Public History

A United States minister, senator, president, and congressman in turn, John Quincy Adams was one of the most prevalent and dedicated Americans in history. Drawing from Adams' 70-year diary, author Paul Nagel probes deeply into the psyche of this cantankerous, misanthropic, erudite, hardworking son of a former president whose remarkable career spanned so many offices.

In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period.

The most profound and important speeches ever delivered are here collected in this anthology, featuring some of the most influential figures in world history. From ancient times to the American Revolution to as recently as this past century, Fort Raphael Publishing has collected some of the most important and iconic speeches of all time and recorded them for this series.

Publicada en 1940 y considerada una obra maestra, La vida privada y pública de Sócrates consagró a René Kraus como biógrafo de excepción. René Kraus realiza impagables descripciones del filósofo, de algunos de sus célebres contemporáneos y del ambiente de la ciudad y la época, subrayando la tesis que subyace en esta obra: que los seres excepcionales, incluso cuando son incomprendidos y maltratados en vida, terminan imponiendo su elevado ejemplo moral y proporcionan a la humanidad un horizonte de civilización.

Plague and pestilence have both fascinated and terrified humanity from the very beginning. Societies and individuals have struggled to make sense of them, and more importantly, they’ve often struggled to avoid them. Before the scientific age, people had no knowledge of the microbiological agents - unseen bacteria and viruses - which afflicted them, and thus, the maladies were often ascribed to wrathful supernatural forces.

«Hay que recuperar el respeto por los contenidos en la acción política, por la sustancia, por el fondo.» «El desafío es inmenso porque los cimientos de nuestras sociedades se están tambaleando, mientras el orden internacional amenaza con fragmentarse.» «Un partido emergente como Ciudadanos tiene un recorrido grande. Y el Partido Popular, si evita el riesgo de centrifugación y recupera el dinamismo de su proyecto político con una imagen reconocible para el electorado, no es un partido desahuciado.»

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

Future war is almost here: battles fought in cyberspace, biologically enhanced soldiers, autonomous systems that can process information and strike violently before a human being can blink. A leading expert on the place of technology in war and intelligence, Robert H. Latiff, now teaching at the University of Notre Dame, has spent a career in the military researching and developing new combat technologies, observing the cost of our unquestioning embrace of innovation.

We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge.

In science, no -one believes the Earth is flat anymore. Economists, on the other hand, haven't budged from their original worldview. Market capitalism depends on seven big ideas: competition, the "invisible hand", utility, agency theory, pricing, shareholder value, and limited liability. These served the world well in the past, but over the years they have become cancerous and are slowly killing the system as a whole.

The number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States in the 1960s was 300,000 a year. This increased reasonably to 600,000 by the 1980s. But in the 1990s, the rate accelerated to an average of more than a million a year. When the number of illegal immigrants is added to this, the total inflow during the 1990s was approximately twelve million.

Spiral is what we can call a perpetual and continuously widening war that has put the country in a "state of exception". Bush's promise that we have "taken the gloves off" and Obama's inability to define an endgame have had a profound effect on us even though the actual combat is fought by a tiny percentage of our citizens. In the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed.

Every day ordinary young Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq, with the same bravery, honor, and sense of duty that have distinguished American troops throughout history. One of these is Jason Dunham, a 22-year-old Marine corporal from the one-stoplight town of Scio, New York, whose stunning story reporter Michael M. Phillips discovered while he was embedded with a Marine infantry battalion in the Iraqi desert.

Nuclear terrorism is such a disturbing prospect that we shy away from its details. Yet, as a consequence, we fail to understand how best to defeat it. Michael Levi takes us inside nuclear terrorism and behind the decisions a terrorist leader would be faced with in pursuing a nuclear plot. Along the way, Levi identifies the many obstacles, large and small, that such a terrorist scheme might encounter, allowing him to discover a host of ways that any plan might be foiled.

Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, Pfaff lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that animates our politics and foreign relations - and makes clear why it is flawed and must ultimately fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment, and in America's effective separation from the common history of the west during the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, during which it failed to gain "the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."

Bill Novelli doesn't believe that retirement has to mean rocking one's way into the sunset. As the head of the strongest organization of retired people in the world, the AARP, Novelli believes that retirement can be a time of action and influence rather than one of illness and decline.

The record of any American President attracts attention, but Barack Obama, the first African-American president in the nation's 240-year history, is of special interest. Obama came into office as the economy was careening into the worst downturn since the Great Depression. On the political front, he would be challenged by the intense congressional polarization faced by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, exacerbated by the rise of the Tea Party movement.

Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space - from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC.

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic.