The subsequent arrests of five men seeking to bug and burgle the Democratic National Committee offices—three of them Cuban exiles, two of them former intelligence operatives—quickly unravels a web of scandal that ultimately ends a presidency and forever alters views of moral authority and leadership. Watergate, as the event is called, becomes a shorthand for corruption, deceit, and unanswered questions. Now, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Garrett M. Graff explores the full scope of this unprecedented moment from start to finish, in the first comprehensive, single-volume account in decades. The story begins in 1971, with the publication of thousands of military and government documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which reveal dishonesty about the decades-long American presence in Vietnam and spark public outrage. Furious that the leak might expose his administration’s own duplicity during a crucial reelection season, President Richard M. Nixon gathers his closest advisors and gives them implicit instructions: Win by any means necessary. Within a few months, an unsteady line of political dominoes are positioned, from the creation of a series of covert operations code-named GEMSTONE to campaign-trail dirty tricks, possible hostage situations, and questionable fundraising efforts—much of it caught on the White House’s own taping system. One by one they fall, until the thwarted June burglary attracts the attention of intrepid journalists, congressional investigators, and embattled intelligence officers, one of whom will spend decades concealing his identity behind the alias “Deep Throat.” As each faction slowly begins to uncover the truth, a conspiracy deeper and more corrupt than anyone thought possible emerges, and the nation is thrown into a state of crisis as its government—and its leader—unravels. Using newly public documents, transcripts, and revelations, Graff recounts every twist with remarkable detail and page-turning drama, bringing readers into the backrooms of Washington, chaotic daily newsrooms, crowded Senate hearings, and even the Oval Office itself during one of the darkest chapters in American history. Grippingly told and meticulously researched, Watergate is the defining account of the moment that has haunted our nation’s past—and still holds the power to shape its present and future.

    Focusing on six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin— Trump’s supporters claimed widespread voter fraud.It was not a well-orchestrated matter. There was no guiding genius pulling the strings in key states for the defeated Donald Trump. In the weeks after the election, in counties and precincts all over the country, many local Republican officials and even Trump’s own campaign workers washed their hands of his increasingly unhinged allegations of fraud. But there was no shortage of people willing to take up the fight. Urged on by Trump and his coterie of advocates, lawyers, and media propagandists, true believers turned on their colleagues, friends, and neighbors — even those in their own party — to accuse them of rigging the election.The real story of the insurrection began months before Trump’s mob attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. That riot was the desperate final act, emblematic of the clumsy, failed movement Trump had been building for years. It began in cities and small towns all over America on election day, November 3, 2020.Working with a team of researchers and reporters, Bowden and Teague uncover never-before-told accounts from the election officials fighting to do their jobs amid outlandish claims and threats to themselves, their colleagues, and their families. The Steal is an engaging, in-depth report on what happened during those crucial nine weeks and a portrait of the heroic individuals who did their duty and stood firm against the unprecedented, sustained attack on our election system to ensure that every legal vote was counted and the will of the people prevailed.

    Now, for the first time, his ambassador to Israel explains how they pulled it off.Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. For decades, the U.S. State Department called it diplomacy.David Friedman was an outside candidate when President Trump appointed him U.S. ambassador to Israel. He took office to find U.S.-Israel policy stuck in stalemate. For years, accepted wisdom was that extensive experience and detailed knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture were necessary to negotiate treaties. In truth, Friedman realized, all parties played on that accepted wisdom to stall--expecting to get a better deal further down the road.Tossing the State Department playbook aside and incorporating insights from his many years as a negotiator in the American private sector, Friedman and a small team with no prior diplomatic experience revamped American diplomacy to project "peace through strength." He emphasized the importance of leverage, the key to any good negotiation. After painstaking, behind-the-scenes work, the Abraham Accords were signed: a historic series of peace deals between Israel and the five Muslim nations.In Sledgehammer, Friedman tells the true story of how the Abraham Accords came about. He takes us from the Oval Office to the highest echelons of power in the Middle East, putting us at the table during the intense negotiations that led to this historic breakthrough. The inside story of arguably the greatest achievement of the Trump Administration, Sledgehammer is an important, inspiring account of the hard, hopeful work necessary to bring long overdue--and lasting--peace to one of the most turbulent and tragic regions of the globe.

    a compelling and insightful meditation on the trauma people still feel as a result of Butler’s career and the American ambitions it represented."—The Washington PostSmedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went—serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism." Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world—from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal—and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.

    AlbrightAn inspiring and urgent memoir by the ambassador who electrified the nation by speaking truth to power. By the time she became US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch had seen her share of corruption, instability, and tragedy in developing countries. But it came as a shock when, in early 2019, she was recalled from her post after a smear campaign by President Trump’s personal attorney and his associates—men operating outside of normal governmental channels, and apparently motivated by personal gain. Her courageous participation in the subsequent impeachment inquiry earned Yovanovitch the nation’s respect, and her dignified response to the president’s attacks won our hearts. She has reclaimed her own narrative, first with her lauded congressional testimony, and now with this memoir.   A child of parents who survived Soviet and Nazi terror, Yovanovitch’s life and work have taught her the preciousness of democracy as well as the dangers of corruption. Lessons from the Edge follows the arc of her career as she develops into the person we came to know during the impeachment proceedings.

    It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation.As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous two-week trip to visit the troops on the front lines accompanied by his young son, seeing combat up close, meeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond, and comforting wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. The power of Lincoln’s personal example in the closing days of the war offers a portrait of a peacemaker. He did not demonize people he disagreed with. He used humor, logic, and scripture to depolarize bitter debates. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but he understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength. Ulysses S. Grant’s famously generous terms of surrender to General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox that April were a direct expression of the president’s belief that a soft peace should follow a hard war.While his assassination sent the country careening off course, Lincoln’s vision would be vindicated long after his death, inspiring future generations in their own quests to secure a just and lasting peace. As US General Lucius Clay, architect of the post-WWII German occupation, said when asked what guided his decisions: “I tried to think of the kind of occupation the South would have had if Abraham Lincoln had lived.” Lincoln and the Fight for Peace reveals how Lincoln’s character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln’s plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony, but in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today.

    Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the vital groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes, and he furthered his reputation as an outspoken federal senator and progressive governor of Ohio. Tapped by Lincoln to become Secretary of the Treasury, Chase would soon prove vital to the Civil War effort, raising the billions of dollars that allowed the Union to win the war, while also pressing the president to emancipate the country’s slaves and recognize black rights. When Lincoln had the chance to appoint a chief justice in 1864, he chose his faithful rival, because he was sure Chase would make the right decisions on the difficult racial, political, and economic issues the Supreme Court would confront during Reconstruction. Drawing on previously overlooked sources, Walter Stahr sheds new light on a complex and fascinating political figure, as well as on the pivotal events of the Civil War and its aftermath. Salmon P. Chase tells the forgotten story of a man at the center of the fight for racial justice in 19th century America.

    Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? And who gets to decide which ones should stay up and which should come down?Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She traces the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, starting with the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom atop the US Capitol, and explores the surprising motivations behind such contemporary flashpoints as the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol. Written with great verve and thoroughly researched, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental question: Whose voices must be heard and whose pain must remain private?

    Summer 1944: Yugoslavia is locked in a war within a war. When not fighting against German occupation, Chetnik and Partisan factions battle each other. Hundreds of Allied airmen have been shot down over this volatile region, among them American Lieutenant Bill Bogdonavich. Though grateful to the locals who risk their lives to shelter and protect them from German troops, Bogdonavich dreams of the impossible: escape.With three failed air missions behind him, Lieutenant Drew Carlton is desperate for redemption. From a Texas airbase he volunteers for a secretive and dangerous assignment, codenamed Operation Halyard, that will bring together American special operations officers, airmen, and local guerilla fighters in Yugoslavia's green hills. The daring plan--to evacuate hundreds of stranded airmen while avoiding detection by the Germans--faces overwhelming odds. What follows is one of the greatest stories of World War II heroism, an elaborate rescue that required astonishing courage, sacrifice, and resilience.Red Burning Sky is a riveting and ultimately triumphant tale based on true events, all the more remarkable for being so little known--until now.

    Evil lurks in California.From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to methamphetamine psychosis to the killing of Sharon Tate.Here and now, in this place and this time, it’s all gone wrong.And there’s something else, too.Zodiac.

    The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. It was written by Jarett Kobek.

    And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full.Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

    Harding to Donald Trump, have shaped today's issues. Every generation tends to believe they live in unique times, but immigration, healthcare, civil rights, tax policy, income distribution, globalization and the evolving role of government have all had their roots in earlier presidencies - and continue to affect every American today.Unlike most presidential biographies, WE THE PRESIDENTS is devoid of politics. A successful presidency is not based on political battles won, but rather the well-being and prosperity of ordinary citizens. For most Americans, that's closely related to their pocketbooks. So, throughout the book are discussions covering economic growth, personal income (and income inequality), taxation, and related topics affecting every American.It's these issues, evolving over decades, that have woven the American tapestry. WE THE PRESIDENTS tells a small part of that remarkable story.Praise from Early ReadersThis well-crafted, wonderfully readable book takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the tenures of US presidents over the past 100 years, highlighting the events that shaped America and the world and offers a candid yet balanced and objective critique of their stewardship. An absorbing and compelling tour de force.Howard Handy, held senior management positions at the IMF and Institute of International FinanceSo you think you know your presidential history? Think again. Ronald Gruner has, and he sees more than most. He has balanced vision and an eye for detail. He has written a knowledgeable and easily read work. It is an excellent investment of your time. It was for me.Jack Falvey, Opinion Writer, The Wall Street Journal and Barron'sThis highly readable book is a triumph. Author Ronald Gruner with meticulous research has woven a non-partisan tapestry embedded with historical parallels as seventeen presidents, from Harding to Trump, shaped the American century, up to the present day, when our democracy faces yet another crucial test of its resilience and strength.Nicholas G. Penniman IV, Publisher (retired), St. Louis Post-DispatchRonald Gruner's clear-sighted view of presidents, their times and contexts is extraordinary. We need the Gruner sensibility in the White House. We the Presidents is more than an absorbing read; it is a great education about how our country works. Gruner's engaging and straightforward writing brings alive a century of presidencies from Harding to Trump, and how their actions have led to what America is today.Phil Cooper, Founder and Managing Partner, Pine Island Capital PartnersRonald Gruner is uniquely qualified to write a penetrating presidential history. Gruner applied his significant business experience to objectively analyze the impact of past presidencies on today's America. His extraordinary research provides facts rather than opinions. A must read.Dr. John R. Patrick, President, Attitude LLC

    Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society, whether it was exercising power or contesting it. But what has the party stood for through the centuries, and how has it managed to succeed in elections and govern? In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the party’s long-running commitment to creating “moral capitalism”—a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. As the party evolved towards a more inclusive egalitarian vision, it won durable victories for Americans of all backgrounds. But it also struggled to hold together a majority coalition and advance a persuasive agenda for the use of government.Kazin traces the party’s fortunes through vivid character sketches of its key thinkers and doers, from Martin Van Buren and William Jennings Bryan to the financier August Belmont and reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, and Jesse Jackson. He also explores the records of presidents from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Throughout, Kazin reveals the rich interplay of personality, belief, strategy, and policy that define the life of the party—and outlines the core components of a political endeavor that may allow President Biden and his co-partisans to renew the American experiment.

    Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush   The United States is entering an era of great-power competition with China and Russia. Such global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today. Although the threat posed by authoritarian powers is growing, America’s muscle memory for dealing with dangerous foes has atrophied in the thirty years since the Cold War ended. In long-term competitions where the diplomatic jockeying is intense and the threat of violence is omnipresent, the United States will need all the historical insight it can get. Exploring how America won a previous twilight struggle is the starting point for determining how America can successfully prosecute another high-stakes rivalry today.

    . . . This highly readable, inclusive, and deeply researched book will appeal to scholars of women and gender studies as well as anyone seeking to understand the historical patterns that misogyny has etched across every era of American culture.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review   What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.   This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. Noting that every attempt to cement a particular definition of “woman” has been met with resistance, Faderman also shows that successful challenges to the status quo are often short-lived. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.

      Though you may not know his name, Robert Welch (1899-1985)—founder of the John Birch Society—is easily one of the most significant architects of our current political moment. In A Conspiratorial Life, the first full-scale biography of Welch, Edward H. Miller delves deep into the life of an overlooked figure whose ideas nevertheless reshaped the American right. A child prodigy who entered college at age 12, Welch became an unlikely candy magnate, founding the company that created Sugar Daddies, Junior Mints, and other famed confections. In 1958, he funneled his wealth into establishing the organization that would define his legacy and change the face of American politics: the John Birch Society. Though the group’s paranoiac right-wing nativism was dismissed by conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley, its ideas gradually moved from the far-right fringe into the mainstream. By exploring the development of Welch’s political worldview, A Conspiratorial Life shows how the John Birch Society’s rabid libertarianism—and its highly effective grassroots networking—became a profound, yet often ignored or derided influence on the modern Republican Party. Miller convincingly connects the accusatory conservatism of the midcentury John Birch Society to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party, the Trump administration, Q, and more. As this book makes clear, whether or not you know his name or what he accomplished, it’s hard to deny that we’re living in Robert Welch’s America.

    A man ready for a change. And a completely unique trip through Europe.In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was a broken man. Reeling from the loss of his wife and humiliated from a political scandal during the Revolutionary war, he needed to remake himself. And to do that, he traveled. Traipsing through Europe, Jefferson saw and learned as much as he could, ultimately bringing his knowledge home to a young America. There, he would rise to power and shape a nation.More than two hundred years later, Derek Baxter, a devotee of American history, stumbles on an obscure travel guide written by Jefferson―Hints for Americans Traveling Through Europe―as he's going through his own personal crisis. Who better to offer advice than a founding father himself? Using Hints as his roadmap, Baxter embarks on a new journey, following Jefferson through six countries and countless lessons. But what Baxter learns isn't always what Jefferson had in mind, and as he comes to understand Jefferson better, he doesn't always like what he finds.In Pursuit of Jefferson is at once the story of a lifechanging trip through Europe, an unflinching look at a founding father, and a moving personal journey. With rich historical detail, a sense of humor, and boundless heart Baxter explores how we can be better moving forward only by first looking back.

    In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world. Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation. A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.

    In The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding, Ryan Walters mounts a case that Harding deserves to move up—and supplies the evidence to make that case strong. -Amity Shlaes, bestselling author of CoolidgeHe's the butt of political jokes, frequently subjected to ridicule, and almost never absent a "Worst Presidents" list where he most often ends up at the bottom. Historians have labeled him the "Worst President Ever," "Dead Last," "Unfit," and "Incompetent," to name but a few. Many contemporaries were equally cruel. H. L. Mencken called him a "nitwit." To Alice Roosevelt Longworth, he was a "slob." Such is the current reputation of our 29th President, Warren Gamaliel Harding. In an interesting survey in 1982, which divided the scholarly respondents into "conservative" and "liberal" categories, both groups picked Harding as the worst President. But historian Ryan Walters shows that Harding, a humble man from Marion, Ohio, has been unfairly remembered. He quickly fixed an economy in depression and started the boom of the Roaring Twenties, healed a nation in the throes of social disruption, and reversed America’s interventionist foreign policy.

    Yet his close friend and sometime collaborator, Henry Hobson Richardson, has been almost entirely forgotten today, despite his outsized influence on American architecture--from Boston's iconic Trinity Church to Chicago's Marshall Field Wholesale Store to the Shingle Style and the wildly popular "open plan" he conceived for family homes. Individually they created much-beloved buildings and public spaces. Together they married natural landscapes with built structures in train stations and public libraries that helped drive the shift in American life from congested cities to developing suburbs across the country.The small, reserved Olmsted and the passionate, Falstaffian Richardson could not have been more different in character, but their sensibilities were closely aligned. In chronicling their intersecting lives and work in the context of the nation's post-war renewal, Hugh Howard reveals how these two men created original all-American idioms in architecture and landscape that influence how we enjoy our public and private spaces to this day.

    Sehat’s clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age.”—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill   In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat narrates the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the U.S. Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the twentieth century. Religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and antireligious activists all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. Then, over the past fifty years, many religious conservatives turned against that order, emphasizing their religious freedom.   Avoiding both polemic and lament, Sehat offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present.

    Thompson’s literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance.   Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Author Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic.   Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

    Blinder, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve).By February 2020, the U.S. economic expansion had become the longest on record. Unemployment was plumbing half-century lows. Stock markets soared to new highs. One month later, the public health battle against a deadly virus had pushed the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma. America’s workplaces—offices, shops, malls, and factories—shuttered. Many of the nation’s largest employers and tens of thousands of small businesses faced ruin. Over 22 million American jobs were lost. The extreme uncertainty led to some of the largest daily drops ever in the stock market.Nick Timiraos, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics correspondent, draws on extensive interviews to detail the tense meetings, late night phone calls, and crucial video conferences behind the largest, swiftest U.S. economic policy response since World War II. Trillion Dollar Triage goes inside the Federal Reserve, one of the country’s most important and least understood institutions, to chronicle how its plainspoken chairman, Jay Powell, unleashed an unprecedented monetary barrage to keep the economy on life support. With the bleeding stemmed, the Fed faced a new challenge: How to nurture a recovery without unleashing an inflation-fueling, bubble-blowing money bomb?Trillion Dollar Triage is the definitive, gripping history of a creative and unprecedented battle to shield the American economy from the twin threats of a public health disaster and economic crisis. Economic theory and policy will never be the same.

    House of Representatives and the first Black woman to run for president with a major political party: Shirley Chisholm. Before there was Barack Obama, before there was Kamala Harris, there was Fighting Shirley Chisholm. A daughter of Barbadian immigrants, Chisholm developed her political chops in Brooklyn in the 1950s and went on to become the first Black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. This “pepper pot,” as she was known, was not afraid to speak up for what she thought was right. While fighting for a better life for her constituents in New York’s 12th Congressional District, Chisholm routinely fought against sexism and racism in her own life and defied the norms of the time. As the first Black woman in the House and the first Black woman to seek the presidential nomination from a major political party, Shirley Chisholm laid the groundwork for those who would come after her. Extensively researched and reviewed by experts, this inspiring biography traces Chisholm’s journey from her childhood in a small flat in Brooklyn where she read books with her sisters to Brooklyn College where she got her first taste of politics. Readers will cheer Chisholm on to victory from the campaign trail to the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol, where she fought for fair wages, equal rights, and an end to the Vietnam War. And while the presidential campaign trail in 1972 did not end in victory, Shirley Chisholm shows us how you can change a country when you speak up and speak out.

    These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism. Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into “Mexican” schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish—the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation—they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children—one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such—reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation. Listen to an interview with the author here.

    Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion. Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.

    

    At the same time, he ominously predicted, “If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.”De Tocqueville was prescient, because the longest battle fought in the history of the United States has been the Civil Rights Movement. The framers of the Constitution kicked the problem down the road, over half a million died during the Civil War to end slavery, and then many more fought and died to dismantle segregation and legalized racism in the 100 years after.Today every American is taught about watershed moments in the history of minorities’ struggles for civil rights over the course of American history: the Civil War, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, the use of the phrase “Civil Rights Movement” in America today almost invariably refers to the period of time from 1954-1964.After a 1960 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia, bus segregation was made illegal on new grounds: it violated the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, by regulating the movement of people across state lines. With this victory in hand, the Freedom Rides of 1961 began. Organized primarily by a new group – the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) – the Freedom Rides followed the same guidance that inspired the Montgomery Boycott and the Greensboro Sit-Ins – non-violent direct action. The purpose of the Freedom Rides was the test the Supreme Court's decision by riding from Virginia to Louisiana on integrated busses. This was notably the first major Civil Rights event that included a large segment of white participants.Mobs in places like Birmingham and Montgomery firebombed buses and brutally beat the Freedom Riders, sending dozens to the hospital. Mob violence, orchestrated by the KKK and their segregationist allies, erupted endlessly throughout the summer. White activists, who were viewed by the Ku Klux Klan as betraying their race, took the worst beatings of all.Martin Luther King, Jr.'s role in Freedom Summer was similar to his role in the Montgomery bus sit in. Rather than participate himself, as he had in Greensboro, King took the role of spokesman and worked behind the scenes. Dr. King was in constant contact with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and he encouraged Kennedy to take actions beneficial to the Riders. Most notable among these was Kennedy's unorthodox petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), demanding that it officially ban segregation on interstate travel, which it did in November of 1961. Having a regulatory agency ban segregation gave added bulk to the movement to effectively end segregation in the South.Both black and white Northerners had participated in the Freedom Rides, and civil rights activists sought other ways to harness their energy and activism in 1963. After the Freedom Rides, civil rights leaders initiated voter registration drives that could help register black voters and build community organizations that could help make their votes count. The momentum generated by the Freedom Rides and the following activism would lead to the famous March on Washington and eventually the passage of a historic civil rights bill in 1964.(source: Amazon)