American Political Science

A short, accessible collection of key historic writings about presidential impeachment, as part of a new Penguin Classics series on liberty and constitutional rights.

Step right up and take a front-row seat at the most colorful spectacle in the world: American politics! Yanks at Odds: A Brit's Irreverent Guide to Healing the American Political Divide by Bryan Sutherland offers a delightfully irreverent yet incisive exploration of the American political divide. Sutherland serves up a hearty helping of wit, wisdom, and warm British humor as he navigates the sometimes baffling, often tumultuous world of American politics.

From Chris Matthews, best selling author of Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, comes this celebration of the American spirit. Matthews presents a portrait of a country that enters the world arena armed with an extremely potent weapon: the collective notions we carry of America at its best. It's a picture of more than just a nation challenged but a people ready and eager to prevail.

Throughout his career as an author, journalist, television commentator, and head of a presidential library and foundation, Mark Updegrove has had the privilege of getting to know seven U.S. Presidents, from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. In Make Your Mark, he offers incisive, compelling sketches of these modern presidents and the character trait that made each suited to his moment in the Oval Office and underlies his most significant accomplishments.

This book is the story of how the "Baby Ninths" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an "etcetera, etcetera" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights "retained by the people" that these "etcetera clauses" are designed to guarantee.

Since Thomas Jefferson first recorded those self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence, America has been a nation that has unfolded as much on the page and the podium as on battlefields or in statehouses. Here Stephen Prothero reveals which texts continue to generate controversy and drive debate. He then puts these voices into conversation, tracing how prominent leaders and thinkers of one generation have commented upon the core texts of another, and invites listeners to join in.

In today's post-truth political landscape, there is a carefully concealed but ever-growing industry of organized misinformation that exists to create and disseminate lies in the service of political agendas. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America present a revelatory history of this industry - which they've dubbed Lies, Incorporated - and show how it has crippled legislative progress on issues including tobacco regulation, public health care, climate change, gun control, immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians - who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives - and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold - a grime-stained scrap of fabric - that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal.

Former congressional staffer turned George Washington University grad school professor Casey Burgat leads a diverse team of officials, academics, and experts from both sides of the aisle to expose the lies at the heart of our political dysfunction. They debunk talking points about term limits, lobbyists, money in politics, and more—offering real-world insights into how our government actually works.

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.

A prominent conservative scholar traces the post-1960s divisions between the Right and the Left, taking aim at liberals' victimization of African Americans and their failure to offer a viable way forward for American society. The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress.

For Henry David Thoreau, there was no separation between public politics and personal principle. "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" is his famous account of the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery and waged war. His impassioned stand for justice later inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many other peaceful revolutionaries. This volume includes Thoreau's other important political writings: "A Plea for Captain John Brown", "Life Without Principle", and the poem "Independence".

Essays, speeches, and letters on constitution ratification, pardoning powers, the Bank of the U.S., and foreign policy illuminate not only Hamilton’s legacy but his compelling engagement with Madison, Jefferson, and Adams, and his legendary conflict with Burr.

Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy.

Meena Menon was The Hindu's correspondent in Islamabad till she was expelled by the Pakistani authorities in May 2014. In spite of her truncated stay and the restrictions placed on her movements, Menon managed to write on a range of subjects covering swathes of life in Islamabad.

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.

Politics Reformed makes a provocative contribution to understanding foundational questions in an era of rising fundamentalism and emboldened secularism, inspiring listeners to rethink the importance of religion in political theory and practice, and the role of the covenant tradition in particular.

In August 1974, after his involvement in the Watergate scandal could no longer be denied, Richard Nixon became the first and only president to resign from office in anticipation of certain impeachment. Tom Brokaw, who was then the young NBC News White House correspondent, gives us a nuanced and thoughtful chronicle, recalling the players, the strategies, and the scandal that brought down a president.

On April 4, 1968, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked the nation. Later that month, the Reverend John Brooks, a professor of theology at the College of the Holy Cross who shared Dr. King’s dream of an integrated society, drove up and down the East Coast searching for African American high school students to recruit to the school, young men he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas and Theodore Wells....

With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.