Public History

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies.

The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding, a perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.

Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

A decade ago, the soldiers of Bravo Company deployed to Afghanistan for a tour in Kandahar’s notorious Arghandab Valley. By the time they made it home, three soldiers had been killed in action, a dozen more had lost limbs, and an astonishing half of the company had Purple Hearts. In the decade since, two of the soldiers have died by suicide, more than a dozen have tried, and others admit they’ve considered it. Written with an insider’s eye and ear and drawing on extensive interviews and original reporting, Bravo Company follows the men from their initial enlistment on.

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing - creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

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.

Read by the author, Robert Hardman. An intimate, authoritative, richly entertaining new portrait of Elizabeth II in her centenary year from the Sunday Times number 1 bestselling author of Charles III. Biographer and royal commentator Robert Hardman has had unique access to the world of the late...

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

The inside story of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air, combatted a public health crisis, and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression. "A sensational book ... It's a marvelous account of what took place." —Warren Buffett By February...

This book offers a series of problems in thinking that require no special knowledge and no mathematics. The problems are designed to let readers find out about their personal style of thinking, its weaknesses and strengths, and the potential methods that they never use. Being right is not always important - an error can lead to the right decision.

This book features a global, historical analysis of the changes and continuities in one of society's basic functions: seeking to protect itself from disease. Hygiene offers an important lens for major aspects of world and comparative history. The volume explores the ways different regions and...

Driven brings a seasoned perspective to today's conversations about government, media, and the future of truth in the form of a deeply personal and long-awaited autobiography by Tom Johnson, an award-winning journalist who helped shape the twenty-four-hour news media as we know it. Johnson's...

An essay on restriction, resistance, and reclaiming space, Black Public Joy is essential reading for all politically engaged Canadians wanting to learn more about anti-Black racism in Canada. During a crucial moment in Black life in North America, Jay Pitter has been engaging directly and...

Over the past 50 years, rates of autoimmunity and chronic disease have exploded. In this provocative book, Dr. Thomas Cowan argues for a direct causal relationship to a corresponding increase in the number of vaccines American children typically receive. The goal of these vaccines is precisely what we’re now seeing in such abundance among our chronically ill children: the provocation of immune response. Cowan looks at emerging evidence that certain childhood illnesses are actually protective of disease later in life.

The American political system can be challenging to navigate. In a time when the political climate can be contentious, understanding the American system of government is an important tool to have. This comprehensive guide covers the basics of U.S. politics in a clear, easy-to-follow format...

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders' political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders' political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. 

From the New York Times bestselling Kennedy historian and author of Jackie: Public, Private, Secret comes the other side of the story--her husband's: JFK: Public, Private, Secret. In this definitive portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, J. Randy Taraborrelli delivers a deeply researched and...

By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats" like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: race war.

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the "other", and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventive measures.

In this gripping political history, New York Times bestselling author Newt Gingrich takes readers behind the scenes of the 1994 Republican Revolution and the rise of the modern GOP to show how we can lead America toward a more conservative, prosperous future. The story of Gingrich’s rise from...