legal study and subsequent law practice; the experiments with romantic versification which culminated in his poetic masterpieces, and those with the opposite sex which led to his courtship and marriage; his eager interest in the politics of the Madison and Monroe Presidencies, and his subsequent activities as a local politician and polemicist in western Massachusetts; his apprenticeship as magazine editor and literary critic in New York City, from which his later eminence as journalist was the natural evolution; the lectures on poetry and mythology which foreshadowed a long career as occasional orator; the collaboration in writing The Talisman, The American Landscape, and Tales of Glauber-Spa, and in forming the National Academy of Design, and the Sketch Club, which brought him intimacy with writers, artists, and publishers; his first trip to the Aemrican West, and his first long visit to Europe, during which he began the practice of writing letters to his newspaper which, throughout nearly half a century, proved him a perceptive interpreter of the distant scene to his contemporaries.Here, in essence, is the first volume of the autobiography of one whom Abraham Lincoln remarked after his first visit to New York City in 1860, "It was worth the journey to the East merely to see such a man." And John Bigelow, who of Bryant's many eulogists knew him best, said in 1878 of his longtime friend and business partner, "There was no eminent American upon whom the judgment of his countrymen would be more immediate and unanimous. The broad simple outline of his character and career had become universally familiar, like a mountain or a sea."
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume II, 1836–1849
by William Cullen BryantThe second volume of William Cullen Bryant's letters opens in 1836 as he has just returned to New York from an extended visit to Europe to resume charge of the New York Evening Post, brought near to failure during his absence by his partner William Leggett's mismanagement. At the period's close, Bryant has found in John Bigelow an able editorial associate and astute partner, with whose help he has brought the paper close to its greatest financial prosperity and to national political and cultural influence.Bryant's letters lf the years between show the versatility of his concern with the crucial political, social, artistic, and literary movements of his time, and the varied friendships he enjoyed despite his preoccupation with a controversial daily paper, and with the sustenance of a poetic reputation yet unequaled among Americans. As president of the New York Homeopathic Society, in letters and editorials urging widespread public parks, and in his presidency of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, he gave attention to public health, recreation, and order. He urged the rights of labor, foreign and religious minorities, and free African Americans; his most powerful political effort of the period was in opposition to the spread of slavery through the conquest of Mexico. An early commitment to free trade in material goods was maintained in letters and editorials, and to that in ideas by his presidency of the American Copyright Club and his support of the efforts of Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau to secure from the United States Congress and international copyright agreement.Bryant's first visit to Great Britain came at the height of his poetic and journalistic fame in 1845, bringing him into cordial intimacy with members of Parliament, scientists, journalists, artists, and writers. In detailed letters to his wife, published here for the first time, he describes the pleasures he took in breakfasting with the literary patron Samuel Rogers and the American minister Edward Everett, boating on the Thames with artists and with diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, spending an evening in the home of Leigh Hunt, and calling on the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount as well as in the distinctions paid him at a rally of the Anti-Corn-Law League in Covent Garden Theatre, and at the annual meeting in Cambridge of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.Equally fresh are most of the letters to prominent Americans, many of them his close friends, such as the two Danas, Bancroft, Cole, Cooper, Dewey, Dix, Downing, Durand, Forrest, Greenough, Irving, Longfellow, Simms, Tilden, Van Buren, and Weir. His letters to the Evening Post recounting his observations and experiences during travels abroad and in the South, West, and Northeast of the United States, which were copied widely in other newspapers and praised highly by many of their subscribers, are here made available to the present-day reader.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume III, 1849–1857
by William Cullen BryantDuring the years covered in this volume, Bryant traveled more often and widely than at any comparable period during his life. The visits to Great Britain and Europe, a tour of the Near East and the Holy Land, and excursions in Cuba, Spain, and North Africa, as well as two trips to Illinois, he described in frequent letters to the Evening Post. Reprinted widely, and later published in two volumes, these met much critical acclaim, one notice praising the "quiet charm of these letters, written mostly from out-of-the-way places, giving charming pictures of nature and people, with the most delicate choice of words, and yet in the perfect simplicity of the true epistolary style."His absence during nearly one-fifth of this nine-year period reflected the growing prosperity of Bryant's newspaper, and his confidence in his editorial partner John Bigelow and correspondents such as William S. Thayer, as well as in the financial acumen of his business partner Isaac Henderson. These were crucial years in domestic politics, however, and Bryant's guidance of Evening Post policies was evident in editorials treating major issues such as the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the rise of the Republican Party, and the Dred Scott Decision, as well as in his correspondence with such statesmen as Salmon P. Chase, Hamilton Fish, William L. Marcy, Edwin D. Morgan, and Charles Sumner. His travel letters and journalistic writings reflected as well his acute interest in a Europe in turmoil. In France and Germany he saw the struggles between revolution and repression; in Spain he talked with journalists, parliamentary leaders, and the future president of the first Spanish republic; in New York he greeted Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi.Bryant's close association with the arts continued. He sat for portraits to a dozen painters, among them Henry P. Gray, Daniel Huntington, Asher Durand, Charles L. Elliott, and Samuel Laurence. The landscapists continued to be inspired by his poetic themes. Sculptor Horatio Greenough asked of Bryant a critical reading of his pioneering essays on functionalism. His old friend, the tragedian Edwin Forrest, sought his mediation in what would become the most sensational divorce case of the century, with Bryant and his family as witnesses. His long advocacy of a great central park in New York was consummated by the legislature. And in 1852, his eulogy on the life of James Fenimore Cooper became the first of several such orations which would establish him as the memorialist of his literary contemporaries in New York.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume IV, 1858–1864
by William Cullen BryantThe years just before and during the Civil War marked the high point of Bryant's influence on public affairs, which had grown steadily since the Evening Post had upheld the democratic Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s. A founder of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1856, Bryant was lauded in 1857 by Virginia anti-slavery leader John Curtis Underwood, who wrote to Eli Thayer, "What a glory it would be to our country if it could elect this man to the Presidency-the country not he would be honored & elevated by such an event."In 1860 Bryant helped secure the Presidential nomination for Abraham Lincoln, and was instrumental in the choice of two key members of his cabinet, Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, and Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy. During disheartening delays and defeats in the early war years, direct communications from Union field commanders empowered his editorial admonitions to such a degree that the conductor of a national magazine concluded that the Evening Post's "clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government of this war than some of its armies."Bryant's correspondence with statesmen further reflects the immediacy of his concern with military and political decisions. There are thirty-five known letters to Lincoln, and thirty-two to Chase, Welles, war secretary Stanton, and Senators Fessenden, Morgan, and Sumner.This seven-year passage in Bryant's life, beginning with his wife's critical illness at Naples in 1858, concludes with a unique testimonial for his seventieth birthday in November 1864. The country's leading artists and writers entertained him at a "Festival" in New York's Century Club, giving him a portfolio of pictures by forty-six painters as a token of the "sympathy" he had "ever manifested toward the Artists," and the "high rank" he had "ever accorded to art." Poets Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier saluted him in prose and verse. Emerson saw him as "a true painter of the face of this country"; Holmes, as the "first sweet singer in the cage of our close-woven life." To Whittier, his personal and public life sounded "his noblest strain." And in the darkest hours of the war, said Lowell, he had "remanned ourselves in his own manhood's store," had become "himself our bravest crown."
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume V, 1865–1871
by William Cullen BryantOn April 26, 1865, as Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege paused in Union Square, New York, before being taken by rail to Springfield, Illinois, William Cullen Bryant listened as his own verse elegy for the slain president was read to a great concourse of mourners by the Reverend Samuel Osgood. Only five years earlier and a few blocks downtown, at Cooper Union, Bryant had introduced the prairie candidate to his first eastern audience. There his masterful appeal to the conscience of the nation prepared the way for his election to the presidency on the verge of the Civil War. Now, Bryant stood below Henry Kirke Brown's equestrian statue of George Washington, impressing Osgood as if he were "the 19tth Century itself thinking over the nation and the age in that presence." Bryant's staunch support of the Union cause throughout the war, and of Lincoln's war efforts, no less than his known influence with the president, led several prominent public figures to urge that he write Lincoln's biography. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him, "No man combines the qualities for his biographer so completely as yourself and the finished task would be a noble crown to a noble literary life." But Bryant declined, declaring his inability to record impartially critical events in which he had taken so central a part. Furthermore, while preoccupied with the editorial direction of the New York Evening Post, he was just then repossessing and enlarging his family's homestead at Cummington, Massachusetts, where he hoped his ailing wife might, during long summers in mountain air, regain her health. But in July 1866, Frances died of recurrent rheumatic fever, and, Bryant confessed to Richard Dana, he felt as "one cast out of Paradise." After France's death Bryant traveled with his daughter Julia for nearly a year through Great Britain and the Continent, where he met British statesman and novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton and French literary critic Hyppolyte Taine, renewed his friendship with Spanish poet Carolina Coronado, Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi, and British and American artists, and visited the family of the young French journalist Georges Clemenceau, as well as the graves of earlier acquaintances Francis Lord Jeffrey and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In his spare moments Bryant sought solace by beginning the translation of Homer, and Longfellow had found relief after his wife's tragic death by rendering into English Dante's Divine Comedy. Home again in New York, Bryant bought and settled in a house at 24 West 16th Street which would be his city home for the rest of his life. Here he completed major publications, including the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and an exhaustive Library of Poetry and Song, and added to published tributes to earlier friends, such as Thomas Cole, Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, memorial discourses on Fitz-Greene Halleck and Gulian Verplanck. In addition to his continued direction of the New York Homeopathic Medical college and the American Free Trade League, he was elected to the presidency of the Williams College Alumni Association, the International Copyright Association, and the Century Association, the club of artists and writers of which, twenty years earlier, he had been a principal founder and which he would direct for the last decade of his life.