American Political Science

With the Constitution being invoked more and more in American politics, it’s now more important than ever before that you understand the guiding principles and significance of the document that shaped American democracy. Written well over 200 years ago, the United States Constitution has endured the test of time and remains the document that defines federal law and policy in the United States. US Constitution 101 explores the construction of the American government as it was laid out in the Constitution.

"Grand strategy" is one of the most widely used and abused concepts in the foreign policy lexicon. In this important book, Hal Brands explains why grand strategy is a concept that is so alluring - and so elusive - to those who make American statecraft. He explores what grand strategy is, why it is so essential, and why it is so hard to get right amid the turbulence of global affairs and the chaos of domestic politics.

The NBC journalist who covered - and took fire from - Donald Trump on the campaign trail offers an inside look at the most shocking presidential election in American history. Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful, Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it - a thoughtful historical record that offers eye-opening insights and details on our political process, the media, and the mercurial 45th president of the United States.

A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his earliest years he forged ties with Jews never before witnessed in a president. American Maccabee traces Roosevelt's deep connection with the Jewish people at every step of his dazzling ascent. But it also reveals a man of contradictions whose checkered approach to Jewish issues was no less conflicted than the nation he led.

In Animal Spirits, the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual's spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality who spoke of the "god within-rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."

Dorothy A. Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. As a young black girl growing up in the South Bronx, she’d seen how racism limited the lives of her family and neighbors. Her law school classes offered a refreshing contrast: Tax law was about numbers, and the only color that mattered was green. But when Brown sat down to prepare tax returns for her parents, she found something strange: James and Dottie Brown, a plumber and a nurse, seemed to be paying an unusually high percentage of their income in taxes. When Brown became a law professor, she set out to understand why.

African Americans have had every reason to doubt America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition, which is urgently needed today.

In the lead-up to every election cycle, pundits predict that Latino Americans will overwhelmingly vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. And it’s true - Latino voters do tilt Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the Latino vote in a “landslide”, and Barack Obama “crushed” Mitt Romney among Latino voters in his reelection. But those numbers belie a more complicated picture. Here, historian and political commentator Geraldo Cadava illuminates the history of the millions of Hispanic Republicans who, since the 1960s, have had a significant impact on national politics.

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point. As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant.

The goal of playing the great game of business has always been to find a way to teach the have-nots how the haves make it. It’s about creating and distributing wealth equitably as a way to close those gaps in wealth that plague our society. It’s about changing the game. We authored Change the Game for those of you who continue to seek a brighter side of capitalism - one that truly transforms lives for the better. This book is about hope: No matter how grim things look, you can make them better.

In Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the follow-up to his award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead paints a terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself and which is on the verge of undermining the basic freedoms guaranteed to the citizenry in the Constitution. Indeed, police have been transformed into extensions of the military, towns and cities have become battlefields.

In June 2009, Wendell Potter made national headlines with his scorching testimony before the Senate panel on health care reform. This former senior vice president of CIGNA explained how health insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they skew political debate with multibillion-dollar public relations campaigns designed to spread disinformation.

America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.

In what is being hailed by many, probably, as the best literary work since the New Testament, PFT Commenter takes you on a realistic-fiction journey through the backdoor politics of today's NFL. Set in the 2014 offseason, Roger Goodell and President Barack Obama become locked in a mano-a-mano battle over the future of the Dallas Cowboys, culminating in a literal fight to the death.

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver's license, verifying information for employers, or claiming state and federal benefits. Yet as Donald Trump and his fellow "birthers" reminded us when they claimed that Barack Obama wasn't an American citizen, it plays a central role in determining identity and citizenship. The Birth Certificate: An American History traces the document's two-hundred-year history to explain when, how, and why birth certificates came to matter so much in the United States.

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted - endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.

Conventional wisdom holds that John F. Kennedy was the first celebrity president, in no small part because of his innate television savvy. But as Kathryn Brownell shows, Kennedy capitalized on a tradition and style rooted in California politics and the Hollywood studio system. Since the 1920s, politicians and professional showmen have developed relationships and built organizations institutionalizing Hollywood styles, structures, and personalities in the American political process.

Derided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. In Reading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought.

In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of 20th-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases - the "American dream" and "America First" - that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality.

Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations, often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual, but that provide sources of emancipatory potential.