American Political Science

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.

Gore Vidal has been described as the last “noble defender” of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America - those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue - by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America’s international power, are the true patriots.

When Gore Vidal’s New York Times bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace was published, the Los Angeles Times described Vidal as the last defender of the American republic. In Dreaming War, Vidal continues this defense by confronting the Cheney-Bush junta head-on in a series of devastating essays that demolish the lies American Empire lives by, unveiling a counter-history that traces the origins of America’s current imperial ambitions to the experience of World War Two and the post-war Truman doctrine.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.

From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir. When Darnell Moore was 14, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling.

The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.

During the five full years of his presidency (1964 - 1968), Lyndon Johnson initiated a breathtaking array of domestic policies and programs, including such landmarks as the Civil Rights Act, Head Start, Food Stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, the Immigration Reform Act, the Water Quality Act, the Voting Rights Act, Social Security reform, and Fair Housing.

In The Hunting of Hillary, presidential biographer Michael D’Antonio details the years of lies and insults heaped upon Hillary Clinton as she pursued a life devoted to politics and policy. The worst took the form of sexism and misogyny, much of it barely disguised. A pioneer for women, Clinton was burdened in ways no man ever was. Defined by a right-wing conspiracy, she couldn’t declare what was happening lest she be cast as weak and whiny

Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In Under Fire, Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.

His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on.

If you've asked yourself the question, what more can I do to make sure Donald Trump does not continue to occupy the Oval Office on January 20, 2021? - then this book is for you. A playbook for the common citizen, A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump addresses the many things individuals can do in 2020 every day, without having to leave their jobs, move to Iowa, or spend every waking moment on the election.

When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation”, its “sole superpower”, the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable.

Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what's gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the founders and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability.

America's great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency - at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we've solved America's race problem.

Step right up and take a front-row seat at the most colorful spectacle in the world: American politics! Yanks at Odds: A Brit's Irreverent Guide to Healing the American Political Divide by Bryan Sutherland offers a delightfully irreverent yet incisive exploration of the American political divide. Sutherland serves up a hearty helping of wit, wisdom, and warm British humor as he navigates the sometimes baffling, often tumultuous world of American politics.

In The Invented State, Emily Thorson argues that a problematic and understudied aspect of political misinformation reflects widespread public misperception about what the government does. Because much of public policy is invisible to the public, there is fertile ground for false beliefs to flourish, leading to what Thorson terms the "invented state": systematic misperceptions about public policy.

What's happening in global politics? As if overnight, many Democrats revolted and passionately backed a socialist named Bernie Sanders; the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union; the vituperative billionaire Donald Trump became the presidential nominee of the Republican party; and a slew of rebellious parties continued to win elections in Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Austria, and Greece. John B. Judis, one of America's most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to learn about the populist movement.

In 2007, David Goldhill’s father died from infections acquired in a hospital - one of more than two hundred thousand avoidable deaths per year caused by medical error. The bill was enormous - and Medicare paid it. These circumstances left Goldhill angry and determined to understand how world-class technology and personnel could coexist with such carelessness - and how a business that failed so miserably could be paid in full.

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in expanding American democracy. In The Power of Black Excellence, Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1865.

Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly - the first gathering of a representative governing body in America - came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America.