Table of Contents

Introduction PART ONE: THE LESSONS OF ANTIQUITY 1. Jehovah's Children and His Enemies The Bible as Source In the Days of the Judges The Life and Times of Joab Division and Fall of the Monarchy Governance under the Lord 2. The Greeks Darkness and Light in Hellas The Strange Case of Athens Colonial Tyrants: Phalaris of Acragas Dionysius and Dion of Syracuse Tyrannies North and East The Macedonia Adventure The Birth of Tyrannicide Theory 3. Rome A Republic of Laws The Gracchi Pompey, Caesar, Cicero The Empire as Epilogue What the Romans Showed 4. Other Peoples, Other Lands Reports from the Neighbors Rival Powers Greater Asia: The Sins of Devadatta Continents Known and Unknown 5. Zealots, Barbarians, and Assassins A Time of Transition Palestine and the Roman Imperium German Invaders and Their Ways Islam: Victories and Divisions Ismailis and the Hashishiyyin PART TWO: THE EUROPEAN CENTURIES 6. The High Middle Ages Causes and Limits of Change Kings, Lords, and Churchmen Murder at Canterbury Some Early Christian Views Two Schoolmen on Tyrannicide 7. A New Age of Princes English Dynasts Fifteenth-Century France Renaissance Italy From Polemics to Analysis: Guicciardini Machiavelli 8. Religious Warfare and Reason of State A Century of Bloodshed The Monarchomachs Coligny and William the Silent The Queen in Danger? Henry of Navarre Wallenstein Trial and Punishment 9. The Early Modern Interlude The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night Signs of Revulsion Some Likely Victims Spared Remnants of Violence The Eighteenth Century Revolution in France The End of the Remission 10. The Nineteenth Century An Old, but Widening Stage The Kotzebue Killing Orsini in Paris, 1858 The Tsar and "The People's Will" Phoenix Park PART THREE: THE MODERN WORLD 11. Civilization in the Balance Before 1914 The First World War Russian Shambles The "Terrible Twenties": Two Ends of Europe Weimar Germany The 1930s: Terror and the State The Thirties: Russia and Germany 12. World War II and After Some Noteworthy Victims Heydrich, Darlan, and the Resistance "The Fuhrer Must Go!" Settling Accounts Different Battles on Changing Lines 13. Recent Times Mass and Location Independence and Nationhood The New Nihilists Historic Targets: Schleyer, Moro, and the Pope Post-Colonial Crises Africa Enters the Arena The Middle East 14. The Americas: Latin, British, and French Where Does the "New World" Fit? "English Islands" Canada--and Quebec 15. The United States "Conceived and Born in Violence"? The Watershed of the Civil War Madmen or Zealots? Centers of Controversy: Weiss, Oswald, and Ray Official Connections Conclusion: Looking Backward and Forward Notes Index

Reviews

Ford, a distinguished Harvard historian, has written a compendious survey of the use of murder as a weapon in politics, from biblical times to the present. He contends that, in general, the results of an assassination rarely secure the aims of its agents. Further, in Ford's view, although there have been many murderous conspiracies, most political murders result from the activities of lone assassins who, the author speculates, often seek self-destruction. Ford makes an excellent case for these contentions, though some may dispute his claim that the murder of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 failed because an independent Bosnia, the hope of the archduke's killer, did not result from World War I. Surely the assassin would have been pleased by the fall of the Austrian Empire. The book's scope, judicious use of data, and clear style reflect the skill of a master historian. For public and academic libraries. David Gordon, Cato Inst., Washington, D.C.