History & Theory

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot comes a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans....

Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play....

New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host Chris Hayes offers a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years....

In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times....

In this powerful, epic biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams....

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation....

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral....

Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America....

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic - Adams, Burr, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington....

This classic, definitive account of totalitarianism traces the emergence of modern racism as an "ideological weapon for imperialism"....

Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before.

In this monumental work of moral and political philosophy, Plato sought to answer some of the world's most formidable questions....

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president....

This audiobook narrated by Fajer Al-Kaisi overturns simplistic portrayals of Iran as a theocratic pariah state, revealing how its strategic moves on the world stage are driven by two pervasive threats—external aggression and internal dissolution.

The definitive history of the military's decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena....

Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency....

What happens when the President of the United States governs one Tweet at a time? When the elected leader of the free world may not have a firm grasp on the names of government agencies, much less an understanding of their intricate inner-workings? Find out....

In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the USSR and inspiring copycat terror programs....

Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen - Winston Churchill first among them - the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....

A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House.

In The American Miracle, Michael Medved recounts some of the most significant events in America's rise to prosperity and power, from the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War....

Jonathan Turley takes a timely, revelatory look at freedom of speech—our most basic right and the one that protects all the others....

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 this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkable perhaps is that it is centrist, even left-leaning, media that have taken up the rallying cry and really defined the outlines of what cancel culture is supposed to be.

The Communist Manifesto (German: Kommunistisches Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.[citation needed] It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, without attempting to predict communism's potential future forms.

Why Rich People Love Fascism is a provocative examination of the unholy alliance between capital and authoritarianism. This book cuts through the myths of political neutrality and liberal virtue to reveal a stark truth: when the wealthy face the threat of democracy, they consistently choose fascism. Not by accident. Not under duress. But willingly, and often eagerly. Drawing on a century of history, the book traces how economic elites have repeatedly aligned themselves with far-right regimes—from Mussolini’s Italy to Hitler’s Germany to Pinochet’s Chile—not because of shared ...

What does it mean to call something "new"? Why is Western art and culture, even after postmodernism, still so obsessed with the concept? What are the consequences of relying on culture to bring about social change? In this provocative book, David Balzer argues that Western culture was never designed to produce truly new or original artifacts. Rather, we move from fixation to fixation, trend to trend—a cycle of creation and destruction with deep origins in Judeo-Christianity and the paganism that preceded it.

Today, the majority of the peoples of the planet live in nation-states, based upon the idea, if never the reality, of a single people, a single culture, a single rule of law, and a single source of sovereign authority. But will they continue to do so in the future? None of the major challenges that confront humanity today—from climate change to disease, from terrorism to mass migration—can be handled effectively by single nation-states, no matter how powerful.

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach. The focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form.

Nicolas Machiavel (Niccolò Machiavelli en italien) est né en 1469 à Florence, en Italie, à une époque marquée par les troubles politiques et les luttes de pouvoir entre les grandes cités-États italiennes. Fonctionnaire et diplomate de la République florentine, il a voyagé à travers l’Europe et observé de près les pratiques des cours princières et des gouvernants de son temps. Ces expériences ont profondément nourri sa réflexion sur le pouvoir, la politique et la nature humaine.

From the ashes of collapsed democracies to the fear-fueled rise of totalitarian regimes, The Rise of Dictators is a riveting exploration of how authoritarian leaders seize and sustain power. In this powerful audiobook, bestselling historian Isabella C. Hayes takes listeners on a sweeping journey through the minds and methods of history’s most dangerous rulers—from Hitler and Stalin to today’s emerging strongmen.

How was it possible for one woman, later joined by a handful of others, to overcome a large organisation and bring about a gender equality sea change in higher education in her country? This is the story of how the granddaughter of Ireland's most famous suffragette won a gender discrimination case for lack of promotion, the first such win in either Ireland or the UK; then donated her €70,000 award to five other women, also passed over in that promotion round, for their High Court case.