What does is it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Susan Griffin’s provocative investigation of that question takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the Iraq War, with many stops in between. Her conclusion: democracy is nothing less than a revolution of consciousness, and the revolution has just begun.

From its founding by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, the Black Panther Party has aroused fear, hope, misunderstanding, pride, and vilification. In The Black Panthers Speak, the best single source of original material on and by the Black Panther Party, Philip S. Foner separates philosophy from propaganda.

A peanut farmer from Georgia, Jimmy Carter rose to national power through mastering the strategy of the maverick politician. As the face of the "New South", Carter's strongest support came from his ability to communicate directly to voters who were disaffected by corruption in politics. But running as an outsider was easier than governing as one, as Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer shows in this examination of Carter's presidency.

How much of our political tradition can be absorbed and used by other peoples? Daniel Boorstin's answer to this question has been chosen by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for representation in American Panorama as one of the 350 books, old and new, most descriptive of life in the United States. He describes the uniqueness of American thought and explains, after a close look at the American past, why we have not produced and are not likely to produce grand political theories or successful propaganda. He also suggests what our attitudes must be toward ourselves and other countries if we are to preserve our institutions and help others to improve theirs. ". . . a fresh and, on the whole, valid interpretation of American political life."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Leader

It has now been more than forty years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas on November 22, 1963. No event in the post-war era, not even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has cast such a long shadow over our national life. The murder of the handsome and vigorous president shocked the nation to its core, and shook the faith of many Americans in their institutions and way of life. The repercussions from that event continue to be felt down to the present day. Looking back, it is now clear that Kennedy's death marked a historical crossroads after which point events began to move in surprising and destructive directions. In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, James Piereson examines this seminal event from an entirely new and provocative point of view. Most books on the assassination take up the question as to who was really responsible for killing the President. Mr. Piereson takes it as established fact that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. What needs to be explained, he argues, is the bizarre aftermath of the assassination: Why in the years after the assassination did the American Left become preoccupied with conspiratorial thinking? How and why was John F. Kennedy transformed in death into a liberal icon and a martyr for civil rights? In what way was the assassination linked to the collapse of mid-century liberalism, a doctrine which until 1963 was the reigning philosophy of the nation? In answering these questions, Piereson places great weight on the influence of Jacqueline Kennedy in shaping public memory of her husband and the meaning of his death. The Kennedy assassination, he argues, is a case study in public myth-making and the ways in which images and symbols can override fact and substance in political life.

For some 30 years, Adam Hochschild's voice has been one of the most distinctive in American journalism. With grace and wit, he has brought to a startling variety of subjects a combination of adventurous reporting and personal honesty. Hochschild's readers can count on an unobtrusive erudition, a sense of justice, and an irrepressible curiosity about life. Admirers of Hochschild's Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son will find in these articles the same warm autobiographical voice that made that book so memorable: He revisits his time as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, as a New England prep school student, and as a teenager seeing apartheid firsthand in South Africa. But readers will find much more as well: profiles of an adoptive Gypsy and of a governor general's son turned revolutionary, essays about Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy, a journey to one of the most remote corners of the Amazon rain forest, and a remarkable evocation of two of Hochschild's personal heroes—who, in hillside trenches at the height of the Russian Civil War, faced each other across a battlefield.

In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats. You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity, David Rothkopf offers an entirely new perspective into the hidden struggles, the surprising triumphs, and the shocking failures of those charged with leading the United States through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Thanks to his extraordinary access, Rothkopf provides fresh insights drawing on more than one hundred exclusive interviews with the key players who shaped this era. At its core, National Insecurity is the gripping story of a superpower in crisis, seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing world, sometimes showing inspiring resilience -- but often undone by the human flaws of those at the top, the mismanagement of its own system, the temptation to concentrate too much power within the hands of too few in the White House itself, and an unwillingness to draw the right lessons from the recent past. Nonetheless, within that story are unmistakable clues to a way forward that can help restore American leadership.

This enthralling book begins in the vast forests of Cyprus, whose wood fuelled the ancient Mediterranean, and extends through the Elizabethan era, in which the Hostmen guild of Newcastle exerted political influence by monopolizing the British coal supply. The central thread of this well-researched book, which draws upon a vast array of archival sources and an extensive list of secondary texts, picks up centuries later with the competition in the American automotive market between electric power and oil-fuelled internal combustion. The definitive blow in favour of oil comes with WWI, which prompted increased demand for gas-powered vehicles at the very moment Thomas Edison and Henry Ford aborted plans to develop an affordable electric car. The decades-long "General Motors conspiracy" solidifies the demise of electrically powered mass transit in American cities. Through it all, the author manages to keep this complex history compelling. By the time the author makes his final, impassioned plea for a bold new solution to the world's energy crisis, he has already made his case with devastating clarity.

Fiorello LaGuardia is known best as the tempestuous mayor of New York City in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House. There had been, however, an earlier time, which matched his mayoralty years in sheer drama and perhaps surpassed them in lasting achievement-LaGuardia's years in Congress. He served in the House of Representative almost continuously from 1917 to 1933, representing two ethnically diverse congressional districts: the Fourteenth (Greenwich Village), from 1917 to 1919, and the Twentieth (East Harlem), from 1923 to 1933. Although barred from important committee posts because of his political independence and thus denied from playing a direct role in lawmaking, he was a tireless and vocal champion of Progressive causes, from allowing more immigration and removing U.S. troops from Nicaragua to speaking up for the rights and livelihoods of striking miners, impoverished farmers, oppressed minorities, and struggling families. A goad to the era's plutocrats and their enablers in government, LaGuardia fought for progressive income taxes, greater government oversight of Wall Street, and national employment insurance for workers idled by the Great Depression. In this book, first published by Cornell University Press in 1959, Howard Zinn establishes LaGuardia's tenure in Congress as a vital link between the Progressive and New Deal eras, offering a lively and informative account of his many legislative battles, his political philosophy, and the distinctly urban (specifically, New York City) sensibilities he brought to the Progressive movement.

Call it the Television War. For six weeks in 1991, images of the war in Iraq danced on America's TV sets, and we were led to believe that the GIs fought it by sitting at computer monitors and firing missiles at the Iraqis far, far away. It was a new kind of war, mudless and bloodless - a videogame war. Do not believe it. The real war in Iraq was as hellish as anything in The Red Badge of Courage or The Naked and the Dead - the GIs were wet and cold, uncertain and scared, and yet, through it all, courageous and compassionate, but TV wasn't there to report it. John Sack was with the GIs throughout the war. In America, he lived with the soldiers of Company C as they trained for D-Day in Iraq. He was with them in their homes, their churches, their drinking, dancing, and stripper clubs, and he was still with them as they invaded Iraq in sixty-ton tanks. He was with them at the biggest tank battle in American history - the only reporter who was.

Advocates of a strong versus a weak presidency have struggled throughout American history, but never so fiercely as in the twentieth century, which saw the rise of progressivism. This is the story of four progressive presidents, from the first Roosevelt, who himself brought plenty of backbone to the office, to Woodrow Wilson , who articulated the theory of a progressive presidency, to FDR, who brought it unique power, and, finally, to Lyndon Johnson, who provided perhaps its last great surge in our century. In a time of progressive malaise, it is important to know the history, to see the benefits as well as the liabilities, in the progressive presidential tradition. That is the aim and achievement of this book.

Michael Ratner (1943-2016) was one of America's leading human rights lawyers. He worked for more than four decades at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) becoming first the Director of Litigation and then the President of what Alexander Cockburn called "a small band of tigerish people." He was also the President of the National Lawyers Guild. Ratner handled some of the most significant cases In American history. This book tells why and how he did it. His last case, which he worked on until he died, was representing truth-telling whistleblower and now political prisoner Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. Ratner "moved the bar" by organizing some 600 lawyers to successfully defend habeas corpus, that is, the ancient right of someone accused of a crime to have a lawyer and to be brought before a judge. Michael had a piece of paper taped on the wall next to his desk at the CCR. It read: 4 key principles of being a radical lawyer: 1. Do not refuse to take a case just because it is long odds of winning in court. 2. Use cases to publicize a radical critique of US policy and to promote revolutionary transformation. 3. Combine legal work with political advocacy. 4. Love people. Compelling and instructive, Moving the Bar is an indispensable manual for the next generation of activists and their lawyers.

Secret history of Islamist terrorism in America from Sirhan Sirhan to Major Hasan and how the JDO fights it. The JDO was founded in March 1982 in reaction to the demise of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). The JDO was never and never will be a Kahanist organization; instead it is based on principles first set forth by the Honorable Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. Jabotinsky, poet, statesman and militarist told Jewish audiences prior to the Holocaust to leave Europe. In 2010 JDO was able to get a meeting of the American Renaissance Party that was to be held at the Skyline Motel in Washington, D.C. cancelled despite the insistence of its manager that it take place. In February 2011 JDO quashed another meeting of this racist group with the help of the NAACP and City Council members Patrick Cannon and Councilman Warren Turner. These men had enough self-respect to stop these KKK jackasses from spewing their racial-hatred in Charlotte, North Carolina. Look what happened in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 when the Klan mowed down a "Death to the Klan" march staged by Communists. Declassified FBI documents revealed that JDO Chairman Mordechai Levy warned the FBI that the Klan was planning a violent attack but his intelligence was ignored due to his status as a Jewish militant. Just the opposite should have been true. In March 2011 the JDO was able to convince the landlord of the the Nazi-Holocaust revisionist scumy group The Institute of Historical Review not to renew their lease. In May 2011 the JDO held a demonstration in front of Nazi Headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. These are our latest actions - we've been staging these events and others for years and years. It is from this militant / activist point of view that the JDO research team studied the history of Islamist terrorism on American soil within certain parameters of interest. Rather than using a shotgun approach we zeroed in on terrorist plots in which bombs were actually constructed or shots were fired and excluded numerous conspiracies that the FBI nipped in the bud. Our researchers obtained the documents from every terrorism court case in the United States, conducted interviews, scoured the Internet in all languages, studied declassified government documents, filed FOIA requests then put the puzzle pieces together. We even collected the trash in front of the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations at 115 East 65th Street in Manhattan and discovered cable traffic that indicated the PLO was using Syrian diplomatic pouches to smuggle bomb parts to various locations throughout the world. JDO turned these cables over to Israeli intelligence who cautioned JDO not to reveal its methodology as it was going to be applied to other hostile diplomatic installations. JDO waited for a year before revealing its discovery on local television. Shortly thereafter a car with two Arabic looking men parked outside JDO headquarters at 6 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. A JDO member displayed his semi-auto Uzi and invited the thugs upstairs. It was just another day in the 1980's at JDO Headquarters.

Noted political philosopher Judith Shklar declined to write a book about American political thought because, she once claimed, "the subject is too hard." She finally took on this formidable task late in her career, but her untimely death left most of the work unpublished. Now Redeeming American Political Thought makes these essays, some published here for the first time, available to readers. In these thirteen essays, Shklar explores two themes crucial to discussions of American democracy: first, what she terms the "fundamental social condition" of American life, the tension between expansive political equality and persistent social inequality; and second, "redeeming" American political thought for those who believe it lacks the complexity and depth of the European tradition. She covers issues ranging from the use of history in political discourse to the effect of skepticism on politics and thinkers from Hamilton and Jefferson to Melville. The strength and depth of this collection underscore Shklar's reputation as one of this century's most important liberal scholars. Judith N. Shklar (1928-1992) was Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of nine books in political philosophy.

National Bestseller Fully Updated Ron Suskind’s book promises to be a bracing international thriller – an ensemble of uranium merchants and panicked diplomats, stealthy Jihadist soldiers and CIA operatives, anxious Muslim children and angry world leaders – a diverse cast of players who will define the struggle between hope and fear in the modern era. Suskind will close the Bush years – a period he has helped to define – with a startling glimpse at what America actually faces across the roiling world. In the intelligence and military communities, the overwhelming concern is the uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons and the ingredients from which weapons can be composed across a globe exploding with conflict and anti-American fervour. It is a failure of government that we are left with this overwhelming security issue – both domestically, where our security is deeply compromised, and internationally, where we face a host of seen and unseen threats. This book will explode in the middle of an election year with unparalleled disclosures and analysis. The book’s nature and timing will place it at the very centre of the election battle as it enters its final six months. It will be a must-read for anyone hoping to exercise truly informed consent.

For more than three decades, Ed Koch has been one of America's most interesting and outspoken political figures. In this provocative new book, Koch with Rafael Medoff guides readers through the major battles in his life-long fight against anti-Semitism. Interviews, speeches, new essays, never-before published personal correspondence, and more highlight his leadership--on campuses, in the media, on the streets of New York City, and in the halls of power in Washington, DC. The book also features personal letters from Henry Louis Gates, former President George Bush, and other prominent figures. Koch will reveal startling information for the first time here, and his writings are controversial, piercing, teasing, and questioning. This book will ignite discussion for years to come

Andrei Codrescu takes us cross-country through the withered, yet alluring American urban landscape, visiting New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Little Rock, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon. He discovers that cities are at the very center of the forces determining our future, in this major work by one of America's most gifted social critics.

This book is an attempt to hold the policies of George W. Bush, and his actions as president, up to an ethical standard - including his own. But it goes beyond that. it is also a study in a distinctively American ethic, for there are many features of this ethic that are not widely held elsewhere in the developed world.