Public History

Beginning in January 2009, The Payoff lays bare Washington’s culture of power and plutocracy. It’s the story of the 20-month struggle by Senator Ted Kaufman and Jeff Connaughton, his chief of staff, to hold Wall Street executives accountable for securities fraud, stop stock manipulation by high-frequency traders, and break up too-big-to-fail megabanks. This book takes us inside their dogged crusade against institutional inertia and industry influence as they encounter an outright reluctance.

Twenty years of America’s Global War on Terror produced little tangible success while exacting enormous harm. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States sustained tens of thousands of casualties, expended trillions of dollars, and inflicted massive suffering on the very populations that we sought to “liberate.” Now the inclination to forget it all and move on is palpable. But there is much to be learned from the immense debacle. And those who served and fought in these wars are best positioned to teach us.

In Antisocial Media, Siva Vaidhyanathan explains how Facebook devolved from an innocent social site hacked together by Harvard students into a force that, while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging.

The world is desperate for cobalt. It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies. But this "demon metal" has a horrific present and a troubled history. The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada, a place called Cobalt. Like the demon metal, this town has a dark and turbulent history.

When Barack Obama took office, he brought with him a new group of foreign policy advisors intent on carving out a new global role for America in the wake of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Now the acclaimed author of Rise of the Vulcans offers a definitive, even-handed account of the messier realities they’ve faced in implementing their policies. In The Obamians, acclaimed author James Mann tells the compelling story of the administration’s struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global turmoil.

Taxing the Rich draws on unparalleled evidence from 20 countries over the last two centuries to provide the broadest and most in-depth history of progressive taxation available. Scheve and Stasavage explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven't.

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.

Short History of Public Parks – Indiana Edition recounts the history of the public park from its early beginnings as hunting parks for European nobles to the extensive state and national parks of today. Cemetery History Cemeteries served as the first parks as landscape designers began designing cemeteries that proved a pleasant place for both the dead and the living. State Parks The book serves as a guide to the state parks of the United States, as it includes a listing of the Departments of Natural Resources of every state. National Park History Readers will learn the history of the ...

As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels - underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation - will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

"Previously published as MYSTERY IN THE APPLE ORCHARD: Hilarious misadventures when, completely out of the blue, caravanning mad Val and Geoff inherit a mysterious, old apple orchard on the Isle of Wight. By GUMBLETON, LYNNE AND CHRISTOPHER (AUTHOR)." Another fun packed comedy adventure when caravanning mad Valerie and Geoff inherit an old bungalow down on the Isle of Wight from a mysterious uncle. Little do they know, they have also inherited a mysterious, old apple orchard to go with it - hidden away, down at the far end of their garden. The orchard contains a secret that changes Val and ...

In Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's leading foreign policy thinkers, provides an original, provocative, and definitive account of the ambitious but deeply flawed post-Cold War efforts to promote American values and American institutions throughout the world.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

April 7 is World Health Organization Day, in honor of the day that the World Health Organization held the first World Health Assembly in 1948. International health conferences had been held nearly a century before this date, and international health organizations had been established in the half century prior to the creation of the World Health Organization, but 1948 marked the year that a formal institution was created to direct and implement a concerted and truly global effort to investigate, prevent, control, and cure disease.

"Now, do not misunderstand me, America is great. But we are fed up with being over-taxed and over-regulated. We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kinds of guns we can own, what kind of prayers we are allowed to say and where we can say them, what we are allowed to do to elect political candidates, what kind of energy we can use, what doctor we can see. What kind of nation are we becoming? I fear it's the very kind the Colonists fought against."

Best-selling author Chris Turner brings listeners onto the streets of Fort McMurray, showing the myriad ways the oil sands of Alberta impact our lives and demanding that we ask the question: To both fuel the world and to save it, what do we do about the Patch? This is no conventional story about the oil business. Rather, it is a portrait of the life cycle of the Patch, showing just how deeply it continues to impact the lives of everyone around the world.

On a tranquil summer night in July 2012, a trio of elderly peace activists infiltrated the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Nicknamed the "Fort Knox of Uranium", Y-12 was reputedly one of the most secure nuclear weapons facilities in the world, a bastion of warhead parts that harbored hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium - enough to power thousands of nuclear bombs. The activists - a house painter, a Vietnam war veteran, and an 82-year-old Catholic nun - penetrated the complex's exterior with alarming ease.

En la mejor tradición ya conocida de Juan Jacobo-Doger, Los nuevos sofistas nos abre de nuevo la puerta del misterioso mundo de la mente humana; esta vez para denunciar y traer a la luz los límites fulminantes de los sistemas políticos, su grado de ineficacia y la desesperanza que el status quo representa, para la sociedad actual; necesitada de los heraldos de la denuncia, los entes comprometidos se convierten en nuestra mejor arma, contra la desidia y la ignorancia.

Bitter fighting over deficits, taxes, and spending bedevils Washington, D.C., even as partisan gridlock has brought the government to the brink of default. Yet the more politicians on both sides of the aisle rant and the citizenry fumes, the more things seem to remain the same. White House Burning looks squarely at the burgeoning national debt and proposes to defuse its threat to our well-being without forcing struggling middle-class families and the elderly into poverty.

Despite more than 50 years of research, however, our global society has yet to find real solutions to the problem of global warming. Why? In Behind the Curve, Joshua Howe attempts to answer this question. He explores the history of global warming from its roots as a scientific curiosity to its place at the center of international environmental politics. The audiobook follows the story of rising CO2 through a number of historical contexts, highlighting the relationships among scientists, environmentalists, and politicians as those relationships changed over time.

Through painstaking research, Geoffrey Perret located thousands of revealing documents on national security issues and foreign affairs, subjects to which John F. Kennedy devoted most of his time and energy. Perret has mined the Kennedy Library in a way few others have, finding letters and diaries that have never before seen the light of day. With style and substance, Perret brings to life again the man who left such an indelible impression on our century.