Pattern of Circles is a success story, for its author and his country. John E. Dolibois was born December 4, 1918, in Luxembourg. His mother died weeks later, and he was raised by an older sister until she left for Akron, Ohio, with her American husband. In 1931, John came to Akron with his father and thus began a fascinating life journey.

Authors who tell “sad stories of the death of kings” in an age which viewed history as a reflection of itself could get into serious trouble. Hayward discovered this when he was closely interrogated by Elizabeth’s council for having dedicated his newly published Henrie IIII to the troublesome earl of Essex. Fortunately, he escaped with only a spell in the Tower of London by way of punishment for participating in the dangerous craft of history writing. He lived to complete his Life and Raigne of Edward Sixth, a piece of historical literature which, despite the advances of modern scholarship, still sets the flavor of a reign steeped in drama and personal tragedy.

This is an introduction to the principle writers of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century France. French thinkers of this century made a long series of devastating attacks on old ideas, usages, and institutions that had been handed down from the past. And, at the same time, these thinkers proposed a series of thorough-going reforms in social, economic, political, religious, and educational ideas and institutions. France was the center of the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, but there were important thinkers that belonged to the movement in other countries, such as Vico and Beccaria in Italy; Lessing, Herder, and Kant in Germany; and Hume, Adam Smith, and Bentham in Britain. France, though, took the lead, and, outside of France, there were no thinkers of quite the influence of the French writers, Voltaire and Rousseau.

Reconstructing Russia focuses on the Wilson administration’s efforts to find some way to provide economic support to Russian Siberia as a counterpoint to German economic influence. The connection between the Wilson administration’s efforts to provide economic assistance in Siberia and the Marshall Plan becomes even more significant at the close of the twentieth century as contemporary debates are waged over the issue of economic assistance to the former Soviet Union. Bacino places Wilson’s Russian policy in a new light and examines it from a government-wide perspective. He analyzes several significant issues and gives a fresh look at one of the most confusing episodes in Wilsonian foreign policy.