Social State

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.

A "Manchurian Candidate" is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide, Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that "accomplished what two Senate committees could not" (Senator Edward Kennedy).

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.

Everything, well, almost everything, you know about American history is wrong because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact. But fear not; Professor Thomas Woods refutes the popular myths in The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

In this landmark work, acclaimed historian Joshua Freeman has created an epic portrait of a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. Beginning in 1945, the economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States’ rise to global dominance. Meanwhile, Freeman locates the profound tragedy that has shaped the path of American civic life.

This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early 16th to the early 21st century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.

Poet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911-1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the US pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator's rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s.

Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, renowned historian Margaret MacMillan's best-selling Paris 1919 is the story of six remarkable months that changed the world. At the close of WWI, between January and July of 1919, delegates from around the world converged on Paris under the auspices of peace. New countries were created, old empires were dissolved, and for six months, Paris was the center of the world.

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941 to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today, it stands as a poetic tract of its time.

When 25-year-old Harry Walker was killed by a bear in Yellowstone Park in 1972, the civil trial prompted by his death became a proxy for bigger questions about American wilderness management that had been boiling for a century. At immediate issue was whether the Park Service should have done more to keep bears away from humans, but what was revealed as the trial unfolded was just how fruitless our efforts to regulate nature in the parks had always been.

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.

Young Stalin tells the story of an exceptional, charismatic, darkly turbulent young man born into obscurity, fancying himself a poet and a priest, and finally embracing revolutionary idealism as his Messianic mission in life. Equal parts scholar and terrorist, a mastermind of bank robberies, extortion, piracy, and murder, he was so impressive in his brutality that Lenin made him, along with Trotsky, his chief henchman.

Do "In God We Trust", the Declaration of Independence, and other historical "evidence" prove that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles? Are the Ten Commandments the basis for American law? A constitutional attorney dives into the debate about religion's role in America's founding.

Black Elk of the Sioux has been recognized as one of the truly remarkable men of his time in the matter of religious belief and practice. Black Elk was the only qualified priest of the older Oglala Sioux still living when The Sacred Pipe was written. This is his book: he gave it orally to Joseph Epes Brown during the latter's eight month's residence on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where Black Elk lived.

The first new edition in 10 years of this important study of Latinos in US history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries - from the first New World colonies to the first decade of the new millennium. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American popular culture - from food to entertainment to literature - is greater than ever.

This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.

North Korea is like no other tyranny on Earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and Big Brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ - the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins - are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line, and the gulag awaits.

April 16th, the year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama, has had a spring of nonviolent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against Blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers longed to create a nonviolent tension so severe that the powers that be would be forced to address the rampant racism head on. Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr.... It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of nonviolence against segregation.

In these stormy times, loud voices from all fronts call for revolution and change. But what kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul? Cultural observer Os Guinness explores the nature of revolutionary faith, contrasting between secular revolutions such as the French Revolution and the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel.

David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.