American Politics

In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for nine dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough and wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War.

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).

As the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award-winning historian and perennial New York Times best-selling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.

In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the White slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's Black population.

In this comprehensive biography, Jean Edward Smith reconciles conflicting assessments of Grant's life, arguing that Grant is greatly underrated as a president. Following the turmoil of Andrew Johnson's administration, Grant guided the nation through the post-Civil War era, overseeing Reconstruction of the South and enforcing the freedoms of new African-American citizens. His presidential accomplishments were as considerable as his military victories, for the same strength of character that made him successful on the battlefield also characterized his years in the White House.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

A fast-paced, rollicking, behind-the-scenes account of how the GOP since the 1950s has encouraged and exploited extremism, bigotry, and paranoia to gain power, American Psychosis offers listeners a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.

Africa has played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture from its infancy. Some of the most decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood in Africa before they were in Europe. If this is so, why is Christianity so often perceived in Africa as a Western colonial import? How can Christians in Northern and sub-Saharan Africa, indeed, how can Christians throughout the world, rediscover and learn from this ancient heritage?

A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one-year anniversary of the Trump presidency.

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, Self-Portrait in Black and White is the searching story of one American family's multigenerational transformation from what is called Black to what is assumed to be White. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a "Black" father from the segregated South and a "White" mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of "Black blood" makes a person Black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he'd never rigorously reflected on its foundations....

Based on his provocative and popular New York Times op-ed, The Man They Wanted Me to Be is both memoir and cultural analysis. Jared Yates Sexton alternates between an examination of his working class upbringing and historical, psychological, and sociological sources that examine the genesis of toxic masculinity and its consequences for society. The Man They Wanted Me to Be examines how we teach boys what's expected of men in America, and the long-term effects of that socialization-which include depression, shorter lives, misogyny, and suicide.

On October 24, 1944, more than 200 American soldiers were surrounded by German infantry deep in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France. When their food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the area's army headquarters turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of Japanese American soldiers, to achieve what other units had failed to do: rescue the "lost battalion".

They Want to Kill Americans is the first detailed look into the heart of the active Trump-led insurgency, setting the stage for a second nation-wide rebellion on American soil. This is a chilling and deeply researched early warning to the nation from a counterterrorism intelligence professional: America is primed for a possible explosive wave of terrorist attacks and armed confrontations that aim to bring about a Donald Trump led dictatorship.

Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. African American victims and survivors had to find a way to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching. Crabtree offers a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in a strategy for “working through” trauma that has long existed within the African American cultural tradition: the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

During allergy season, sufferers know the drill: runny nose, watery eyes, sneezing up a storm. For the unlucky with asthma, symptoms might also include coughing and wheezing. However, asthma is not always caused by allergens like pollen and dust - nonallergenic asthma is brought on by a number of possible environmental or genetic triggers. Then there’s the common cold, which also presents with similar symptoms. So what’s causing your runny nose?

In the summer of 1987, Johnny Boone set out to grow and harvest one of the greatest outdoor marijuana crops in modern times. In doing so, he set into motion a series of events that defined him and his associatesas the largest homegrown marijuana syndicate in American history, also known as the Cornbread Mafia. Author James Higdon takes listeners back to the 1970s and ‘80s and the clash between federal and local law enforcement and a band of Kentucky farmers.

With Uncivil Agreement, Lilliana Mason looks at the growing social gulf across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently come to divide neatly between the two major political parties. She argues that group identifications have changed the way we think and feel about ourselves and our opponents. Even when Democrats and Republicans can agree on policy outcomes, they tend to view one another with distrust and to work for party victory over all else.

With global population numbers projected to increase by two billion by 2050, a veritable food crisis is on the horizon. In this audiobook we examine some of the complex factors involved in the coming “food crisis” and the innovative ideas and technologies designed to increase food production sustainably. We also examine current industry methods to increase production and the controversies surrounding them, including not only hot-button issues like genetically modified (or GM) and processed foods but also food safety and the physical effects of the modern diet.

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy remains up for debate. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention.