State Politics

It is well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years in office, the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister worked together to promote lower taxes, deregulation, free trade, and an aggressive stance against the Soviet Union. But according to Nicholas Wapshott, the Reagan/Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests.

Frank Sinatra desperately wanted to be part of John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s gang. He had his own famed "Rat Pack", made up of hard drinking, womanizing individuals like himself - guys like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford - but the guy "Ol' Blue Eyes" really wanted to hang with was Lawford's brother-in-law, the real chairman of the board, John F. Kennedy. In Sinatra and the Jack Pack, Michael Sheridan delves deep into the acclaimed singer's relationship with the former president.

Recalling the classic warnings against militarism, from George Washington's farewell address to Dwight Eisenhower's denunciation of the military-industrial complex, Johnson explores the trend of militarism that is bankrupting the United States and creating conditions for a new century of virulent blowback.

This book paints a vivid picture of Jefferson Davis as a multifaceted, often charismatic man who mirrored the turbulent times in which he lived and who stood solidly for the South that he loved. Ranging over the complete span of his long life, it shows him as a hardworking Mississippi planter, a compassionate slave owner, a hero of the Mexican War, and an able secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. But it is on the years of the Civil War and Davis’s controversial performance as president of the Confederacy that the book focuses.

Like thousands of Aboriginal children in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a student in a church-run residential school. These institutions endeavored to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings; forced separation from family, language, and culture; and strict discipline. In this frank and poignant memoir of her years at St. Joseph's Mission, Sellars breaks her silence about the residential school's lasting effects on her and her family and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics—the politics of ethnocide—played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of Indigenous people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream.” It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. This crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president.

America's political leaders have considered suffrage not a natural right but a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, residence, literacy, criminal conviction, and citizenship. Today, voter identification laws, political gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges deny many millions of citizens the opportunity to express their views at the ballot box. We cannot blame the founders alone for America's embattled vote. Best-selling author Allan Lichtman notes that subsequent generations have failed to establish suffrage as a universal right.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and many around him, including certain other elected Republican officials, intentionally breached their oath to the Constitution: they ignored the rulings of dozens of courts, plotted to overturn a lawful election, and provoked a violent attack on our Capitol.

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved, found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.

The Titans of the Twentieth Century addresses an age-old question: what is the impact of individuals on history? The first half of the twentieth century offered political leaders enormous scope for changing the world. This book consists of essays about eight who, for better and for worse, did just that. Individually, each chapter offers fresh and often surprising portraits of the twentieth century's titans. Collectively, the essays present a vivid and revealing portrait of a turbulent half-century that shaped the world of today.

After 9/11, the United States made one of the most secretive and dangerous deals in its history. The evidence against the powerful Saudis who coordinated the attack would be buried. In return, King Faisal would promise to keep the oil flowing and deal with the conspirators in his midst. When the king's own nephew is discovered funding ISIS, the president suspects that the Saudis never intended to live up to their agreement.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war.

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow reveals in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Fifteen years after the events of the Natchez Burning trilogy, Penn Cage is alone. Nearly all his loved ones are dead, his old allies gone, and he carries a mortal secret that separates him from the world. But Penn’s exile comes to an end when a brawl at a Mississippi rap festival triggers a bloody mass shooting—one that nearly takes the life of his daughter Annie.