State Theory

The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.

At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than 200 years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution.

The American Revolution was not simply a battle between independence-minded colonists and the oppressive British. As Thomas B. Allen reminds us, it was also a savage and often deeply personal civil war, in which conflicting visions of America pitted neighbor against neighbor and Patriot against Tory on the battlefield, the village green, and even in church.

In this fascinating book, the author begins by looking at the ways in which the framers of our Constitution were hampered in their work. They could not know about developments in democratic procedures which hadn't yet been devised, and they had no model of the democracy they were attempting to structure which could have guided them in their deliberations.

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights.

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics", Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death - by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington's administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon's misdeeds could be measured. What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison, every American president has been accused of misconduct.

Throughout his presidency, Ronald Reagan sought "peace through strength" during an era of historic change. In the decades since, pundits and scholars have argued over the president's legacy: some consider Reagan a charismatic and consummate leader, who renewed American strength and defeated communism. To others he was an ambitious and dangerous warmonger, whose presidency was plagued with mismanagement, misconduct, and foreign policy failures.

Karl Rove, the man who masterminded the rise of George W. Bush from governor of Texas to the presidency, who advised Bush during two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who some claim helped seize the 2004 election for Bush, and who was at the center of the Bush administration's two biggest scandals - is back. Since exiting the Bush administration, Rove has quietly become the country's greatest Republican power broker. This up-to-the-minute journalistic report sheds crucial light on Rove's vital behind-the-scenes role.

An intriguing look behind the congenial facade of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, this work reveals how each leader jealously guarded knowledge from the other in pursuit of separate national interests.

In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s 100-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in - Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona - need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now.

Well-funded hard-left extremists, the mainstream media, Obama/Clinton holdovers in the government bureaucracy, and clandestine forces within the US intelligence apparatus have a strategy to ensure that Trump will not serve out his term as the 45th President of the United States. Investigative journalist and conspiracy expert Jerome Corsi goes into shocking detail about how this Deep State, or Shadow Government, secretly wields power in Washington and why it is dangerous.

In most accounts of the origins of money, we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war.

Nomi Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how financiers have retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation.

A lauded expert on European history paints a vivid picture of Paris, London, and New York during the Age of Revolutions, exploring how each city fostered or suppressed political uprisings within its boundaries. In The Unruly City, historian Mike Rapport offers a vivid history of three intertwined cities toward the end of the 18th century - Paris, London, and New York - all in the midst of political chaos and revolution.

This work is a landmark in American political thought. Preeminent Richard Hofstadter examines the passion for progress and reform that colored the entire period from 1890 to 1940 with startling and stimulating results. The Age of Reform searches out the moral and emotional motives of the reformers, the myths and dreams in which they believed, and the realities with which they had to compromise.

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement.

In The Grouchy Historian, Ed Asner leads the charge for liberals to reclaim the Constitution from the right-wingers who use it as their justification for doing whatever terrible thing they want to do, which is usually to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It's about time someone gave them hell and explained that Progressives can read, too.