United States History

To trace the evolution of the American state, Aaron Good takes a deep-politics approach. The term “deep state” was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it here refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions.

Tracing the birth of a revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and oft-quoted autobiography is as much a manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle of America's Black Panther Party. From Newton's impoverished childhood on the streets of Oakland to his adolescence and struggles with the system, from his role in the Black Panthers to his solitary confinement in the Alameda County Jail, Revolutionary Suicide is unrepentant and thought-provoking in its portrayal of inspired radicalism.

Here is the New York Times and international best seller, revised and expanded with a new afterword. This is the essential update of Fareed Zakaria's analysis about America and its shifting position in world affairs. In this new edition, Zakaria makes sense of the rapidly changing global landscape. With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, he draws on lessons from the two great power shifts of the past 500 years - the rise of the Western world and the rise of the United States - to tell us what we can expect from the third shift, the rise of the rest.

This prize-winning and critically acclaimed history uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from 13 disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The American Story and How to Lead and host of PBS’s History with David Rubenstein—David Rubenstein interviews living American presidents and top historians and journalists who reflect on the US presidency, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Maggie Haberman, Ron Chernow, and more.

A spellbinding storyteller, historian David O. Stewart traces the canny and charismatic Aaron Burr from the threshold of the presidency in 1800 to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Stewart recounts Burr’s efforts to carve out an empire, taking listeners across the American West as the renegade vice president schemes with foreign ambassadors, the U.S. general-in-chief, and future presidents.

Winner of three book awards, The Lavender Scare masterfully traces the origins of contemporary sexual politics to Cold War hysteria over national security. Drawing on newly declassified documents and interviews with former government officials, historian David Johnson chronicles how the myth that homosexuals threatened national security determined government policy for decades, ruined thousands of lives, and pushed many to suicide. As Johnson shows, this myth not only outlived McCarthy but, by the 1960s, helped launch a new civil rights struggle.

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”

According the New York Times’ “1619 Project”, America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. Ever since then, the “1619 Project” argues, American history has been one long sordid tale of systemic racism.

The French and Indian War: 1660-1763 covers much more than the few years during which the English and French fought over the division of the North American continent in one of the most neglected periods of American history. In this volume in the Drama of American History series, authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier trace how England’s other rivals for control of America were eliminated over this period until the only source of conflict left would be between the British and their own colonists.

In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

This story is told in the words of a tragic figure in American history - a hook-nosed, hollow-cheeked old Sauk warrior who lived under four flags while the Mississippi Valley was being wrested from his people. The author is Black Hawk himself - once pursued by an army whose members included Captain Abraham Lincoln and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Perhaps no Indian ever saw so much of American expansion or fought harder to prevent that expansion from driving his people to exile and death.

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014 and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'Black rage', historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she wrote, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.'

The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

As countries in Europe grew their military power in 1914, so did their fear of being attacked. Alliances were made and tested! Europe was split into two central powers—this was the birth of World War I. When America entered the Great War, they used carrier pigeons to send messages to their allies. Discover how one pigeon, Cher Ami, became famous for his mission to headquarters.

Devotion tells the inspirational story of the U.S. Navy’s most famous aviation duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, and the Marines they fought to defend. A white New Englander from the country-club scene, Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighters for his country. An African American sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Jesse became the navy’s first Black carrier pilot, defending a nation that wouldn’t even serve him in a bar.

Peter Dale Scott has written extensively on the Kennedy assassination and other dark corners of the American political scene. His encyclopedic knowledge enables him to connect the dots among the players, the organizations, and the unacknowledged collusions--the deep politics-- of our often troubled political system. Deep Politics on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba, originally published in 1995, narrows the focus of Scott's earlier Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.

Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.