State Science

For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes.

More than almost anything else, globalization and the great world religions are shaping our lives, affecting everything from the public policies of political leaders and the economic decisions of industry bosses and employees to university curricula, all the way to the inner longings of our hearts. Integral to both globalization and religions are compelling, overlapping, and sometimes competing visions of what it means to live well.

In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.

Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. In Russia, to this day, Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere he continues to fascinate as a man who made history and who created a new kind of state that would later be imitated by nearly half the countries in the world.

In 1765, 11 years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur'an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America.

In Dead Presidents, NPR host Brady Carlson takes listeners to presidential gravesites, monuments, and memorials to tell the death stories of our greatest leaders. Mixing biography and travelogue, Carlson explores whether William Henry Harrison really died of a cold, why Zachary Taylor's remains were exhumed 140 years after his death, and how what killed James A. Garfield wasn't an assassin's bullet.

Darlene and Mike fight not only the foreign enemy on United States soil but the foes within the populace of America in the exciting third book of this World War 3 apocalyptic tale. Faced with chaos and disorder all around them, the survivors must not only reach Osceola but make sure it stays outside of enemy hands in this epic thriller!

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation's founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders' thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch's Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero.

The 2024 election could be the last free election held in a unified America. So warns Robert Kagan in this brilliant and terrifying analysis of the perilous state of democracy in the United States today. If Donald Trump loses the upcoming election, as he did in 2020, but refuses to accept the result, as he also did in the last election, he is likely to call on his millions of followers to repudiate the election results. It will be a short step from there to Republican-dominated states rejecting the legitimacy of the federal government and effectively seceding.

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.

It is June 1936. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) has finally been granted a visa for asylum in Norway, having been banned first from living in Paris, and then the whole of France. With him comes the draft of The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, which is completed and sent to the publishers on the 4th of August. The book, published by Faber in 1937, is considered to be Trotsky’s major work on Stalinism.

The country is fighting losing battles on both coasts and from within as the desperate and the despicable fight for diminishing resources. American forces have been pushed to the brink and have been forced toward the center of the country in a frenzied bid to regroup. Darlene Bobich and her group struggle to elude capture from the Sawyer clan, hell-bent on enslaving everyone in sight. Meanwhile, Mike, BT and what remains of the National Guard forces are caught up in a multi-national conflict that could spell the end of the American way.

The Making of the President: 1960 revolutionized the way modern presidential campaigns are reported. Reporting from within the campaign for the first time on record, White’s extensive research and access to all parties involved set the bar for campaign coverage and remains unparalleled. White conveyed, in magnificent detail and with exquisite pacing, the high-stakes drama; he painted the unforgettable, even mythic story of JFK versus Nixon; and, most of all, he imbued the nation’s presidential election process with grandeur.

In this direct, concise, and essential volume, Harold R. Johnson examines the justice system's failures to deliver "peace and good order" to Indigenous people. He explores the part that he understands himself to have played in that mismanagement, drawing on insights he has gained from the experience; insights into the roots and immediate effects of how the justice system has failed Indigenous people, in all the communities in which they live; and insights into the struggle for peace and good order for Indigenous people now.

As a member of the RPS, Daphne Niell, also known as the Vampire of Montana, lives to serve. On a good day, she hunts terrorists and eliminates them before they can strike. On a bad one, His Royal Majesty of Montana, also known as her twerp of a cousin, sends her overseas to play nice with foreign monarchs.

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.

When World War 3 erupts on American soil, it is up to some less than likely heroes to band together and stand tall against any and all comers as a once proud nation is brought to her knees. Cowardly terrorist attacks and indifferent global communities have isolated America as she spirals into a desperate bid for survival.

United States of Japan is set in a gripping alternate history where the Japanese Empire rules over America with huge robots. Is resistance possible in the form of subversive video games? Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons, a group of rebels fighting for freedom.

The first of two biographical volumes, Professor Robert C. Tucker covers Stalin's life from his first revolutionary years until the end of the 1920s. This important period of his life is the key to understanding how a dictator is formed and how his cruel totalitarian regime was born. With an in-depth analysis of Stalin's personality and beliefs - set against a historical examination of Soviet society - this captivating book helps us to understand how and why Stalinism occurred.