In many accounts of the 60s, Washington is portrayed as a target of reform: a reluctant group of politicians coaxed into accepting the radical spirit the day demanded. In this volume of the award-winning Penguin History of American Life, Mackenzie & Weisbrot argue that the most powerful agents of change in the 60s were those in the traditional seats of power, not the counterculture. A masterly new interpretation of this pivotal decade, The Liberal Hour explores the seismic shifts that led to an era when demands that had lingered on the political agenda for years entered the realm of possibility. By the time JFK was elected in '60, the political system that had prevailed for most of the century was based on crumbling economic, social & demographic realities. The growth of the suburbs shifted power out of the cities, rendering urban political machines & bosses increasingly irrelevant, which in turn allowed younger, more independent-minded politicians to rise. In Congress, Democrats retained their long held control, but the Southern wing of the party was losing its grip. Postwar prosperity led many to believe there was enough wealth to go around, an optimism that lent powerful support to antipoverty programs, not to mention civil rights. For once the Supreme Court, which has traditionally served dominant interests, was aligned with the progressive spirit of the age. The 60s represented a rare convergence: a public ready for change & a government ready to act. Liberal reform may have begun with JFK's New Frontier, but his assassination only gave emotional urgency to his agenda. His successor, LBJ, knew he had a window of opportunity before reactionary forces set in, an awareness that may have fostered his occasionally bullying tactics to push legislation thru Congress. The result was a burst in government initiatives--for civil rights, consumer protection, environmental reform etc--that hasn't been matched in American history. Ultimately the liberal hour promised too much, & couldn't afford both a costly & unpopular war abroad & a Great Society at home, but when it passed it left in its wake a vastly altered landscape. With elegant, accessible prose, The Liberal Hour casts one of the most dramatic periods in American history in new light, revealing that for all that has been written about the more attention-grabbing protest movements, the most powerful engine of change in that tumultuous decade was Washington itself.

    But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships social, cultural, political, economic, and legal were established during America s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America s first cities."Eden on the Charles" explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a city upon a hill to the process of urbanization and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that for better or worse have defined urban America to this day.

    Between 1939 and 1974 he wrote the autobiography and eight novels now collected by the Library of America in an authoritative three-volume set, earning a place as one of the greatest writers of America, his beloved adopted home.The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, published a year after he settled in the U. S., is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of a famous author. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, this novel was published in 1941.Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of Adam Krug, a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic bungling of a totalitarian police state. “I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer,” Nabokov affirms in his introduction to the novel, but goes on to state: “There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass caused by idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.”Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; revised 1966), Nabokov’s dazzling memoir of his childhood in imperial Russia and exile in Europe, is central to an understanding of his art. With its balance of inner and outer worlds—of family chronicle and private fantasy, revolutions and butterflies, the games of childhood and the disasters of politics—the work that Nabokov called “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections” is a haunting transmutation of life into art. “I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe…I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love,” he writes toward the end of the book, “so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov’s penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son.

    More than a successful book, A People’s History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People’s History: the centuries-long story of America’s actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians.Shifting from world-shattering events to one family’s small revolutions, A People’s History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.

    Until now. In Greatness, Steven F. Hayward—who has written acclaimed studies of both Reagan and Churchill—goes beneath the superficial differences to uncover the remarkable (and remarkably important) parallels between the two statesmen. In exploring these connections, Hayward shines a light on the nature of political genius and the timeless aspects of statesmanship—critical lessons in this or any age.A swift-moving and original book, Greatness reveals:• The striking similarities between Reagan’s and Churchill’s political philosophies: the two were of the same mind on national defense, the economy, and many other critical issues• What made both Reagan and Churchill so effective in the public arena—including their shared gift for clearly communicating their messages to the people • The connecting thread of the Cold War, which was bookended by Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” address of 1946 and Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech of 1987• The odd coincidences that mark everything from their childhoods to their shifts from Left to Right to their shared sense of personal and national destinyUltimately, Hayward shows, the examples of Churchill and Reagan teach us what is most decisive about political leadership at the highest level—namely, character, insight, imagination, and will. Greatness also serves as a sharp rebuke to contemporary historians who dismiss notions of greatness and the power of individuals to shape history. Hayward demonstrates that the British historian Geoffrey Elton had it right when he wrote, “When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian.”From the Hardcover edition.

    Most people of the current generation lack a sense of the historical sweep of the intellectual side of the right-wing collectivist position. Jeffrey Tucker, in this collection written between 2015 and 2017, argues that this movement represents the revival of a tradition of interwar collectivist thought that might at first seem like a hybrid but was distinctly mainstream between the two world wars. It is anti-communist but not for the reasons that were conventional during the Cold War, that is, because communism opposed freedom in the liberal tradition.Right-collectivism also opposes traditional liberalism. It opposes free trade, freedom of association, free migration, and capitalism understood as a laissez-faire free market. It rallies around nation and state as the organizing principles of the social order—and trends in the direction of favoring one-man rule—but positions itself as opposed to leftism traditionally understood.We know about certain fascist leaders from the mid-20th century, but not the ideological orientation that led to them or the ideas they left on the table to be picked up generations later. For the most part, and until recently, it seemed to have dropped from history. Meanwhile, the prospects for social democratic ideology are fading, and something else is coming to fill that vacuum. What is it? Where does it come from? Where is it leading?This book seeks to fill the knowledge gap, to explain what this movement is about and why anyone who genuinely loves and longs for liberty classically understood needs to develop a nose and instinct for spotting the opposite when it comes in an unfamiliar form. We need to learn to recognize the language, the thinkers, the themes, the goals of a political ethos that is properly identified as fascist."Jeffrey Tucker in his brilliant book calls right-wing populism what it actually is, namely, fascism, or, in its German form national socialism, nazism. You need Tucker’s book. You need to worry. If you are a real liberal, you need to know where the new national socialism comes from, the better to call it out and shame it back into the shadows. Now."— Deirdre McCloskey

    'Poisoned Wells' exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty.

    Representing a lifetime of study by the great American poet, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years distills Sandburg's monumental six volume set into a single one-book edition. By gleaning every possible reference from history, literature, and popular lore, Sandburg successfully captures not only the legendary president, but also Lincoln the man. He reveals exactly who Lincoln was, and what forces in his life shaped his personality. More than 100 black-and-white historical photographs and linecuts show Lincoln himself, the places he went, and the people who knew him.

    Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community.Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge.A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.

    His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel GUARD OF HONOR balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days to a racial incident on a U.S. Air Force training base in Florida in 1942.

    

    It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad.With a journalist’s grasp of events and a novelist’s ear for narrative, Melanie Kirkpatrick tells the story of the North Koreans’ quest for liberty. Travelers on the new underground railroad include women bound to Chinese men who purchased them as brides, defectors carrying state secrets, and POWs from the Korean War held captive in the North for more than half a century. Their conductors are brokers who are in it for the money as well as Christians who are in it to serve God. The Christians see their mission as the liberation of North Korea one person at a time.Just as escaped slaves from the American South educated Americans about the evils of slavery, the North Korean fugitives are informing the world about the secretive country they fled. Escape from North Korea describes how they also are sowing the seeds for change within North Korea itself. Once they reach sanctuary, the escapees channel news back to those they left behind. In doing so, they are helping to open their information-starved homeland, exposing their countrymen to liberal ideas, and laying the intellectual groundwork for the transformation of the totalitarian regime that keeps their fellow citizens in chains.

    From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.A New York Times Bestseller.

    I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.

    Maybe, that’s why in the presidential election of 2012, more people did not vote than voted for either candidate. We, the people, must realize we hold the power through our one vote. If we do not exercise that power, we have no right to complain!In One Vote, Dr. Ben Carson makes an urgent, nonpartisan, and unbiased plea for every American citizen to exercise the power of their vote in every election. This convenient and easy-to-use book will give you everything you need to become an informed voter. After reading this book, you will know how to ask the right questions about candidates, parties, and voting records; find the candidates and political parties that coincide with your values; locate your own senator and congressman; request information from your representatives; discover what bills your representatives have sponsored; and uncover how your representatives have voted in the past.One Vote can help you make sure your voice is heard.