One of ten placards above the stairs leading to the chamber of the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. -- Jefferson
True liberty consists in the privilege of enjoying our own rights, not in the destruction of the rights of others.
--Pinckard
One of eight placards above the stairway leading to the chamber of the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.
Let us ever remember that our interest is in concord, not conflict, and that our rea eminence rests in the victories of peace, not those of war. --McKinley
One of ten placards above the stairs leading to the Senate chambers in the Minnesota State Capitol.
Equal and exace justice to all men, of whatever state of persuasion, religious or political; peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliance with none.
--Jefferson.
Plackard above the stairway leading to the chambers of the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education without which neither justice nor freedom can be permanently maintained. --Garfield
Education is our only political safety. --H. Mann
One of ten placards above the stairs leading to the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves. Cowley. Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. Everett.
--Placard above the stairway to the entrance of the Senate in the Minnesota State Capitol.
of the English Language, except obsolete and very rare technical terms not found in general literature.
--Charles Walter Brown, Donohue's Handy American Dictionary of the English Language
Book cover. Tiny. Ornate. handy.
This Dictionary was begun, with the view of supplying, at a price within the reach of all, a public want, which the editor had found to exist, for a small word-book which should comprise all the primitive, and most of the derivative words
Actor, Laurence Olivier as the hunchback king, Richard III.
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends stolen out of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
--William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, scene v.
Book jacket. Blue, white and red bands across the midriff. Book title (in quotes) all caps across the top, blue, band. Author's name all caps, across the bottom, red, band. Descriptor subtitle in black letters across the middle, white, band. Behind the bands, a "V" for victory emblem with an NRA-ish eagle seated in the crotch of the V, wings upstretched. Ribbon arched across its lap with the motto "Win the War" emblazoned on it. Eleven stars circling around the head and body of the eagle. All on a steel gray field.
I was in combat for six weeks, forty-two days.
--Studs Terkel, “The Good War” (1984)
him and its achievement; British sea power and the German lack of it.
--Donald Macintyre, The Naval War Against Hitler (1971)
Book jacket. Grau sky and sea. Three bristling battleships steaming head-on towards the reader in a staggered row, the bows throwing foam.
When Hitler, having secured his eastern frontier by the lightning elimination of Poland, turned west to pursue his ambition to dominate Europe, one principal factor stood between
Book jacket. Flaming red clouds, almost like contrails streaking across the sky above a row of three story, post-medieval buildings which march up a slight incline. In the foreground, a line of obscure black figures, silhouettes crouching, on the alert. A bayonet or two thrusting up from the dark mass.
German weather forecasters predicted all western Europe would be enshrouded by the fog that screened Adolph Hitler’s last mad lunge westwards out of Nazi Germany.
-- Fred MacKenzie, The Men of Bastogne (1968)
Book jacket. Red background with wisps of gray coursing across it diagonally not quite obscuring a rampant rooster of heraldic mien, wings thrust upward, talons evenly planted, martial head glaring off to the left. Centered atop this image, in white curving font, the title, beneath which is rendered the author's name in smaller font, and above which in much smaller letters, two sentences setting the scene (Nazi-occupied Poland) and the premise (collective action underground in resistance).
On the night of August 23, 1939, I attended a particularly gay party.
--Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (1944)
Front cover and spine. Deep red. Author's signature scrawled optimistically (upwards towards the right) in gold, and underscored for emphasis.
In my childhood in Holland—I may have been fifteen or sixteen years of age—I remember one evening accompanying my parents to church when prayers were offered there for the return of the People of Israel to the Holy Land.
--Pierre Van Paassen, The Forgotten Ally (1943)
Book cover and spine. Red. No-nonsense. Low-key distinguished.
On August 2nd, 1274, Edward of Westminster the crusader landed at Dover.
--Arthur Bryant, The Age of Chivalry (1963)
Front book cover and spine. Just dignified.
I enlisted in the Marine Corps on 3 December 1942 at Marion, Alabama.
--E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981)
Book jacket. Author's name in orange across the top. Title of the book thrusting out from the black shadow in the background, looking like distressed concrete. Beneath, a blurb breathlessly extolling the thrust of the text. It's going to be a wild ride.
The gap between generations, unless it is to become a chasm and make history meaningless, must somehow be bridged.
--James P. O’Donnell, The Bunker (1978)
Book jacket. Title across the top in bold red letters. Photo montage across the middle third depicting double column of marching Soviet soldiers holding bayoneted rifles at port arms, above which on the left is the face of Joseph Stalin looking determinedly forward to his left. Receding off to his left, and of slightly smaller size, a row of seven determined looking, mustachioed faces angled slightly towards their left but looking back towards their right, behind whom, in much smaller scale, you'll see soldiers, eyes right, marching towards the right side of the image in ranks, carrying rows of flags, while in their foreground salutes are thrown up.
It was not self-evident in the ideology of the new Soviet state founded by Lenin that this was to be a militaristic or even well-armed society.
-- Harold Shukman, Ed., Stalin’s Generals (1993)
Book jacket. Sepia-toned photo of G.I in combat dress, slightly hunched forward with bayonetted rifle pointing ahead at waist height, tentatively stepping into debris-strewn street or courtyard. Title boxed in upper left corner, touting fiftieth anniversary edition.
On 8 June 1950, newspapers of the city of P’yongyang, capital of Chosun Minjujui Inmun Kongwhakuk, the North Korean People’s Republic, printed a manifesto of the Central Committee of the United Democratic Patriotic Front.
--T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War (1963)
Book jacket. Royal blue background. Thin red stripes at top and bottom and 1/4 of the way up from the bottom. Top 3/4 section dominated by large, bold white, all-caps title wrapped around a postcard-like photo of an aircraft carrier--looking for all the world like a cruise ship--pulling away from (or arriving to) a dock crowded with well-wishers, seen from the rear, one of whom is brandishing the Union Jack.
Storm-battered, with the pumps working every watch, the little squadron fled westward before the contrary winds.
--James L. Stokesbury, Navy and Empire (1983)
Book jacket. Interesting mess. Subtitle in two lines across the top, small caps with Japanese word Yamato in italics. Review blurb in much smaller font crawling down the left side of the centered first word of the title. Title in large all cap letters, burnished gold or bronze, centered, in four lines drawing the eye down to the bottom of the page where the black profile of a battleship silhouette, with a bright yellow fire licking upward from the deck, tilts its stern into the sky before the final death plunge in front of a grey mist shading off to the horizon and the top half of a sinking red ball of a sun centered in the distance behind the stricken ship.
The biggest warship in the world arose from the outer reaches of Kure harbor, a mountainous island of gray steel.
--Russell Spurr, A Glorious Way to Die (1981)
Book cover. Photo of young man in British WW2 uniform. Photo is oddly cropped to evoke mystery. Sepia-like green tones overall, except for a bright swatch of color on the shoulder patch, on which there is a Star of David in gold atop three vertical bands of color thus: blue-white-blue.
It was only a hundred days since the invasion of Normandy, but as the first cool nights of fall arrive, the Allied command was confident the war in Europe would soon be over.
--Howard Blum, The Brigade (2001)
Spine and front cover. Hardbound. Faux leather. Title is embossed on the front surface, just above the fold.
Book jacket. Title across the top, on a field that resembles a sepia-toned fog. Black ribbon banner below, bordered in gold, with sub-title in italic font. Bottom two thirds is a painting of a group of Union officers kneeling above a recently fallen officer with his eyes cast towards heaven. In the background, Union soldiers and a young drummer boy look on, while a field artillery piece points off to the left and rear of the scene.
The cycle of interest in the Civil War has come around again, as inevitable as a wheel turning, and the indications are that it won’t soon go away.
--Robert Cowley, Ed., With My Face to the Enemy (2001)
Book jacket. Black background. Small white letters across the top touting the author's previous Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Author's name next in larger white letters with book title, centered, beneath in slightly larger, all caps lettering, burnished gold flanked on the left by an American flag, wind blowing from the west, and on the right by a Communist Russian flag, wind blowing from the east. Then in white lettering across the bottom, a subtitle teasing the subject of the book.
When the Space Age is mentioned, most people think of Sputnik, the launching into orbit of the first man-made satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 2957, or the race between Russia and the United States to land men on the moon.
--Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War (2009)
Book jacket. Irregular splotch of red paint blotted diagonally on gray filed from top left towards bottom right, as though applied in haste, on which the title is inscribed in bold calligraphic font of two sizes and two colors. Author's name splayed above in smaller font (all caps). At the bottom, an excited blurb sets forth the thesis of the book.
Some weeks before the Russo-German war broke out I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the guest of a Harvard professor.
--Maurice Hindus, Hitler Cannot Conquer Russia (1940, 1941)
Book jacket. Upper section white lettering on red field, with a heraldic chicken, rampant, d'or, upper left behind the lettering. Gold band separates the lower third of the front panel which is black and has the author's name in white uppercase lettering, below which, in much smaller font, previous titles by the same author are touted.
I was an eyewitness of three epochal stages of the history of Czechoslovakia.
--Maurice Hindus, We Shall Live Again (1939)
Book Jacket. Mostly red. naturally.
September and October are said to be the worst months of the year in Leningrad.
--Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (1958)
Book jacket. bareheaded man wearing khaki, with riding boots and a satchel, looking off in the distance holding a sheaf of papers with pen poised above it, his right foot resting on the hip of a supine woman who is barefoot in a toga with a sash draped across her torso reading TRUTH. In the background across a flat plain are what might be buildings, behind which roll flame-colored hills.
At ten minutes past eleven our Light Cavalry Brigade advanced….
--Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (1975)
Book jacket. Black with narrow red bands top and bottom. Book title in white, slightly off-centered, above swastika bookended by the dates 1930 and 1940. Below the fold, Author's name in matte bronze lettering.
One stifling October day in 1930, at a party in Bombay, I ran into the crown prince of Afghanistan.
--William L. Shirer, The Nightmare Years 1930-1940 (1984)