Political Study

In A Moonless, Starless Sky Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball team flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram.

On 6 February 1918, after campaigning for over 50 years, British women were finally granted the vote. In November 1919, the first woman MP, Lady Nancy Astor, was elected to the House of Commons. History was made. A hundred years on, it is time to reflect on the daring and painful struggle women undertook to break into a political system that excluded them.

The 2015 Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks heralded the beginning of a new wave of terrorism - one rooted in the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq that shows the possibility of foreign attackers working with citizens of the country. As ISIS seeks to expand its reach in the Middle East, its territory serves as a training and operations base for a new generation of jihadis.

As a former three-term U.S. Republican senator from Missouri and an ordained Episcopal priest, John C. Danforth has watched the shifts in his party and the Christian church with growing alarm. Now he feels the time has come for a change.

ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider's view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.

In her best-known work, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman writes about different kinds of oppression that women were exposed to at the time. Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, in which an isolated society composed entirely of women exists. The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. It is an important early feminist work that brings forward complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism.

Stephen Mansfield, the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, has highlighted the growing popularity of Mormonism—a belief system with cultic roots—and the implications of its critical rise. Mormons are moving into the spotlight in pop culture, politics, sports, and entertainment via presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, media personality Glenn Beck, mega-bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, and The Book of Mormon, the hottest show on Broadway.

Do you want the greatest political and societal challenges of the day to be addressed with thoughtful, reality-based solutions rather than with cherry-picked quotations from scripture? Do you want to shrink religion - especially fundamentalist religion - to the point that it plays no noticeable role in public life? Do you want right-wing religious leaders to be so unpopular that politicians avoid them rather than pander to them for endorsements? This book illustrates specific, actionable steps for facilitating fundamentalist religion's decline.

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

Behind the Bill of Rights uncovers the timeless principles that make the Bill of Rights tick. The authors reveal lost meanings, elaborate on new understandings, and bring to light many fundamentals that have been overlooked for decades.

Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity, and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a road map for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.

Socialists Don’t Sleep is about all the sneaky ways the secular left has pressed socialism into American politics and life - and why Christians are the only ones who can stop it. Socialists Don’t Sleep tells how America has gone from a country of rights coming from God, not government, to a country that embraces socialism - where the government’s now expected to pretty much provide from cradle to grave. Cheryl K. Chumley, award-winning journalist and contributing editor to The Washington Times, explains how to return the country to its glory days.

Frustrated and feeling betrayed, Americans have come to loathe politics with disastrous results, argues Peter Wehner. In this timely manifesto, the veteran of three Republican administrations and man of faith offers a reasoned and persuasive argument for restoring “politics” as a worthy calling to a cynical and disillusioned generation of Americans.

Super Bomb unveils the story of the events leading up to President Harry S. Truman's 1950 decision to develop a "super" or hydrogen, bomb. That fateful decision and its immediate consequences are detailed in a diverse and complete account built on newly released archives and previously hidden contemporaneous interviews with more than 60 political, military, and scientific figures who were involved in the decision.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.

The US, Barry R. Posen argues in Restraint, has grown incapable of moderating its ambitions in international politics. Since the collapse of Soviet power, it has pursued a grand strategy that he calls "liberal hegemony", one that Posen sees as unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful. Written for policymakers and observers alike, Restraint explains precisely why this grand strategy works poorly and then provides a carefully designed alternative grand strategy and an associated military strategy and force structure.

Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis, Gwen Ifill shows why now is a pivotal moment in American history.

The American Dream is close to being replaced by a living nightmare. Key commodities that are essential to our daily lives and that are widely believed to be abundant are running critically short. Even worse, the Chinese are doing what they can to monopolize the world's dwindling resources. The U.S. is now largely dependent on our greatest economic rival for rare earth elements as well as a host of other minerals - all of which are absolutely essential to the development of alternative energies....

Drawing inspiration from philosophy, history, and literature, Martha C. Nussbaum takes us to task for our religious intolerance, identifies the fear behind it, and offers a way past fear toward a more equitable, imaginative, and free society, through the consistent application of universal principles of respect for conscience.

Almost forty years ago, Neil Postman argued that television had brought about a fundamental transformation to democracy. By turning entertainment into our supreme ideology, television had recreated public discourse in its image and converted democracy into show business. In Trolling Ourselves to Death, Jason Hannan builds on Postman's classic thesis, arguing that we are now not so much amusing, as trolling ourselves to death. Contrary to the popular view of the troll as an exclusively anonymous online prankster, Hannan asserts that trolls have emerged from the cave, so to speak.