The Eagle S Shadow

The Eagle’s Shadow (1904) is the debut novel of James Branch Cabell, a master of fantasy fiction and an underrated figure of twentieth-century American literature. The novel is significant for being among few of Cabell’s works to take place both around the time of its publication and to be set in the contemporary world. Like many of his works, however, it paints an intricate portrait of romance and power, immersing its reader into a fiction more real than they’d care to admit. Most of the novel’s action occurs at Selwoode, a recently built mansion located in the English countryside. Following the death of her uncle Frederick, Margaret Hugonin finds herself his unlikely heiress, and is thrust into a life she could not have prepared for even if she had managed to imagine it in the first place. As she faces down suitor after suitor while enduring a routine of lessons on philanthropy, culture, and charity, she navigates the complexities of her love for Billy Woods, her cousin through marriage and the nephew of Selwoode’s deceased scion, Frederick. Throughout the story, the eagle—both Frederick’s chosen heraldic animal and a symbol of power—looms over their relationship. The ill-gotten nature of the family fortune—acquired through the exploitation enabled by imperialism and solidified in the shadows of Wall Street—threatens to destroy not only their love, but their entire world. The Eagle’s Shadow, a novel at times tragic and comedic, is a brilliant and bold social critique masquerading as romance, and a literary work for all time. Cabell’s work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read The Eagle’s Shadow, however, is to understand that the issues therein—the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women—were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabell’s The Eagle’s Shadow is a classic of comedy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

What America looks like to the rest of the world Americans rarely used to think about the outside world. As the mightiest nation in history, the United States could do as it pleased. Now Americans have learned the hard way that what outsiders think matters. When terror struck last September 11, author Mark Hertsgaard was completing a trip around the world, gathering perceptions about America from people in fifteen countries. Whether sophisticated business leaders, starry-eyed teenagers, or Islamic fundamentalists, his subjects felt both admiring and uneasy about the United States, enchanted yet bewildered, appalled yet envious. This complex catalogue of impressions--good, bad, but never indifferent--is the departure point for a short, pointed essay in the tradition of Common Sense and The Fate of the Earth. How can the world's most open society be so proud of its founding ideals yet so inconsistent in applying them? So loved for its pop culture but so resented for its high-handedness? Exploring such paradoxes, Hertsgaard exposes uplifting and uncomfortable truths that force natives and outsiders alike to see America with fresh eyes. "Like it or not, America is the future," a European tells Hertsgaard. In a world growing more American by the day, The Eagle's Shadow is a major statement about and to the place everyone discusses but few understand.

The dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations during the Cold War views the United States as all-powerful. That perspective, represented in the metaphor “talons of the eagle,” continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. The goal of this collection of essays is not to write the United States out of the picture but to explore the ways Latin American governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their own interests and perspectives. The book also challenges the tendency among scholars to see the Cold War as a simple clash of “left” and “right.” In various ways, several essays disassemble those categories and explore the complexities of the Cold War as it was experienced beneath the level of great-power relations.

In 1946, while her emotionally distant father is in occupied Japan, a twelve-year-old girl spends a year with her mother's relatives in a Tlingit Indian village in Alaska and begins to love and respect her heritage as she confronts the secret of her mother's disappearance.

This is the story of Margaret Hugonin and of the Eagle. And with your permission, we will for the present defer all consideration of the bird, and devote our unqualified attention to Margaret. I have always esteemed Margaret the obvious, sensible, most appropriate name that can be bestowed upon a girl-child, for it is a name that fits a woman--any woman--as neatly as her proper size in gloves.

This is the story of Margaret Hugonin and of the Eagle. And with your permission, we will for the present defer all consideration of the bird, and devote our unqualified attention to Margaret. I have always esteemed Margaret the obvious, sensible, most appropriate name that can be bestowed upon a girl-child, for it is a name that fits a woman--any woman--as neatly as her proper size in gloves. Yes, the first point I wish to make is that a woman-child, once baptised Margaret, is thereby insured of a suitable name. Be she grave or gay in after-life, wanton or pious or sullen, comely or otherwise, there will be no possible chance of incongruity; whether she develop a taste for winter-gardens or the higher mathematics, whether she take to golf or clinging organdies, the event is provided for. One has only to consider for a moment, and if among a choice of Madge, Marjorie, Meta, Maggie, Margherita, Peggy, and Gretchen, and countless others--if among all these he cannot find a name that suits her to a T--why, then, the case is indeed desperate and he may permissibly fall back upon Madam or--if the cat jump propitiously, and at his own peril--on Darling or Sweetheart.