American High

After Donald Trump's rise to power, after the 2020 presidential election, after January 6, is American politics past the point of no return? New York Times columnist Thomas Byrne Edsall fears that the country may be headed over a cliff. In this compelling and illuminating book, Edsall documents how the Trump years ravaged the nation's politics, culture, and social order.

In 1805 and 1806, Aaron Burr, former vice president of the newly formed American republic, traveled through the Trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. This book explores the political and cultural forces that shaped how Americans made sense of the uncertain rumors and reports about Burr's intentions and movements, and examines what the resulting crisis reveals about their anxieties concerning the new nation's fragile union and uncertain republic.

John and Abigail Adams and their descendants have profoundly influenced life in the United States for more than two centuries. From the great political and philosophical contributions of Founding Father and President John Adams, the roster of Adams luminaries is unprecedented: diplomat and sixth president, John Quincy Adams; pre-Civil War "Voice of Honor", Charles Francis Adams; and authors Henry and Brook Adams. The story of the Adams dynasty is as impressive and compelling as its legacy.

In a lifetime shaped by politics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proved himself a master manipulator of Congress, the press, and the public. But when war in Europe and Asia threatened America's shores, FDR found himself in a world turned upside down, where his friends became his foes, his enemies his allies. To help wage democracy's first "total war", he turned to one of history's most remarkable triumvirates.

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives.

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

In this groundbreaking, revisionist history, Larrie D. Ferreiro shows that at the time the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord the colonists had little chance, if any, of militarily defeating the British. The nascent American nation had no navy, little in the way of artillery, and a militia bereft even of gunpowder. In his detailed accounts, Ferreiro shows that without the extensive military and financial support of the French and Spanish, the American cause would never have succeeded.

Robert Lopez's grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family's efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.

Written in Tyrrell's trademark satirical style, How Do We Get Out of Here? is an invaluable and intimate recount of the political and cultural battles that shaped our contemporary politics.

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters.

Celebrating the vast breadth and scope of Black excellence, Make Your Own History spotlights the principles of success exemplified by the lives of 120 Black role models who have blazed trails throughout American history. Make Your Own History gathers together motivational quotes, historical contexts, and enlightening precepts from Black trailblazers spanning the eighteenth century to the present. These insights encompass twelve central themes: courage, self-discipline, compassion, perseverance, teamwork, integrity, industriousness, self-reliance, optimism, purposefulness, civility, and faith.

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?

American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Brian D. Taylor, Eric A. Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of US urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about.

The Marauders uncovers the riveting nonfiction saga of far-right militias terrorizing the border towns of southern Arizona. In one of the towns profiled, Arivaca, rogue militia members killed a man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009. In response, the residents organized and spent two years trying to push the new militias out through boycotts and by urging local businesses to ban them.

Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of fifteen activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities - using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates.

Shale gas extraction - commonly known as fracking - is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet - whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the land beneath our feet - is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent.

Crusades against the automobile are nothing new. Its arrival sparked battles over street space, pitting the masses against the millionaires who terrorized pedestrians. When the masses got cars of their own, they learned to love driving, too. During World War II, Washington nationalized Detroit and postwar Americans embraced car and country as if they were one.

Why have so many middle-class Americans encountered so much financial trouble? In this classic analysis of hard-pressed families, the authors discover that financial stability for many middle-class Americans is all too fragile. The authors consider the changing cultural and economic factors that threaten financial security and what they imply for the future vitality of the middle class. A new preface examines the persistent and new threats that have emerged since the original publication.

Early on, the United States imposed war taxes that both demanded sacrifices from all Americans and served as reminders of their participation. Since the Korean War, the United States has increasingly moved away from war taxes. Instead, borrowing has become a permanent feature of contemporary wars. The move serves leaders well because reducing the apparent burden of war has helped mute public opposition and any decision-making constraints. But by masking accountability, however, the move away from war taxes undermines the basis for democratic restraint in wartime.

In late 2013, Americans were shocked to learn that a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 was there on a mission for the CIA. The missing man, Robert Levinson, appeared in pictures dressed like a Guantánamo prisoner and pleaded in a video for help from the United States.