History & Theory

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

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

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....

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....

Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving....

New York Times best-selling author Sarah Kendzior documents the truth about the calculated rise to power of Donald Trump since the 1980s and how the erosion of our liberties made an American dema­gogue possible....

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

Tyrants project invincibility, but all of them fall. This is because they face critical weaknesses that can form a fatal trap.

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....

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

Named a New York Times Notable Book, Empire of Liberty offers a marvelous account of this pivotal era in American history....

In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyses a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an "I" society to a "We" society and then back again....

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

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question....

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

From one of the most admired international leaders comes a timely, considered, and personal look at the history and current resurgence of fascism today and the virulent threat it poses....

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....

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

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....

Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, with disturbing resonances for our own time....

The Bolsheviks promised that they were building a new society, a workers’ paradise that would change the nature of mankind itself. What they ended up constructing was the largest prison the world had ever seen: a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that spanned half the globe....

At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history....

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....

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”

World War II loomed over the twentieth century, transforming every level of American society and international relationships and searing itself onto the psyche of an entire generation, including that of seven American presidents: John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. In Presidents at War, bestselling author of America's Reluctant Prince Steven Gillon examines what these men took away from the war and how they then applied it to Cold War policies that proceeded to change America, and the world, forever.

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is.

Uncover the Shadowy World of Political Influence: Are You Ready to Explore the Hidden Networks Behind Anonymous Donations? Dive into the murky depths of political influence with 501(c)(4) Exposed: The Hidden Financial Networks Behind Influence Operations. This gripping investigation reveals how nonprofit organizations, initially designed to promote social welfare, have become conduits for anonymous political donations. With a spotlight on the legal loopholes and financial networks that empower these entities, this book is an essential read for anyone intrigued by the covert mechanisms ...

The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom. Taking listeners from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.