United States Government

Meticulously formatted, this is a highly listenable edition of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogation and detention programs launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Students and enthusiasts of American history are familiar with the Revolutionary War spies Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, but few studies have closely examined the wider intelligence efforts that enabled the colonies to gain their independence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides readers with a fascinating, well-documented, and highly readable account of American intelligence activities during the era of the Revolutionary War, from 1765 to 1783.

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority, James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today.

Gore Vidal - novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist - is America’s premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.

Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.

When historians want to find out about the ideas that motivated American foreign policy in the early years of the twenty-first century, they would do well to read this book. Robert Kagan has formally set out a case for unilateralism on the part of the United States, as opposed to the multilateralism now characteristic of Europe. Kagan believes that the United States can disregard a weak Europe, and have a free hand in pursuing its global interests.

In today’s world, we live in a culture of truth suppression. This is true in representative democracies like the United States as well as full totalitarian dictatorships like Communist China. This book covers many areas of major lies like global warming, perverted doctrines taught in schools, politics, news suppression, Communist China, limitations in spirituality, deficit spending, and problems with globalism.

As violence in Iraq reaches unnerving levels in 2006, a second front in the war rages at the highest levels of the Bush administration. With unparalleled intimacy and detail, Bob Woodward takes listeners deep inside the tensions, secret debates, unofficial back channels, distrust, and determination within the White House, Pentagon, State Department, intelligence agencies, and U.S. military headquarters in Iraq.

From comedian to president to freedom fighter, this is the story of Volodymyr Zelensky, the man who stood up to Vladimir Putin and forever changed the world. The authors of Zelensky chronicle his rise, discuss the changing attitudes toward him by Ukrainians there and abroad, and include some of his most stirring speeches.

In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.

In the summer of 1992, federal agents surrounded a few acres of land isolated in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where Randy Weaver, his wife Vicki, his 14 year old son Samuel, and his three young daughters were staying. Weaver was a former Green Beret who had come to the attention of the ATF and other federal agencies for a number of reasons, including associations with white supremacist groups and the possession of illegal shotguns.

In this unflinching exploration of corruption in America, Chayes exposes how corruption has thrived within our borders - from the titans of America's Gilded Age (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, et al.) to the collapse of the stock market in 1929, the Great Depression, and FDR's New Deal; from Joe Kennedy's years of banking, bootlegging, machine politics, and pursuit of infinite wealth to the deregulation of the Reagan Revolution - undermining this nation's proud middle class and union members.

How the Best Did It is an accessible and insightful explanation of how the most important leadership traits from America's eight greatest presidents can be implemented by today's leaders.

Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers—the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. No other nation commits so many important questions to its highest court. Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative history of the United States Supreme Court from the Founding era to the present.

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins.

At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With US power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War's "Third World"-developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union.

Unlike the women who descended on Washington in 2017 to protest the inauguration of President Trump, the women of January 6 did not come as women. They came as Americans, as patriots, as defenders of the republic. They did not wear pink hats. They wore MAGA hats. Their issues were indistinguishable from those of the men in their lives—the rule of law, free and fair elections, and the preservation of constitutional rights. They brought no laundry list of special needs like, say, “reproductive rights,” because they understood that no one was challenging their right to reproduce.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress.

How much do you know about the Constitution of the United States or even about those brave men who are considered Founding Fathers? Sure, you may have been forced to read the Declaration of Independence in elementary school but do you even remember its intent? Take a brief walk back in time to learn more about how each of these documents was created, who developed the text, and who ultimately signed these powerful writings that dictate the rules and laws of our democracy.