History Research

If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that Americans save too little, spend too much, and borrow excessively. What can we learn from East Asian and European countries that have fostered enduring cultures of thrift over the past two centuries? Beyond Our Means tells for the first time how other nations aggressively encouraged their citizens to save by means of special savings institutions and savings campaigns.

Was the 2000 presidential campaign merely a contest between Pinocchio and Dumbo? And did Dumbo miraculously turn into Abraham Lincoln after the events of September 11? In fact, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman argue in The Press Effect, these stereotypes, while containing some elements of the truth, represent the failure of the press and the citizenry to engage the most important part of our political process in a critical fashion.

Justice in Plain Sight is the story of a hometown newspaper in Riverside, California, that set out to do its job: tell readers about shocking crimes in their own backyard. But when judges slammed the courtroom door on the public, including the press, it became impossible to tell the whole story. Pinning its hopes on business lawyer Jim Ward, whom Press-Enterprise editor Tim Hays had come to know and trust, the newspaper took two cases to the US Supreme Court in the 1980s. Hays was convinced that the public - including the press - needed to bear witness to justice....

Award-winning journalist Nathan Bomey argues that Trump did not usher the post-truth era into being. He was its inevitable outcome. Bomey points to recent trends that have created the perfect seedbed for spin, distortion, deception, and bald-faced lies: shifting news habits, the rise of social media, the spread of entrenched ideologies, and the failure of schools to teach basic critical-thinking skills.

Once a shoestring operation built on plywood sets and Australian rules football, ESPN has evolved into a media colossus. A genius for cross-promotion and its near-mystical rapport with its viewers empower the network to set agendas and create superstars, to curate sports history even as it mainstreams the latest cultural trends. Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned Xs and Os into billions of $$$.

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

Groundbreaking analytical research from a database of over 200,000 North American churches reveals our population is growing faster than church attendance. This guide shows the problems as well as the potential of the American church, confirming hunches, exploding myths, and offering a clear path to a brighter future.

In Enemy of the People, Marvin Kalb, an award-winning American journalist with more than six decades of experience both as a journalist and media observer, writes with passion about why we should fear for the future of American democracy because of the unrelenting attacks by the Trump administration on the press.

The Watergate scandal began with a break-in at the office of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1971, and ended when President Gerald Ford granted Richard M. Nixon a pardon on September 8, 1974, one month after Nixon resigned from office in disgrace. Effectively removed from the reach of prosecutors, Nixon returned to California, uncontrite and unconvicted, convinced that time would exonerate him of any wrongdoing and certain that history would remember his great accomplishments—the opening of China and the winding down of the Vietnam War.

One of America's most admired television newsmen gives us an intimate chronicle of the final year of the 20th century. Here is the voice we know from Nightline - intelligent, curious, opinionated, witty, concerned - reminding us in entertaining and thought-provoking ways that even the most public events reverberate in our private lives. Hear an interview with Ted Koppel on The Connection.

Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.

During his years of reporting from the world's most savage and turbulent regions, Fergal Keane has witnessed the violence of the South African townships and the terror in Rwanda, the most extreme kinds of human behaviour, the horror of genocide, and the bravery of peacekeepers faced with overwhelming odds. As one of the BBC's leading correspondents, he recounts extraordinary encounters on the front lines.

After decades of atheism and hard living, author Dan Wakefield experienced a profound religious awakening that led him back to the church. He describes his religious journey, fraught with peaks and pitfalls, and his hard-won realization that faith is not static. In a continuing quest to maintain his faith over the long-haul, Wakefield speaks plainly about the challenges of maintaining one's convictions in today's complex, secular world. Wakefield's acknowledgement that each day holds the promise of renewal will resonate with listeners who seek to keep their faith.

In February 1943, a group of journalists - including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney - clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the 64 bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. "I think I’m going to say," mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell."

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it? In providing the answers to these questions, Ron explores the history of Man’s research and investigation in the field of the human spirit.

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it? In providing the answers to these questions, Ron explores the history of Man's research and investigation in the field of the human spirit.

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it?

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it? In providing the answers to these questions, Ron explores the history of Man’s research and investigation in the field of the human spirit.

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it?

Today weapons exist powerful enough to annihilate whole nations. And violence has become commonplace, often in disregard of human life. Why has there been such a lessening of moral responsibility and, most important, what can be done about it? In providing the answers to these questions, Ron explores the history of Man’s research and investigation in the field of the human spirit.