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Author
Description
Here's something true for almost every American. The democracy you live in today is different, completely different, than the democracy born into. Since 1980, the number of Americans legally barred from voting has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, odds of living in a competitive Congressional district have fallen by more than half. In the twenty-first century alone, the amount of money spent on Washington lobbying has increased by more than 100...
Author
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
"From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter Letters From An American, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy -- and how we can turn back. In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. The essays soon turned into a newsletter and, spread by word...
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
[2021]
Description
"From the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, and a warning that the forces of autocracy unleashed by Trump remain as potent as ever. In the years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, Congressman Adam Schiff had already been sounding the alarm over the resurgence of autocracy around the world, and the threat this posed to the United States. But as...
Author
Formats
Description
"Americans have disabled the government's ability to solve even basic problems, making us vulnerable to the most dangerous demagogue ever to pretend to the White House. Kurt Andersen shows how the masterminds of the economic right rode an unprecedented wave of nostalgia by dressing up their harsh new rich-get-richer system in patriotic old-time drag, making it their mission to take over the government for their purposes alone and convincing the country...
Author
Pub. Date
[2019]
Formats
Description
"John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (and it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results, and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. John and...
Author
Formats
Description
Eric Metaxas offers a thrilling review of America's uniqueness, and a sobering reminder that America's greatness cannot continue unless people truly understand what their founding fathers meant for them to be. The book includes a stirring call-to-action for every American to understand the ideals behind the 'noble experiment in ordered liberty' that is America. It also paints a vivid picture of the tremendous fragility of that experiment and explains...
Author
Publisher
W.W. Norton
Pub. Date
c1998
Description
"Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an open-ended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in congressional...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Formats
Description
"Cuts through the hyperbole and hysteria that often distorts assessments of our republic, particularly at this time." - Alan Taylor, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History What-and who-is a demagogue? How did America's Founders envision the presidency? What should a constitutional democracy look like-and how can it be fixed when it appears to be broken? Something is definitely wrong with Donald Trump's presidency, but what exactly? The extraordinary...
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture--during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement--but have now come to fruition in the...
11) We the people!
Author
Publisher
Amulet Books
Pub. Date
[2022]
Description
This graphic novel tells the history of American democracy and how it evolved from other forms of government. Explains the fundamental ideas of democracy as liberty, equality, and justice for all.
Author
Description
"From the prophetic author of the now-classic What's the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, an eye-opening account of populism, the most important--and misunderstood--movement of our time. Rarely does a work of history contain startling implications for the present, but in The People, No Thomas Frank pulls off that explosive effect by showing us that everything we think we know about populism is wrong. Today 'populism' is seen as a frightening...
Author
Publisher
The University of Georgia Press
Pub. Date
[2019]
Description
"This book brings together the author's personal and professional link to the long American Revolution in a narrative that spans more than 150 years and places the Revolution in multiple contexts -- from the local to the transatlantic and hemispheric and from racial and gendered to political, social, economic, and cultural perspectives. A descendant on his father's side from a long line of Kentuckians, the author grew up torn between a father who...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2024.
Appears on list
Description
"An intimate study of Abraham Lincoln's powerful vision of democracy, which guided him through the Civil War and is still relevant today--by best-selling historian and three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize. Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. While many books have been written about his temperament, judgment, and steady hand in guiding the country through the Civil War, we know...
Author
Publisher
Harper
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
"A huge swath of Americans see the rest of the country building a future that doesn't have a place for them. It's no wonder they'd rather burn it all down. But the fire can be stopped by Americans who act now to protect their country and its democracy"--
Author
Description
[This text] is a survey of American history from the earliest days of European exploration and conquest of the New World to the dawn of the twenty-first century. It offers students a ... concise narrative whose central theme is the changing contours of American freedom.... Aimed at an audience of undergraduate students with little or no detailed knowledge of American history, [the text] guides readers through the complexities of the subject without...
Author
Publisher
Hill and Wang
Description
This pioneering study redefines women's history in the United States by focusing on civic obligations rather than rights. Looking closely at thirty telling cases from the pages of American legal history, Kerber's analysis reaches from the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," up to the present, when men and women, regardless of their marital status, still have different obligations to serve...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power--and the movement to stop them. The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn't begin or end with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through...
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Formats
Description
"Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the...
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