How did the lowly potato plant feed the poor across Europe and then cause the deaths of millions? How did the rubber plant enable industrialization? What is the connection between malaria, slavery, and the outcome of the American Revolution? How did the fabled silver mountain of 16th-century Bolivia fund economic development in the flood-prone plains of rural China and the wars of the Spanish Empire? Here is the story of how sometimes the greatest leaps also posed the greatest threats to human advancement.

From Gold Star father and beloved Democratic National Convention speaker Khizr Khan comes a book for young people about the Constitution - what it says and why it matters for everyone. Our Founding Fathers created the US Constitution and Bill of Rights as a blueprint for American government and the rights of American citizens. This document is not merely a piece of parchment but a living, breathing promise of our deepest democratic values.

Matthew Henson’s destiny was set when he met naval officer Robert Edwin Peary, in 1887. An African American son of poor farmers, Henson shared Peary’s desire to be the first person to reach the North Pole. In 1909, the men set out one one of their many voyages together. They battled sub-zero temperatures, deadly ice formations, and bone-chilling winds. Many times it was Henson who saved the expedition with his knowledge of Inuit language and culture. But when the men finally achieved their goal, few people believed them.

They Want to Kill Americans is the first detailed look into the heart of the active Trump-led insurgency, setting the stage for a second nation-wide rebellion on American soil. This is a chilling and deeply researched early warning to the nation from a counterterrorism intelligence professional: America is primed for a possible explosive wave of terrorist attacks and armed confrontations that aim to bring about a Donald Trump led dictatorship.

More than 40 years after it ended, the Vietnam War continues to haunt our country. We still argue over why we were there, whether we could have won, and who was right and wrong in their response to the conflict. When the war divided the country, it created deep political fault lines that continue to divide us today. Now, continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed collaborations, the authors draw on dozens and dozens of interviews in America and Vietnam to give us the perspectives of people involved at all levels of the war.

In 1996 Amy Goodman started a radio show called Democracy Now! to focus on the issues that are underreported or ignored by mainstream news coverage. Shortly after September 11, 2001, they were broadcasting on television every weekday. Today it is the only public media in the US that airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, radio, and the Internet. Now Amy and her journalist brother, David, share stories of the progressive heroes - the whistleblowers, the organizers, the protestors - who have brought about remarkable, often invisible change.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.

Democrats, the news media, and many leading Republicans immediately blamed the roughly four-hour disturbance on President Trump. The president “incited an insurrection”, the American pubic was told. But one year later, the original narrative of what happened that day has crumbled while hundreds of Americans have been swept up in an unprecedented investigation led by Joe Biden’s Justice Department to punish them for their involvement in the January 6 protest. The public has been misled - and flat-out lied to - about that day. This book exposes them all.

Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement.

The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world.

Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.”

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable audiobook chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority.

After years of living abroad and covering the Global War on Terrorism, Luke Mogelson went home in early 2020 to report on the social discord that the pandemic was bringing to the fore across the US. An assignment that began with right-wing militias in Michigan soon took him to an uprising for racial justice in Minneapolis, then to antifascist clashes in the streets of Portland, and ultimately to an attempted insurrection in Washington, D.C. His dispatches for The New Yorker revealed a larger story with ominous implications for America. They were only the beginning.

Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, tells his personal stories about more than 30 years of fighting for social change, from teaching at Spelman College to recent protests against war. A former bombardier in World War II, Zinn emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice. Although he's a fierce critic, he gives us reason to hope that by learning from history and engaging politically, we can make a difference in the world.

In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power - a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy - asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide?