Social Civics

What is America becoming? Or, more importantly, what can she be if we reclaim a vision for the things that made her great in the first place? In America the Beautiful, Dr. Ben Carson helps us learn from our past in order to chart a better course for our future. From his personal ascent from inner-city poverty to international medical and humanitarian acclaim, Carson shares experiential insights that help us understand: What is good about America, where we have gone astray, and which fundamental beliefs have guided America from her founding into preeminence among nations.

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as best-selling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today.

In their own words and their own voices, these contributors prove that ordinary citizens can make a difference. They offer practical resources to turn inspiration into action. From effective online petitions to getting out informed voters, this empowering audio is an essential guide for being involved based on one criterion: a heartfelt desire to better our communities and country.

When Lee H. Hamilton joined Congress in 1965 as a US Representative from southern Indiana, he began writing commentaries for his constituents describing his experiences, impressions, and developing views of what was right and wrong in American politics. He continued to write regularly throughout his 34 years in office and up to the present. Lively and full of his distinctive insights, Hamilton's essays provide vivid accounts of national milestones over the past 50 years.

In his widely acclaimed volume Our Undemocratic Constitution, Sanford Levinson boldly argued that our Constitution should not be treated with "sanctimonious reverence," but as a badly flawed document deserving revision. Now Levinson takes us deeper, asking what were the original assumptions underlying our institutions, and whether we accept those assumptions 225 years later.

An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including 18 years in the U.S. Senate, she explained that Washington wasn’t solving the big problems anymore. In this timely call to action, she explores the roots of her belief in principled policy-making and bipartisan compromise.

With almost 20 million listeners on more than six hundred stations, Rush Limbaugh is the leading and most dangerous figure in the conservative movement today. John K. Wilson uses the most effective strategy of all—Rush’s own words—to show how Limbaugh’s flagrant disregard for the truth and penchant for savage personal attacks laced with racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs have held the political arena hostage.

Ciudadanía Americana ¡Hecho Fácil! Todo el inglés que usted necesita saber para el nuevo examen de naturalización Para que sea aún más fácil, ¡el inglés está escrito en español! ¡El examen de ciudadanía cambió! Ya no son solamente las 100 preguntas típicas de historia, el nuevo examen de naturalización contiene preguntas sobre temas como.

No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty. Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy.

America is full of inspiring heroes. Greatness is not a chance—it is a choice. George Washington didn’t simply wake up as one of the greatest men in human history. His greatness was the sum of a lifetime of difficult and consequential choices. In Lessons in Liberty, Jeremy S. Adams distills inspiring advice from the lives of extraordinary Americans from our past.

Based on extensive research with organizations and companies that are boldly breaking out of business as usual, Beloved Economies offer listeners an imagination-expanding vision of what work could be. Authors Rimington and Cea explore possibilities for how we work, learning with more than sixty people from a wide array of enterprises. What these groups have in common is that they are generating forms of success that audaciously prioritize well-being, meaning, connection and resilience—alongside conventional metrics like quality and financial success.

"Es precisamente esa otra consolación ante la vejez […] lo que me mueve a mí […] a dirigirte ahora esta larga misiva desde Atenas. […]. Tú has dejado claro en tu obra, al hablarnos de que las dificultades de la vejez no provienen tanto de la edad como del carácter y de la actitud vital de las personas, que envejecer es, en un alto grado, un empeño ético; y yo deseo ahora que reflexionemos sobre si el hecho de que nuestra sociedad esté o no organizada y facultada para posibilitar dicho empeño no hace del envejecer, también, un propósito político".

El esfuerzo griego por construir un espacio humano donde fuera posible la justicia y donde el destino común estuviera regido por la voluntad de los hombres se vinculó desde el origen a la existencia de ciudadanos: ellos eran la ciudad y, por tanto, el Estado.

El empresariado inconsciente es un análisis profundo del pensamiento de la élite económica que ofrece información tan interesante como sorprendente sobre las posturas, preocupaciones e inquietudes de los dueños del dinero.

In 1987, E. L. Doctorow celebrated the Constitution's bicentennial by reading it. "It is five thousand words long but reads like fifty thousand," he said. Distinguished legal scholar Garrett Epps disagrees. It's about 7,500 words. In American Epic, Epps takes us through a complete reading of the Constitution to achieve an appreciation of its power and a holistic understanding of what it says. In this book he seeks not to provide a definitive interpretation, but to listen to the language and ponder its meaning.

En 2004 Michoacán se resquebrajó. Ese año, los cárteles, insatisfechos con las ganancias obtenidas con el tráfico de drogas, diversificaron sus actividades e incursionaron en la extorsión, el secuestro, el pillaje y, en el colmo del sadismo, la violación y la tortura. Después de una década de violencia desatada, los habitantes de la zona reaccionaron. Empobrecidos por los embates del crimen, olvidados por las autoridades, furiosos y hartos, decidieron tomar la justicia en sus manos.

In The Second Amendment, Michael Waldman traces the ongoing argument on gun rights from the Bill of Rights to the current day. Now, in The Fight to Vote, Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at an even more crucial struggle: the past and present effort to define and defend government based on "the consent of the governed". From the writing of the Constitution, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought the right, others have fought to stop them.

Extinction Rebellion (XR, for short) is an emergency response. Politics as usual, governments, as usual, have let down the peoples of the world in an extreme way: We are on course for eco-driven societal collapse, and we are extinguishing other species very rapidly. We could even end up making ourselves extinct. XR suggests that when your government is driving you and your family over a cliff, it is no longer a legitimate government. Rebellion against it is permitted - indeed, it is required. But XR is insistent that such rebellion must be nonviolent.

Losing Control is a vivid history of the past half century of immigration politics and policy. It is also a dramatic ground-level account of how the story took shape. Kammer describes the economic and cultural forces that both pushed millions of migrants from home communities in Latin America and pulled them northward to the US. He shows how the backlash gradually emerged from the frustrations of American workers and communities who felt overwhelmed by the influx and betrayed by their government.

Ethical leadership, steeped in integrity and fairness, matters. The future of our nation and our world depends upon the quality of America's character. In this uncompromising, absorbing look at our government and society today, Jill Long Thompson persuasively argues that we all have a meaningful role to play in shaping America's character and future. The citizenry, as well as their elected officials, are responsible for protecting fairness of participation and integrity in elections, as well as in the adoption and execution of laws.