Nonfiction Political History

The year 2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, yet even as the war slips from living memory, its legacies continue to influence current political and military thinking. This anthology will analyze these legacies for a number of countries and regions, including China, Russia, the United States, the Near East, and Germany, illustrating in detail how World War II is not merely a historical event, but a defining moment for current military and political thinking around the globe.

This New York Times bestseller shares the rich history of the White House grounds, revealing how the story of the garden is also the story of America. The 18-acres surrounding the White House have been an unwitting witness to history—kings and queens have dined there, bills and treaties have...

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet...

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.

In the late nineteenth century, white lawmakers in the United States created a set of policies, collectively called “Jim Crow,” that created segregated facilities, like schools and parks, for African Americans in the South. But Jim Crow–type policies didn’t just affect the South. These policies have had far-reaching effects across America, impacting where Black people live, how they’re treated by the criminal justice system, and how they’re portrayed in TV and film.

If greatness is measured by achievement, Orrin Hatch was the greatest U.S. senator of modern times—discover the life and career of the senator through archival material, original research, and exclusive interviews. This is the dramatic story of a conservative champion who shaped modern...

This provocative account of our immigration system's long, racist history reveals how it has become the brutal machine that upends the lives of millions of immigrants today. Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what...

The definitive story of one American family at the center of a single, shocking act of international terrorism that "manages to capture the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (Dan Ephron). On October 3, 1985, Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish New Yorker, and his wife boarded the...

This riveting memoir follows a Lebanese-Muslim-American and thirty-year US Marine veteran who suffered a six-month ordeal at the hands of a brutal regime in Yemen—and remained loyal to his country through it all. As air strikes carpeted Yemen's capital, Sam Farran was one of only a few...

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injustice About 170,000 black Americans have died in homicides just since the year 2000. Violence takes more years of life...

Madeleine Westerhout, the former "gatekeeper" of the Trump White House, writes about her relationship with the president, and tells the story of the terrible mistake that led to her losing her job. From the first day President Trump stepped into the White House, Madeleine Westerhout was by his...

No one man or woman has ever been in a position to see the presidents, and the presidency, so intimately, over so many years. They called him in for photo opportunities. They called for comfort. They asked about death and salvation; about sin and forgiveness. At a time when the nation is...

In American Patriots, historian Ralph Young chronicles the key role dissent has played in shaping the United States. Some of these protesters are celebrated heroes of American history, while others are ordinary people, frequently overlooked, whose stories show that change is often accomplished through grassroots activism. Yet not all dissent is equal. In 2021, thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol, and Americans on both sides of the aisle watched the destruction with horror. American Patriots contrasts this attack with the history of American protest.

Wrongful intolerance has existed in American society for more than four centuries. Us and Them illuminates the shadowy corners of our national past and traces the country’s continuing efforts to measure up to its lofty ideals. Through 14 dramatic narratives, listeners witness epic struggles that shaped our collective identity. These and eight other forgotten incidents of history come to life in clear and vibrant prose.

Through meticulously researched and stirring accounts — some well known and some chronicled here in book form for the first time — Doreen Rappaport brings to light the defiance of tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These resisters answered the genocidal madness and unspeakable depravity that was Hitler’s Holocaust with the greatest weapons of all — courage, ingenuity, the will to survive, and the resolve to save others or to die trying.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future? These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power.

Born in a cabin deep in the backwoods of Kentucky and growing up in a family considered the poorest of the poor, Abraham Lincoln rose to become the 16th president of the United States. As president, he guided the United States through the Civil War, helped end slavery in America, and strengthened the federal government. This third installment in the Making of America series continues the story of the first 100 years of America's constitutional history, a story that began with Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson.

After rising to national fame as the general who defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson ran for president as a political outsider, championing the interest of common farmers and frontiersmen. Determined to take down the wealthy, well-educated East Coast elites, he pledged to destroy the national bank, which he believed was an engine of corruption serving the interest of bankers and industrialists. A staunch nationalist, he sought to secure and expand the nation's borders.

Introduction read by the author. An eye-opening new history of American political conflict, from Alexander Hamilton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These days it seems that nobody is satisfied with American democracy. Critics across the ideological spectrum warn that the country is heading toward...

In the summer of 1776, when Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence, declaring that “all men are created equal,” he wasn’t alone. With him was Robert Hemings, just one of the many Black people Jefferson enslaved. But who was Robert Hemings? Discover his story and the true history of those who really helped build America. Featuring riveting interviews with historians, including Margaret Kimberley, author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents, The Founders Unmasked is a quest for the whole truth, good and bad.