United States Government

Instead of the system that the Constitution intended, judges have created a system in which bureaucrats and appointed officials make most of the important policies. While the government claims to be a representative republic, somehow hot-button topics from gay marriage to the allocation of Florida's presidential electors always seem to be decided by unelected judges. What gives them the right to decide such issues? The judges say it's the Constitution.

Building a riveting narrative around four influential members of Congress - Thaddeus Stevens, Pitt Fessenden, Ben Wade, and the pro-slavery Clement Vallandigham - Fergus Bordewich shows us how a newly empowered Republican party shaped one of the most dynamic and consequential periods in American history.

Andrew Jackson’s America examines the events and personalities, particularly President Andrew Jackson, that shaped the development of the United States during the first half of the 19th century. Learn about the influence that Andrew Jackson had on the way America developed, the industrial revolution and the beginning of the two-party system.

Mississippi, 1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered by a white mob after making flirtatious remarks to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Till's attackers were never convicted, but his lynching became one of the most notorious hate crimes in American history. It launched protests across the country, helped the NAACP gain thousands of members, and inspired famous activists like Rosa Parks to stand up and fight for equal rights for the first time.

In this, the first broad historical overview of labor in the United States in 20 years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. Unlike recent books that have covered labor in the 20th century, Labor's Story in the United States looks at the broad landscape of labor since before the Revolution. Throughout, the audiobook focuses on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of democracy, painting a vivid picture of the strength of labor movements.

An acclaimed chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, Peniel Joseph presents this sweeping overview of a key component of the struggle for racial equality: the Black Power movement. This is the story of the men and women who sacrificed so much to begin a more vocal and radical push for social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Historian Sean Wilentz presents two key insights that together reveal a clearer, much-needed vision of American political history. First, partisanship has almost always been a feature of American history and in fact has made possible the nation's greatest social reforms. There is little to be gained from a "postpartisan" political world. Second, the recent attention to economic inequality has a long history. From the founders' generation to the present, America's egalitarian tradition has appeared and reappeared like an underground river.

A penetrating look at the necessity of constitutional limits upon government and exceptional men to lead those governments, uniquely taken by overlaying the life and writings of Winston Churchill with the American experiment.

George Washington's Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a "parting friend" to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. Its message remains starkly relevant. In Washington's Farewell, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," were two of the most important Founders of the United States as well as the closest of political allies. Yet historians have often seen a tension between the idealistic rhetoric of the Declaration and the more pedestrian language of the Constitution. Moreover, to some, the adoption of the Constitution represented a repudiation of the democratic values of the Revolution.

A leading Supreme Court expert recounts the personal and philosophical rivalries that forged our nation's highest court and continue to shape our daily lives. The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government, and yet the Court is at root a human institution, made up of very bright people with very strong egos, for whom political and judicial conflicts often become personal.

Once upon a time. Happily ever after. Such are the classic promises of fairy tales. Yet in Texas we find a twist to the familiar storyline. In If the Devil Had a Wife, there is still the battle of Good vs. Evil, a beautiful maiden, a wealthy suitor, a kingdom of riches and the wicked witch, but any similarity with Cinderella and Snow White ends there. With the help of her life partner and an attorney (always necessary in these modern times), Nelda Stark executes a devious plan that elevates fraud and theft to a new high.

Trump and Churchill both fought valiantly to protect Western Civilization, and while fighting different forms of tyranny, Trump could very well be to the 21st century what Churchill was to the 20th. What do Winston Churchill - the eloquent, eternally quotable wordsmith, pudgy politician of 50 years, wealthy aristocrat, war-time Prime Minister of England - and Donald Trump, the 6'4", brash, Twitter happy, political neophyte, billionaire entrepreneur - have in common?

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights.

In addition, Remini explains the reasons for the nation's unique and enduring strengths, its artistic and cultural accomplishments, its genius in developing new products to sell to the world, and its abiding commitment to individual freedoms.

Ex-British Army Soldier, John Carney, ran a close protection operation in Iraq for oil executives when he was asked by the family of a young Dutch woman to extract her from the collapsing Islamic State in Syria. Hearing first-hand of the shocking living hell of tricked naive young girls, many from the West, trapped, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing - he had to get them out. Armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks, he launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many as he could.

The story of America has always been shaped by people from all corners of the Earth who came in search of a better life and a brighter future. Immigration remains one of the critical topics in 21st century America, and how our children learn the lessons of the past will shape all our futures. The patriotic stories of hope that shape most immigration books are supplemented here by the lesser-known stories of those denied, detained, and deported.

The Reconstruction and Rise of Jim Crow describes the fallout of the Civil War, whose aftermath left the United States South angry and poor. This book details the struggles to decide how to deal with the newly freed slaves, through the years of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and segregation. The storyline also sets the stage for the country’s next battle, which is between the Jim Crow laws and the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Using a narrative format, Creating the Constitution details the events leading up to the writing of the US Constitution and what American leaders went through to create it. The authors describe the conflicts between the new states and the delegates each sent to the Constitutional Convention, as well as the work that was done to resolve the many issues at hand.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who drew from his own experiences as an African-American living in American society, explores the concept of "double-consciousness"—a term he uses to describe living as an African-American and having a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." With Du Bois' examination of Black life in post-Civil War America, his explanation of the meaning of emancipation and its effect, and his views on the roles of the black leaders of his time, The Souls of Black Folk is one of the important early works in the field of sociology.