Showing results for "The History Wars" in Public Policy

When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead — or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

Andrew Wakefield reveals the inside story of desperate parents trying to help their autistic children, only to be labeled as abusers by social workers, medical professionals, and the courts. As the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders grows each year, new discoveries and controversies arise. Andrew Wakefield explores many of these in his thorough investigation of the recent trial case of the “Arizona 5,” which destroyed an Arizona family.

Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past 30 years.

Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

Hybrid war, grey-zone warfare, unrestricted war: Today, traditional conflict - fought with guns, bombs, and drones - has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending.

Prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores the nature of leadership with his usual depth and vivid prose in The Savior Generals, a set of brilliantly executed pocket biographies of five generals (Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus) who single-handedly saved their nations from defeat in war. War is rarely a predictable enterprise - it is a mess of luck, chance, and incalculable variables. Today's sure winner can easily become tomorrow's doomed loser.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The...

The Austrian School of Economics - a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right - is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter built the School’s international reputation with their work on business cycles and monetary theory. In this collective biography, Janek Wasserman brings these figures to life....

A disturbing chronicle of the US government’s mistreatment of American soldiers and veterans throughout history, with a new introduction by Charles Sheehan-Miles. Time and time again, the sacrifices made by veterans and their families have been repaid with scorn, discrimination, lack of health services, scant financial compensation, and other indignities. This injustice dates back as far as the American Revolution....

Behind the demeanor that made Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower so popular was a cold-as-steel intelligence that kept his country prosperous and out of danger. Because his operating methods were so deeply hidden, it is only in the past few decades that historians have grasped the full extent of his achievements. Ike in Love and War shows the hidden sacrifices that made Eisenhower remarkable. It probes the mission that was driving him: the quest to reconcile his skill as a fighter with his mother's pacifism, which led him to become the greatest peacekeeper of his age.

In House of War, the bestselling author James Carroll has created a history of the Pentagon that is both epic and personal. Through Carroll we see how the Pentagon, since its founding, has operated beyond the control of any force in government or society, undermining the very national security...

A vivid account of the largest act of civil disobedience in US history, in Richard Nixon’s Washington They surged into Washington by the tens of thousands in the spring of 1971. Fiery radicals, flower children, and militant vets gathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement to...

The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decision-making in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.

Benjamin Franklin once said, "There never was a good war or a bad peace." But what determines whether war or peace is chosen? Award-winning sociologist Michael Mann concludes that it is a handful of political leaders—people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions—who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results.

The War Comes Home is structured around the different experiences of US veterans of the Iraq war. Sections of the book are dedicated to the difficulties of reintegrating to civilian life after coming home, living with disability, unemployment, dealing with the military bureaucracy, suicide, and homelessness - as well as more upbeat sections about families, communities and fellow veterans pulling together to help each other.

For years, government bureaucrats have been looking for ways to destroy small businesses. With coronavirus, they finally had their chance. In 2020, the American economy suffered the biggest financial collapse in history. But while Main Street suffered like never before, the stock market...

In this timely book, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol take a hard look at Saddam Hussein. They see the face of evil: someone who embraced a cruel blend of socialism, fascism, and pan-Arab nationalism when young, and later became a coup plotter and a member of the Iraqi equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts.

The urgent truth about the privatization of America’s national security that exposes where this industry came from, how it operates, where it's heading—and why we should be concerned. Thirty years ago there were no private military and security companies (PMSCs); there were only mercenaries. Now the PMSCs are a bona-fide industry, an indispensable part of American foreign and military policy.

Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor White communities.

From one of America's preeminent national security journalists, an explosive, news-breaking account of Donald Trump's collision with the American national security establishment, and with the world It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience...