Political History

Since the election of Scott Walker, Wisconsin has been seen as ground zero for debates about the appropriate role of government in the wake of the Great Recession. In a time of rising inequality, Walker not only survived a bitterly contested recall that brought thousands of protesters to Capitol Square, he was subsequently reelected. How could this happen? How is it that the very people who stand to benefit from strong government services not only vote against the candidates who support those services but are vehemently against the very idea of big government?

This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.

i>Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: What makes people live and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their names?

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER America has always been a nation of laws. But today our laws have grown so vast and reach so deeply into our lives that it’s worth asking: In our reverence for law, have we gone too far? Over just the last few decades, laws in this nation have exploded in number...

An inspiring survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China makes a passionate case that history is eerily repeating itself as the Woke Revolution spreads across America. Xi Van Fleet lived through the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a schoolgirl. Forced to the countryside with...

Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors - including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave - Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller and offers a gripping day-by-day account of what really happened behind the scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.

A major new collection from "arguably the most important intellectual alive" ( The New York Times). Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's recent talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has written a revolutionary road map to saving our children from leftist indoctrination. Behind a smokescreen of “preparing students for the new industrial economy,” early progressives had...

Economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.

How to Win an Election is an ancient Roman guide for campaigning that is as up-to-date as tomorrow's headlines. In 64 BC when idealist Marcus Cicero, Rome's greatest orator, ran for consul (the highest office in the Republic), his practical brother Quintus decided he needed some no-nonsense advice on running a successful campaign.

“This is the book I have been waiting for.”—Rachel Maddow INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | The FBI veteran behind the Russia investigation draws on decades of experience hunting foreign agents in the United States to lay bare the threat posed by President Trump. “Peter Strzok is...

A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the...

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

The New York Times bestseller “A clear and concise account of the history, diplomacy, economics, and societal forces that have molded the modern global system.” —Foreign Affairs An invaluable primer from Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, that will help anyone...

As the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and a small group of passengers fought desperately to stop a third plane from completing its deadly flight plan, America went on war footing. Killing the Killers narrates America's intense global war against extremists who planned and executed not only the 9/11 attacks but hundreds of others in America and around the world, and who eventually destroyed entire nations in their relentless quest for power.

This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burke’s opinion on whether France’s new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious of certain tendencies of the Revolution from the start and perceived that the revolutionaries were actually subverting the true "social order". Blending history with principle and graceful imagery with profound practical maxims, this book is one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower.

This program is read by the author. Taiwan expert Kerry Brown sums up the history of Taiwan and the danger of a Chinese takeover in this succinct and authoritative book. When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland...

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?