Political History

Iran presents one of the most significant foreign policy challenges for America and the West, yet very little is known about what the country's goals really are. Vali Nasr examines Iran's political history in new ways to explain its actions and ambitions on the world stage, showing how, behind the veneer of theocracy and Islamic ideology, today's Iran is pursuing a grand strategy aimed at securing the country internally and asserting its place in the region and the world.

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?

War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks. When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: A rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" 16 times. In 12 of the 16, the results have been catastrophic.

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense - one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The book explores the incentives, the visions, and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups but for societies as a whole.

Fukuyama examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.

Hannah Arendt's penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. On Revolution is her classic exploration of a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the 18th-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the 20th century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future.

A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then - diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions - continue to confront us today.

Do "In God We Trust", the Declaration of Independence, and other historical "evidence" prove that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles? Are the Ten Commandments the basis for American law? A constitutional attorney dives into the debate about religion's role in America's founding.

As America struggles with an economic debacle akin to the Great Depression, nothing could be timelier than an authoritative account of the New Deal, masterfully written by Michael Hiltzik, author of the acclaimed history of the Hoover Dam, Colossus.

In this richly peopled, vividly rendered narrative, Hiltzik describes how the urgent short-term relief measures of Franklin Roosevelt’s Hundred Days evolved into a transformative concept of the federal role in American life.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) - the only English commoner to become the overall head of state - is one of the great figures of history, but his character was very complex. He was at once courageous and devout, devious and self-serving; as a parliamentarian, he was devoted to his cause; as a soldier, he was ruthless. Cromwell's speeches and writings surpass in quantity those of any other ruler of England before Victoria, and, for those seeking to understand him, he has usually been taken at his word. In this remarkable new work, Ronald Hutton untangles the facts from the fiction.

At the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War ended, many, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, believed that democracy had triumphed politically once and for all. Yet nearly 30 years later, the direction of history no longer seems certain. A repressive and destructive force has begun to reemerge on the global stage - sweeping across Europe, parts of Asia, and the United States - that to Albright, looks very much like fascism.

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how "racial phantasms" inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects.

In an astonishing, tough firsthand reportage, Chris Hedges draws on stories from inside communities across America and reveals how the hurricanes of change have allowed an array of pathologies to arise: the opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling, the corporate coup d'état of government, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the emboldening of violence and hate, the plagues of suicides, and the global upheaval caused by catastrophic climate change.

For the past three decades, the United States and Iran have been engaged in an unacknowledged secret war. This conflict has frustrated five American presidents, divided administrations, and repeatedly threatened to bring the two nations to the brink of open warfare. Drawing upon unparalleled access to senior officials and key documents of several US administrations, David Crist, a senior historian in the federal government, breaks new ground in virtually every section of The Twilight War.

A comprehensive history of the people and cases that have changed history, this is the definitive account of the nation's highest court.

Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now Southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism.

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

Over the past decade, A Patriot's History of the United States has become the definitive conservative history of our country, correcting the biases of historians and other intellectuals who downplay the greatness of America's patriots. Professors Schweikart and Allen have now revised, updated, and expanded their book, which covers America's long history with an appreciation for the values that made this nation uniquely successful.

The series weaves together more than 50 first-person interviews with an unprecedented collection of archival sound: a rare recording of the 1964 trial that resulted in Mandela's life sentence; a visit between Mandela and his family secretly taped by a prison guard; marching songs of guerilla soldiers; government propaganda films; and pirate radio broadcasts from the African National Congress (ANC).

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out - with military precision - an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.