American Elections

The 2016 election is conservatives' last, best chance to take back the country. So how can they win? The answer, conservative columnist and analyst Ed Morrissey says, depends on seven battleground counties in swing states Republicans must win. Each county pulled for Obama in one or both of the last two elections, but after eight years of misadventures under the Obama administration, the door is open for Republicans to win them - and the presidency - once again, making a decisive mandate against progressivism for the generation to come.

Rosenthal suggests that right-wing populism is a protean force whose prime mover is the resentment felt toward perceived elites, and whose abiding feature is its ideological flexibility, which now takes the form of xenophobic nationalism. In 2016, American right-wing populists migrated from the free marketeering Tea Party to Donald Trump's "hard hat," anti-immigrant, America-First nationalism. This was the most important single factor in Trump's electoral victory.

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, 31-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail - and the time that King's family most feared for his life. Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is the first full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history.

Kate Rice went looking for unity in a polarized nation. This is a how-to of hope. The audiobook covers a national movement in the Bible Belt and other red states that sees evangelicals and other religious conservatives taking the words of the Bible literally and treating the foreigner as their neighbor, and that neighbor as their brother or sister. These are people seeking to live the words of the Bible in Matthew, John, and Leviticus by helping the very refugees the Trump administration seeks to keep out of the country.

On a bright Phoenix morning, Elena Santiago opened her door to find her house surrounded by a platoon of federal immigration agents. Her children screamed as the officers handcuffed her and drove her away. Within hours, she was deported to the rough border town of Nogales, Sonora, with nothing but the clothes on her back. Her two-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, both American citizens, were taken by the state of Arizona and consigned to foster care. Their mother's only offense: living undocumented in the United States.

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.

"You know what our party thinks? 'We're good people with good ideas. That's enough, isn't it?' Being tough enough, mean enough, and vicious enough is just not what they want." Well, tough, mean, and vicious isn't just for Karl Rove anymore. In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party decisively ended 12 years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin' is the story of that historic victory, and the one man at the center on whom everything hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

In a series of 10 essays, spanning five centuries of history, beginning with the conquest of Mexico by Hermán Cortés and ending in 1992 San Francisco, Rodriguez explores the conflicts of race, religion, and cultural identity for Mexican-Americans across the landscape of his beloved California.

Beginning with the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the future of the nation and continuing through the Civil War, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, and Obama and the Tea Party, many pols have asked, "What would the founders do?" instead of "What is the common good today?" Recently both the right and the left have used the founders to sort through such issues as voting rights, campaign finance, free speech, gun control, taxes, and war and peace.

Women around the country are running in - and winning - elections at an unprecedented rate. It appears that women are on a steady march toward equal representation across state legislatures and the US Congress, but there is a sharp divide in this representation along party lines. Most of the women in office are Democrats, and the number of elected Republican women has been plunging for decades. In The Partisan Gap, Elder examines why this disparity in women's representation exists and why it's only going to get worse.

From his bestselling first novel, The Naked and the Dead, to his last work, American democracy was a lifelong project for Norman Mailer. It was his grand theme. Nearly all of his books touched on the pros and cons, the strengths and weaknesses, the grace (to use his word) and fragility of the American experiment as well as the threats to it. A Mysterious Country is a carefully selected collection of Mailer’s most incisive—and sometimes remarkably prophetic—commentary on American democracy and what must be done to safeguard it.

In this brilliant historical classic, Dan Sisson argues that Thomas Jefferson thought democratic revolutions would be necessary from time to time to break the grip of autocratic factions on the government. That is how Jefferson saw the election of 1800 - and the lessons for today couldn’t be more obvious. Most historians celebrate Jefferson’s victory over Adams in 1800 as the beginning of the two-party system, but Jefferson would have been horrified by this interpretation.

Biographers have chronicled every significant period of Roosevelt's life with one exception, and American Cyclone fills that gap. His nomination for the vice presidency was Roosevelt's debut as a candidate for national office. American Cyclone presents the story of his campaign, a whirlwind effort highlighted by an astounding whistle-stop tour of 480 communities across 23 states. Eighteen of those states gave a plurality of votes to the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket, a gain of five states for the Republicans over 1896.

Accountable examines present-day conditions and the consequences for America. At its core, this book is a tool with which the community can evaluate the successes or failures of its political leaders and of itself. This insightful book acknowledges the mistakes of the past while offering hope and inspiration for a better future.

New York Times best-selling author Tony Blankley prescribes a three-pronged approach as key to America's success in previous wars that must be "rediscovered" today. The political-correctness crowd will complain, but Blankley argues that this conservative manifesto to reestablish American grit is essential - our nation's very survival depends on it.

A major new collection of modern commentary - from scholars, historians, and Civil War buffs - on the significant events of the Civil War, culled from The New York Times' popular Disunion online journal.

The most powerful political tool of the modern presidency is control of the message and the image. In Republic of Spin - a vibrant history covering more than 100 years of politics - presidential historian David Greenberg recounts the rise of the White House spin machine, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. His sweeping, startling narrative takes us behind the scenes to see how the tools and techniques of image making and message craft work.

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.

The Glory and the Burden: The American Presidency from FDR to Trump is a timely examination of the state of the American presidency and the forces that have shaped it over the past 75 years, with an emphasis on the dramatic changes that have taken place within the institution and to the individuals occupying the Oval Office.

The presidential election of 1968 forever changed American politics. In this character-driven narrative history, Aram Goudsouzian portrays the key transformations that played out over that dramatic year. It was the last "Old Politics" campaign, where political machines and party bosses determined the major nominees, even as the "New Politics" of grassroots participation powered primary elections. It was an election that showed how candidates from both the Left and Right could seize on "hot-button" issues to alter the larger political dynamic.