United States Government

With the sweep and vitality of a great novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough presents the enthralling story of John Adams. This is history on a grand scale - an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Read by History Channel host Edward Herrmann!

In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.

In Fearless Speech, Dr. Mary Anne Franks emphasizes the distinction between what speech a democratic society should protect and what speech a democratic society should promote. While the First Amendment in theory is politically neutral, in practice it has been legally deployed most visibly and effectively to promote powerful antidemocratic interests: misogyny, racism, religious zealotry, and corporate self-interest—in other words, reckless speech. Instead, Franks argues, we need to focus on fearless speech.

How does the president get his job? How do people know who will win an election before everybody’s voted? Do the candidates hate each other? Dan Gutman takes on his strangest subject ever: the American political system. Reaching through history from the days of the founding fathers to today’s voting system, Gutman tackles complex subjects in a clear, easy-to-understand way. Even grown-ups will find something in here that they’ve never learned before.

Is economic—or broader—conflict, well beyond the trade and technology war that has already erupted, inevitable between the world’s two superpowers? Will their clash produce a new economic leadership vacuum akin to the 1930s, when Great Britain was unable to play its traditional leadership role and a rising United States was unwilling to step in to save the global order?

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.

Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

For two centuries, the Framers' ideas about political corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically. No case makes that clearer than Citizens United.

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy - author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law - “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

For the past three decades, the United States and Iran have been engaged in an unacknowledged secret war. This conflict has frustrated five American presidents, divided administrations, and repeatedly threatened to bring the two nations to the brink of open warfare. Drawing upon unparalleled access to senior officials and key documents of several US administrations, David Crist, a senior historian in the federal government, breaks new ground in virtually every section of The Twilight War.

Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American history - yet it has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. In Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic. Beginning in the years before the eruption of war, Fischer illuminates the figure of Paul Revere.

This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide nonrecognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Today, we are at a turning point as we face ecological and political crises that are rooted in conflicts over the land itself. But these problems can be solved if we draw on elements of our tradition that move us toward a new commonwealth - a community founded on the well-being of all people and the natural world.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America and learn about the founding of America.

Throughout the history of warfare, the practice of placing blame on innocent parties in order to justify attacking them has been a constant feature. In the 20th century, this practice began to be commonly referred to as a “false flag” operation. The essence of a false flag scenario is that it is conducted by one party or government and “made to appear as though another party sponsored it".

Cindy Hensley was just out of college when she met and fell in love with the celebrated Navy hero John McCain. They embarked on a thrilling life together that put her at the center of American politics for over four decades. Stronger, her moving and inspiring memoir, tells the story of her adventurous life with John for the first time.

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.

G.C. "Red" Jones' classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of "Bloody Harlan", and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history.

The United States has two separate banking systems today - one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessities - all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s.