Public History

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient - safety movement - and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem.

In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe.

Bailout Nation offers one of the clearest looks at the financial lenders, regulators, and politicians responsible for the financial crisis of 2008. Written by Barry Ritholtz, one of the most popular economic bloggers and a well-established industry pundit, this book skillfully explores how the United States evolved from a rugged independent nation to a soft Bailout Nation - where financial firms are allowed to self-regulate in good times, but are bailed out by taxpayers in bad times.

The recent economic crisis was a dramatic reminder that capitalism can both produce and destroy. It's a system that by its very nature encourages predators and creators, locusts and bees. But, as Geoff Mulgan argues in this compelling, imaginative, and important book, the economic crisis also presents a historic opportunity to choose a radically different future for capitalism, one that maximizes its creative power and minimizes its destructive force.

Did Wall Street cause the mess we are in? Should Washington place stronger regulations on the financial industry? Can we lower unemployment rates by controlling the free market? Answer: no. Not only is free-market capitalism good for the economy, it is our only hope for recovery. As the nation’s longest-serving CEO of one of the top 25 financial institutions, John Allison has had a unique inside view of the events leading up to the financial crisis.

Alex Davies tells the “illuminating and important narrative” (Steven Levy, author of Facebook: The Inside Story) of the quest to develop driverless cars—and the fierce competition between Google, Uber, and other companies in a race to revolutionize our lives. The self-driving car has been...

Though often taken for granted, the modern American public defender is a recent invention with a surprisingly contentious history - one that offers insights not only about the "carceral state" but also about the contours and compromises of 20th-century liberalism.

The time has come to acknowledge that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation's history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the southern border, starting on Inauguration Day in 2021, and millions more will cross over by the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. This event is historic by all measures, exceeding even the storied chronicles of Ellis Island, and portends the same permanent change for the nation. Unfortunately, a fog of a fierce partisan information war obscures that it is even happening.

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was—and is—a world-class lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues.

From writer, award-winning placemaker and urbanist, Jay Pitter, this is a profoundly beautiful and essential text that asserts, with intimacy and insight, our collective responsibility to protect and enhance each other’s public joy. When Jay Pitter was growing up in a poorly designed...

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson distilled a leading idea in the early American republic and wrote of a wall of separation between church and state. That metaphor has come down from Jefferson to 21st-century Americans through a long history of jurisprudence, political contestation, and cultural influence. This book traces the development of the concept of separation of church and state and the Supreme Court's application of it in the law.

The enthralling, can't-put-down account of the birth of the modern FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was the face of the FBI. But the federal agents in the field, relentlessly chasing the most notorious gangsters of the 1930s with their own lives on the line, truly transformed the Bureau. In 1932, the FBI...

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

The Illicit Global Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® answers the key questions about how illicit global markets are structured and operate, how they intersect with state institutions and practices, how they interact with the legal economy, and how they shape and are shaped by domestic and international politics.

One hundred fifty years ago, the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail. The Chisholm Trail follows the McCoys' vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post-Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade.

This book offers a series of problems in thinking that require no special knowledge and no mathematics. The problems are designed to let readers find out about their personal style of thinking, its weaknesses and strengths, and the potential methods that they never use. Being right is not always important - an error can lead to the right decision.

The Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, subsequent war in Eastern Ukraine, and economic sanctions imposed by the West transformed European politics. The conflict did not escalate to the levels originally feared but nor was either side able to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Ukraine suffered a loss of territory but was not forced into changing its policies away from the Westward course adopted as a result of the EuroMaidan uprising of February 2014. President Putin was left supporting a separatist enclave as Russia's economy suffered significant damage.

A thrilling celebration of a forgotten early American renegade, Not Your Founding Father reconsiders just how radical the American experiment could have been. Early in the morning of October 9, 1776—in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry...

In The Emergency State, leading global affairs commentator David C. Unger reveals the hidden costs of America's obsessive pursuit of absolute national security. In the decades since World War II, presidents from both parties have assumed broad war-making powers never intended by the Constitution and intervened abroad to preserve our credibility rather than our security, while trillions of tax dollars have been diverted from essential domestic needs to the Pentagon. Yet ironically, this pursuit has not just damaged our democracy and undermined our economic strength....

The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decision-making in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.