American Doctrines

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early 20th century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal, but it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and have been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day.

In Real Americans, Jared A. Goldstein boldly challenges the conventional wisdom that a shared devotion to the Constitution is the essence of what it means to be American.

A redistricting crisis is now upon us. This surprising, compelling book tells the history of how we got to this moment—from the Founding Fathers to today’s high-tech manipulation of election districts—and shows us as well how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Nick Seabrook has written an illuminating, urgently needed book on how our elections have been rigged through redistricting, beginning with the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and extending to today’s high-tech manipulations of districts.

In Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics, political scientists Anand Edward Sokhey and Paul A. Djupe bring together a wide range of scholars and writers to examine the relationship between former President Donald Trump and white American evangelical Christians.

What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society.

Americans today have “freedom” to be fleeced, groped, injected, harassed, surveilled, vilified, disarmed, beaten, detained, and maybe shot by federal agents. From hapless homeowners hit by SWAT raids to pandemic lockdowns pointlessly paralyzing lives, government agencies have become far more intrusive and abusive. There is no escape from tinhorn dictators seizing guns, sabotaging schooling, or wrecking housing markets.

Editor and investigative reporter Jefferson Morley has been widely published in national periodicals and is the author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction work Our Man in Mexico. An eye-opening look at Washington’s first race riot, Snow-Storm in August also offers revealing profiles of Arthur Bowen, the slave blamed for the riot, and “Star Spangled Banner” lyricist Francis Scott Key, a defender of slavery who sought capital punishment for Bowen.

The American way - independence, entrepreneurialism, liberty - has been under assault for decades. The cultural foundations of the United States and its institutions are devolving along the line of some futuristic apocalyptic novel and producing social, moral, and economic dry rot that can lead only to chaos and ruin. Attacks on individuality, freedom, and personal responsibility for most of the last century have resulted, as Alexis de Tocqueville once predicted, in a gradual degradation of the people and the descent into slavery of once-free people.

America is at a crossroads. We are alienated from civic engagement, and our democracy is in doubt. Yet there is a new energy in the air. Young people are again taking up the role they've often held: as leaders of change, demanding a better future, wielding their votes to uphold democracy and lead the country forward. Enter Generation Citizen, an organization dedicated to empowering youth through revitalizing civics education across America.

Black voters have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party for the last fifty years - and for their loyalty, black Americans have been rewarded with worsening schools, collapsed families, skyrocketed incarceration rates, disappearing jobs, and rising crime. Crystal Wright, editor of the blog Conservative Black Chick, exposes how the Democratic Party has systematically betrayed black voters.

A Ruling Class have emerged in America against the hopes and designs of our Founding Fathers. Over the last hundred years, they have rejected the Constitution and expanded their own power, slowly at first and now rapidly. These people believe their actions are justified, because they think they are smarter than the rest of us - so smart they can run our lives better than we can.

The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland.

Much of the attention paid to Trump's rise to power has focused on his corrosive personality and divisive style of governing. But he alone is not the problem. The vulnerability is much broader and deeper. The ascendance of Trump is the culmination of nearly 250 years of political reforms that gradually ceded party nominations to small cliques of ideologically motivated party activists, interest groups, and donors. Author Lawrence Jacobs provides a highly engaging history of political reforms since the late-eighteenth century that over time dangerously weakened democracy.

The majority of Americans are far closer in values than the ideological opinion-shapers lead us to believe. This book asks how we can restore the civic unity that our political elites have worked for years to dismantle.

In The Politics of Petulance Alan Wolfe argues the core of our problem isn't Trump himself - it's that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively - and mindlessly - accepted. The good news is that we've been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues.

During the last days of July, 1967, Detroit experienced a week of devastating urban collapse - one of the worst civil disorders in 20th-century America. Forty-three people were killed, over $50 million in property was destroyed, and the city itself was left in a state of panic and confusion, the scars of which are still present today.

Drawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the reemergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the religious right. Today’s rapidly expanding interfaith coalition - which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faiths - has become a force within the larger “resistance” movement. Jenkins profiles Washington political insiders as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today.

In the history of American politics, there are few stories as enigmatic as that of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison's bitterly personal falling out. Together they helped bring the Constitution into being, yet soon after the new republic was born, they broke over the meaning of its founding document. Hamilton emphasized economic growth; Madison the importance of republican principles. Author Jay Cost is the first to argue that both men were right - and that their quarrel reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of the American experiment.

In a remote corner of Oregon, James Pogue found himself at the heart of a rebellion. Granted unmatched access by Ammon Bundy to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pogue met ranchers and militiamen ready to die fighting the federal government. He witnessed the fallout of communities riven by politics and the danger (and allure) of uncompromising religious belief. The occupation ended in the shooting death of one rancher, the imprisonment of dozens more, and a firestorm over the role of government that engulfed national headlines.

For much of American history, evangelicalism was aligned with progressive political causes: nineteenth-century evangelicals fought for the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and public education. But contemporary conservative activists have defaulted on this majestic legacy, embracing instead an agenda virtually indistinguishable from the Republican Party platform.