Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

    We’ve Got People is the story of that movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning. With the party and the nation at a crossroads, this timely and original book offers new insight into how we’ve gotten where we are – and where we're headed.

    Sovereignty has become a trap for Palestinians and getting out is a matter of political vision and will. The law does not determine any particular outcome, it only promises the contest over one. While Jewish and Palestinian sovereignty are incommensurable, their belonging is not. The law is not just and justice is not rule-based.

    Yet, as Greece has been brought under repeated scrutiny during the financial crises that have convulsed the country since 2010, worldwide coverage has revealed just how poorly we grasp the modern nation. This book sets out to understand the modern Greeks on their own terms.How did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place, and then define an identity for themselves that is at once Greek and modern? This book reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last 300 years, of building a modern nation on, sometimes literally, the ruins of a vanished civilisation. This is the story of the Greek nation-state but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, of the collective identity that goes with it. It is not only a history of events and high politics, it is also a history of culture, of the arts, of people and of ideas.

    In this wildly entertaining and meticulously researched account, Tony Perrottet unravels the human drama behind history's most improbable revolution: a scruffy handful of self-taught revolutionaries--many of them kids just out of college, literature majors, art students and young lawyers, and including a number of women--defeated 40,000 professional soldiers to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Cuba Libre's deep dive into the revolution reveals fascinating details: How did Fidel's highly organized lover Celia S�nchez whip the male guerrillas into shape? Who were the two dozen American volunteers who joined the Cuban rebels? How do you make lethal land mines from condensed milk cans -- or, for that matter, cook chorizo � la guerrilla (sausage guerrilla-style)?Cuba Libre is an entertaining look back at a liberation movement that captured the imagination of the world with its spectacular drama, foolhardy bravery, tragedy, and, sometimes, high comedy--and that set the stage for a buildup of Cold War tension that became a pivotal moment in history.

    The ‘invisible threads’ Nehru said held together an improbable union divided by language, religion and ethnicity have snapped under the burden of Modi’s Hindu-supremacist rule.In this blistering critique of post-Independence India from Nehru to Modi, K.S. Komireddi charts the unsound course of Indian nationalism: its cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India’s past and demeaning bribes to India’s minorities. He argues that the missteps of the nation’s founders, the mistakes of Nehru, the betrayals of his daughter and her sons, the anti-democratic fetish for technocracy inaugurated by Narasimha Rao and carried to the extremes by Manmohan Singh—all of them laid down the road on which Hindu nationalists rode to absolute power.Hindu bigotry, ennobled under Modi as a healthy form of self-assertion, has reopened old fissures that threaten to devour India’s hard-won unity. Yet bad times have also smashed the citizenly complacency that brought India to this point. There are multitudes who now realise how extraordinary and brave the idea of India was to begin with; there is a resurgent struggle against its extinction, and the assertion of new voices to wrest the republic from the forces of religious majoritarianism.A short history of the modern Indian nation, Malevolent Republic is also an impassioned plea for India’s reclamation. ‘Kapil Komireddi is one of the most thoughtful and thorough journalists writing today. His range of interests is impressive in its breadth and cosmopolitanism; his is a rare voice that can comment on global affairs from a truly comparative perspective.’ AMITAV Ghosh ‘Kapil Komireddi is a write of flair, originality and, above all, an absolute independence of mind … His ability to see through posturing and prejudice makes his work both distinctive and compelling. This book deserves to be widely read within India and beyond.’RAMACHANDRA GUHA

    Wade is coming. How will you prepare?Handbook for a Post-Roe America is a comprehensive and user-friendly manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law, and getting the healthcare you need––by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides readers through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America, and offers ways to fight back, including: how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems. She details how to plan for your own emergencies, how to start organizing now, what to know about self-managed abortion care with pills and/or herbs, and how to avoid surveillance. The only guidebook of its kind, Handbook for a Post-Roe America includes an extensive, detailed resource guide for all pregnant people (whether cis, trans, or non-binary) of clinics, action groups, abortion funds, and practical support groups in each state, so wherever you live, you can get involved.With a newly right-wing Supreme Court and a Republican Senate, Roe is under threat. Robin Marty observes: "When we say abortion will be illegal in half the states in the nation, we are no longer talking about some hypothetical future—we are talking about just years down the road. We have to act now to secure what access remains, shore up the networks supporting those who need care, and decide what risks we are willing to take to ensure that any person who wants a termination can still end that pregnancy—with or without the government's permission."

    But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. World leaders such as Barack Obama ushered in waves of international support. Progress seemed inevitable.As historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U saw the cracks forming. In this insider’s diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, he dissects how a singularly predatory economic system, fast-rising inequality, disintegrating state institutions, the impact of new social media, the rise of China next door, climate change, and deep-seated feelings around race, religion, and national identity all came together to challenge the incipient democracy. Interracial violence soared and a horrific exodus of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees fixed international attention. Myint-U explains how and why this happened, and details an unsettling prognosis for the future.Burma is today a fragile stage for nearly all the world’s problems. Are democracy and an economy that genuinely serves all its people possible in Burma? In clear and urgent prose, Myint-U explores this question—a concern not just for the Burmese but for the rest of the world—warning of the possible collapse of this nation of 55 million while suggesting a fresh agenda for change.

    This single notion can be recited by everyone who has ever heard of him, but the actual story of his life remains unknown save for a few inaccurate anecdotes. Up Jumped the Devil is the result of over 50 years of research. Gayle Dean Wardlow has been interviewing people who knew Robert Johnson since the early 1960s, and he was the person who discovered Johnson's death certificate in 1967. Bruce Conforth began his study of Johnson's life and music in 1970 and made it his personal mission to try to fill in the gaps in what was still unknown about him. In this definitive biography, the two authors relied on every possible interview, resource and document, most of it material that no one has ever seen before. As a result, this book not only destroys every myth that ever surrounded Johnson, but also tells a very human and tragic story of a real person. It is the first book about Johnson that documents his years in Memphis, details his trip to New York, uncovers where and when his wife Virginia died and the impact this had on him, fully portrays the other women Johnson was involved with, and tells exactly how and why he died and who gave him the poison that killed him. Up Jumped the Devil will astonish blues fans who thought they knew something about Johnson—most of those things are wrong—and will be a great read for anyone interested in blues, black culture and American music.

    One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighborhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” including Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

    White, “one of the country’s great literary treasures” (New York Times), centered on the subject of freedom and democracy in America.“I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear.”These words were written by E. B. White in 1947.Decades before our current political turmoil, White crafted eloquent yet practical political statements that continue to resonate. “There’s only one kind of press that’s any good—” he proclaimed, “a press free from any taint of the government.” He condemned the trend of defamation, arguing that “in doubtful, doubting days, national morality tends to slip and slide toward a condition in which the test of a man’s honor is his zeal for discovering dishonor in others.” And on the spread of fascism he lamented, “fascism enjoys at the moment an almost perfect climate for growth—a world of fear and hunger.”Anchored by an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, this concise collection of essays, letters, and poems from one of this country’s most eminent literary voices offers much-needed historical context for our current state of the nation—and hope for the future of our society. Speaking to Americans at a time of uncertainty, when democracy itself has come under threat, he reminds us, “As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman . . . the scene is not desolate.”

    Along the way, she pays tribute to those who've spoken up and taken action in the face of ridicule, dismissal and violence.This Is What a Feminist Looks Like shows us how we got to where we are today -- and reminds us that some battles must be fought over and over again.

    From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. This selection of works collected together for the first time brings together the most compelling literary depictions of migration.Organized in four parts (Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature conveys the intricacy of worldwide migration patterns, the diversity of immigrant experiences, and the commonalities among many of those diverse experiences. Ranging widely across the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, across every continent of the earth, and across multiple literary genres, the anthology gives readers an understanding of our rapidly changing world, through the eyes of those at the center of that change. With thirty carefully selected poems, short stories, and excerpts spanning three hundred years and twenty-five countries, the collection brings together luminaries, emerging writers, and others who have earned a wide following in their home countries but have been less recognized in the Anglophone world. Editor of the volume Dohra Ahmad provides a contextual introduction, notes, and suggestions for further exploration.

    In 2016, its residents—many of whom are elderly—were relocated to Cassia Crescent to make way for redevelopment. To help them resettle, a group of volunteers came together and formed the Cassia Resettlement Team.They Told Us to Move tells the story of the relocation through interviews with the residents from the Dakota community and reflections by the volunteers. Accompanying these are essays by various academics on urban planning; gender and family; ageing, poverty, and social services; civil society and citizenship; and architectural heritage and place-making. Through this three-part conversation, the book explores human stories of devotion, expectation, and remembrance. It asks what we can achieve through voluntary action and how we can balance self-reliance and public services.This book is for people who want to understand the kind of society we are, and question what kind of society we want to be.

    Focusing on two brothers from Mosul and their families, a charismatic Iraqi major who marched north from Baghdad to seize the city with his troops, rowdy Kurdish militiamen, and a hard-bitten American sergeant, Verini describes a war for the soul of a country, a war over and for history.Seeing the battle in a larger, centuries-long sweep, he connects the bloody-minded philosophy of the Islamic State with the ancient Assyrians who founded Mosul. He also confronts the ways that the American invasion of Iraq not only deformed that country, but also changed America like no conflict since Vietnam.

    Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment. It all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the wind-down of the Vietnam War. What follows is the story of our own lifetimes. It is the story of ever-widening historical fault lines over economic inequality, race, gender, and sexual norms firing up a polarized political landscape. It is also the story of profound transformations of the media and our political system fueling the fire. Kruse and Zelizer’s Fault Lines is a master class in national divisions nearly five decades in the making.

    But, as Kevin O'Rourke writes, Brexit did not emerge out of nowhere: it is the culmination of events that have been under way for decades and have historical roots stretching back well beyond that. Brexit has a history.O'Rourke, one of the leading economic historians of his generation, explains not only how British attitudes to Europe have evolved, but also how the EU's history explains why it operates as it does today - and how that history has shaped the ways in which it has responded to Brexit. Why are the economics, the politics and the history so tightly woven together? Crucially, he also explains why the question of the Irish border is not just one of customs and trade, but for the EU goes to the heart of what it is about. The way in which British, Irish and European histories continue to interact with each other will shape the future of Brexit - and of the continent.Calm and lucid, A Short History of Brexit rises above the usual fray of discussions to provide fresh perspectives and understanding of the most momentous political and economic change in Britain and the EU for decades.

    Supreme Court in this punchy polemic." --Publishers WeeklyThom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, lays out a sweeping and largely unknown history of the Supreme Court of the United States, from Alexander Hamilton's arguments against judicial review to modern-day debates, with key examples of cases where the Supreme Court overstepped its constitutional powers using the excuse of judicial review, and possible solutions.Hartmann explains how the Supreme Court has spilled beyond its Constitutional powers in a series of rulings, including how it turned our elections over to American and foreign oligarchs with twin decisions in the 1970s, setting the stage for the very richest of that day to bring Ronald Reagan to power.You'll hear the story of a series of Republican presidents who used fraud and treason to secure their elections, and how the GOP knew it but looked the other way because "the Court is hanging in the balance." A court that then went on to gut hundreds of pieces of progressive legislation, as Republicans had hoped.Ironically, Hartmann points out, John Roberts (now the Court's Chief Justice), when he worked for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, came up with a novel theory about how Congress could go around the Supreme Court. His goal was to effectively reverse Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board, but in the process provides us with an elegant legal argument and legislative solution that could, in an emergency, be used by a progressive Congress and president to clean up much of the damage the Court has done in past decades.Thomas Jefferson argued it is not the role of the Supreme Court to decide what the Constitution means, but rather the duty of the people themselves (and how they can do it). America may soon be forced to decide if it's going to continue to be governed as a constitutional monarchy, with nine unelected royals who have final say on everything, or if we are to revert to being a democratic republic as was largely the case before the late 1800s when America's first industrial era oligarchs corrupted the Court.

    Americans confront this crisis of authority when they erect statues of Founding Fathers who slept with their slaves. And Muslims faced it when ISIS revived sex-slavery, justifying it with verses from the Quran and the practice of Muhammad. Exploring the moral and ultimately theological problem of slavery, Jonathan A.C. Brown traces how the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions have tried to reconcile modern moral certainties with the infallibility of God’s message. He lays out how Islam viewed slavery in theory, and the reality of how it was practiced across Islamic civilization. Finally, Brown carefully examines arguments put forward by Muslims for the abolition of slavery.

    By the start of 1942 Nazi Germany had conquered mainland Europe and Imperial Japan had overrun Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific. How could Britain and distant America prevail in what had become a "war of continents"? In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 through to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counter-attack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea. Covering all the major actions in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as those in the narrow seas, this book interweaves for the first time the endeavors of the maritime forces of the British Empire, the United States, Germany, and Japan, as well as those of France, Italy, and Russia.

    Former Nominated Member of Parliament Kuik Shiao-Yin shares the concerns of young voters and how a new generation of leaders can rise up to serve them.

    

    By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post-World War I period, the nation's annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi's account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history's most horrific events.

    Constitutional law scholar and political science professor Corey Brettschneider guides us through the Constitution and explains the powers—and limits—that it places on the presidency. From the document itself and from American history’s most famous court cases, we learn why certain powers were granted to the presidency, how the Bill of Rights limits those powers, and what “we the people” can do to influence the nation’s highest public office—including, if need be, removing the person in it. In these brief yet deeply researched chapters, we meet founding fathers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, as well as key figures from historic cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Korematsu v. United States.Brettschneider breathes new life into the articles and amendments that we once read about in high school civics class, but that have real impact on our lives today. The Oath and the Office offers a compact, comprehensive tour of the Constitution, and empowers all readers, voters, and future presidents with the knowledge and confidence to read and understand one of our nation’s most important founding documents.

    This book, the first in-depth history of the Hijra community, illuminates the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality and the production of colonial knowledge. From the 1850s, colonial officials and middle class Indians increasingly expressed moral outrage at Hijras' feminine gender expression, sexuality, bodies and public performances. To the British, Hijras were an ungovernable population that posed a danger to colonial rule. In 1871, the colonial government passed a law that criminalised Hijras, with the explicit aim of causing Hijras' 'extermination'. But Hijras evaded police, kept on the move, broke the law and kept their cultural traditions alive. Based on extensive archival work in India and the UK, Jessica Hinchy argues that Hijras were criminalised not simply because of imported British norms, but due to a complex set of local factors, including elite Indian attitudes.

    Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable.A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China--including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008. Vague demonstrates that the over-accumulation of private debt does a better job than any other variable of explaining and predicting financial crises. In a series of clear and gripping chapters, he shows that in each case the rapid growth of loans produced widespread overcapacity, which then led to the spread of bad loans and bank failures. This cycle, according to Vague, is the essence of financial crises and the script they invariably follow.The story of financial crisis is fundamentally the story of private debt and runaway lending. Convinced that we have it within our power to break the cycle, Vague provides the tools to enable politicians, bankers, and private citizens to recognize and respond to the danger signs before it begins again.

    The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and usedracially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the Long Southern Strategy.In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners, particularly women. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasinglyfundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right. With original, extensive data on national and regional opinions and voting behavior, Maxwell and Shields show why all three of those decisions were necessary for the South to turn from blue to red.To make inroads in the South, however, GOP politicians not only had to take these positions, but they also had to sell them with a southern accent. Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an us vs. them outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizingidentity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution. In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.

    This book magnificently explores how, after the upheavals of industrialisation, a truly global capitalism followed. For the first time in the history of humanity, there was a social system able to provide a high level of consumption for the majority of those who lived within its bounds. Today, capitalism dominates the world.With wide-ranging scholarship, Donald Sassoon analyses the impact of capitalism on the histories of many different states, and how it creates winners and losers by constantly innovating. This chronic instability, he writes, 'is the foundation of its advance, not a fault in the system or an incidental by-product'. And it is this instability, this constant churn, which produces the anxious triumph of his title. To control or alleviate such anxieties it was necessary to create a national community, if necessary with colonial adventures, to develop a welfare state, to intervene in the market economy, and to protect it from foreign competition. Capitalists needed a state to discipline them, to nurture them, and to sacrifice a few to save the rest: a state overseeing the war of all against all.Vigorous, argumentative, surprising and constantly stimulating, The Anxious Triumph gives a fresh perspective on all these questions and on its era. It is a masterpiece by one of Britain's most engaging and wide-ranging historians.

    Poet and playwright Alfian Sa'at calls for greater support for the arts in our city-state.

    Many analysts have predicted that China's unprecedented economic development and middle-class expansion would lead to a liberalization of its political regime and a move toward democracy. Instead, leading scholar Jean-Pierre Cabestan contends that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to adapt and prosper in the coming decades, representing a growing challenge to all democracies. Influenced by China's traditional culture and even more so by the regime's Soviet ideology, institutions, and modus operandi, most Chinese are not pushing for democracy, choosing security, stability and prosperity over political freedoms and participation.

    

    In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

    The referendum vote for Britain to leave the European Union has led to a seismic shift in the ways in which parts of the British population view and judge their compatriots. The subsequent rise in the reported number of racially motivated incidents and the climate of vilification and negativity directed at anyone not viewed as 'authentically' British should be a matter of concern for all people.The book is comprised of a series of essays that address varying aspects of what it means to be British and the ways in which churches in Britain and the Christian faith could and should respond to a rising tide of White English nationalism. It is a provocative challenge to the all too often tolerated xenophobia, as well as the paucity of response from many church leaders in the UK. This critique is offered via the means of a prophetic, postcolonial model of Black theology that challenges the incipient sense of White entitlement and parochial 'nativism' that pervaded much of the referendum debate.The essays in this book challenge the church and wider society to ensure justice and equity for all, not just a privileged sense of entitlement for some. It will be of keen interest to any scholar of Black, political and liberation theology as well as those involved in cultural studies from a postcolonial perspective.

    It was the uniform world of material goods that united diverse soldiers in the ranks of the Red Army and was often all that separated civilians from soldiers"--