Political History

More than 40 years after President Johnson signed the landmark Fair Housing Act into law, residential segregation in America remains unresolved. Designed to help dismantle the nation’s racially divided housing patterns, the act has gone largely ignored by every presidential administration - Democrat and Republican alike - since 1968. In Living Apart, ProPublica investigates this failing.

Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory's core tenet—that the United States Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists' unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history.

Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I'd Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics. These performers and politicians both rode and resisted cultural waves: some advocated for the poor and dispossessed, and others voiced religious and racial anger, but they all walked the line between exploiting their celebrity and righteously taking on the world.

An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful - and secretive - colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times best seller Brothers.

Alexandra Petri's US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding.) Petri's "historical fan fiction" draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation's complicated past. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Alexandra Petri's US History is the fake textbook you never knew you needed.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, The Washington Post's seminal Watergate stories have been gathered together for the first time as an audiobook, including a foreword by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein assessing the impact of their stories 40 years later.

"Vanished is a scientific, political, environmental, and medical thriller where the action begins from the first line and doesn’t let up until the very end. It’s a page-turning rollercoaster ride and is highly recommended." Readers' Favorite A ship washes ashore in the Philippines without a single crew member aboard. All residents of an alpine village disappear without a trace. Connecting the two events is the appearance of strange, metallic spheres and scorch marks in both locations. An NSA team led by agents Alton and Mallory Blackwell discover a link between the disappearances and a ...

A storm is on the horizon. America’s days are numbered. A Chinese submarine has gone rogue and is navigating towards the continental United States, putting its nuclear missiles within striking distance of the West Coast.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” So said Abraham Lincoln as he contemplated the great issues of containing slavery and preserving the Union. Now, after another era of turbulent political chaos, including repudiation of traditional American values by many elites in politics and academia, we are embarked on a GREAT RESTORATION of respect for our Founding principles. This book is written to show where we are, and whither we are tending, by explaining our current political controversies in context of where...

The 1968 US presidential election was the young Lawrence O'Donnell's political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America's shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different and how we got to where we are now.

Neoliberalism took shape in the 1930s and 1940s as a transnational political philosophy and system of economic, political, and cultural relations. As neoliberal ideas gained political currency in the 1960s and 1970s, reactionary cultural turn catalyzed their ascension. The cinema, music, magazine culture, and current events discourse of the 1970s provided the space of negotiation permitting these ideas to take hold and be challenged.

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly 20 years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.

A captivating portrait of one of history’s most compelling figures—Winston Churchill—told with the usual wit and charm of Leonard Wibberley (author of The Mouse that Roared). Many books have been written about Winston Churchill at his finest hour as Britain’s leader during World War II, but few tell the stories of the his youth—as a rebellious schoolboy, as a daring young soldier who took part in cavalry charges and in hand-to-hand combat in India and Africa, and as a brazen foreign correspondent, covering wars in Sudan, Cuba, India, and South Africa. This entertaining biography ...

The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America’s unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William "Pig Iron" Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation’s politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis.

This groundbreaking book from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald is the first to tell the powerful, dramatic story of the Evangelical movement in America - from the Puritan era to the 2016 presidential election. Evangelicals have, in many ways, defined the nation. They have shaped our culture and our politics. Frances FitzGerald's narrative of this distinctively American movement is a major work of history, piecing together the centuries-long story for the first time.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all.

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.

Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society.

A blend of history, analysis, and theory, Understanding Socialism is an honest and approachable text that knocks down false narratives, confronts failures and challenges of various socialist experiments throughout history, and offers a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy.