Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analyzing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction including Men Explain Things To Me , brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness ; hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "globally wide-ranging and topically urgent and the Boston Globe as "luminous and precise.". As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit's concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in, from the jungles of the Zapatistas in Mexico to the splendors of the Arctic. This rich collection tours places as diverse as Haiti and Iceland; movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring; an original take on the question of who did Henry David Thoreau's laundry; and a searching look at what the hatred of country music really means. Solnit moves nimbly from Orwell to Elvis, to contemporary urban gardening to 1970s California macramé and punk rock, and on to searing questions about the environment, freedom, family, class, work, and friendship. It's no wonder she's been compared in Bookforum to Susan Sontag and Annie Dillard and in the San Francisco Chronicle to Joan Didion. The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness proves Rebecca Solnit worthy of the accolades and honors she's received. Rarely can a reader find such penetrating critiques of our time and its failures leavened with such generous heapings of hope. Solnit looks back to history and the progress of political movements to find an antidote to despair in what many feel as lost causes. In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit's collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Her essays are a beacon for readers looking for alternative ideas in these imperiled times.

This book presents a readable introduction to the lives and times of the great philosophers. It takes us from the inception of Western society Plato's Athens to when the power of Marxism had captured one third of the world. Lavine discusses Western philosophers in terms of the historical and intellectual environment which influenced them, and connects their lasting ideas to the public and private choices we face in America today. The book formed the basis for the PBS television series of the same name.--From publisher description.

Robert Dallek's brilliant two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson has received an avalanche of praise. Michael Beschloss, in The Los Angeles Times, said that it "succeeds brilliantly." The New York Times called it "rock solid" and The Washington Post hailed it as "invaluable." And Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Globe wrote that it was "dense with astonishing incidents." Now Dallek has condensed his two-volume masterpiece into what is surely the finest one-volume biography of Johnson available. Based on years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this biography follows Johnson, the "human dynamo," from the Texas hill country to the White House. We see LBJ, in the House and the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career. Then, in the White House, we see Johnson as the visionary leader who worked his will on Congress like no president before or since, enacting a range of crucial legislation, from Medicare and environmental protection to the most significant advances in civil rights for black Americans ever achieved. And we see the depth of Johnson's private anguish as he became increasingly ensnared in Vietnam. In these pages Johnson emerges as a man of towering intensity and anguished insecurity, of grandiose ambition and grave self-doubt, a man who was brilliant, crude, intimidating, compassionate, overbearing, driven: "A tornado in pants." Gracefully written and delicately balanced, this singular biography reveals both the greatness and the tangled complexities of one of the most extravagant characters ever to step onto the presidential stage.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a stunning revision of our last great period of idealism, the 1960s, with burning relevance for our contemporary challenges. "Great Society is accurate history that reads like a novel, covering the high hopes and catastrophic missteps of our well-meaning leaders." --Alan Greenspan Today, a battle rages in our country. Many Americans are attracted to socialism and economic redistribution while opponents of those ideas argue for purer capitalism. In the 1960s, Americans sought the same goals many seek now: an end to poverty, higher standards of living for the middle class, a better environment and more access to health care and education. Then, too, we debated socialism and capitalism, public sector reform versus private sector advancement. Time and again, whether under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, the country chose the public sector. Yet the targets of our idealism proved elusive. What's more, Johnson's and Nixon's programs shackled millions of families in permanent government dependence. Ironically, Shlaes argues, the costs of entitlement commitments made a half century ago preclude the very reforms that Americans will need in coming decades. In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period, from U.S. Presidents to the visionary UAW leader Walter Reuther, the founders of Intel, and Federal Reserve chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns. Great Society casts new light on other figures too, from Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, to the socialist Michael Harrington and the protest movement leader Tom Hayden. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes upends the traditional narrative of the era, providing a damning indictment of the consequences of thoughtless idealism with striking relevance for today. Great Society captures a dramatic contest with lessons both dark and bright for our own time.

"By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change--including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. [This] is their story"--

"From hunting and gathering to GMOs and ultraprocessed foods, this expansive tour of human history rewrites the story of our species-and points the way to a better future"--

Containing star charts, a guide to the constellations, and details about seasons and the movement of the objects we see in the sky, this classic book makes H. A. Rey's passion for astronomy evident on every page. New updates concentrate on the planetary and solar system information in the latter part of the book. Facts and figures for each planet have been revised, and new scientific information has been added, such as Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet. There's also a new online resource that allows readers to track the positions of the planets in the night sky till the year 2100.

“Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.” —George Friedman In his long-awaited and provocative new book, George Friedman turns his eye on the future—offering a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century. The Next 100 Years draws on a fascinating exploration of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years. Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era—with changes in store, including: • The U.S.-Jihadist war will conclude—replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia. • China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power. • A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly. • Technology will focus on space—both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications. • The United States will experience a Golden Age in the second half of the century. Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead. For continual, updated analysis and supplemental material, go to www.Stratfor.com

"A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable." —Mervyn Jones, New Statesman. The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old—all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism. From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide. US History in 15 Foods takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats.

A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end extreme global poverty, now a Signal paperback. "The poor you will always have with you," according to Matthew 26:11. But Jeffrey Sachs, economics superstar, special advisor to the Secretary General of the UN and the author of The End of Poverty , vehemently disagrees. In his view, poverty -- especially the extreme deprivation of sub-Saharan Africa -- can easily be eradicated. The vast sums spent in foreign aid over the decades has not come close to alleviating the dire subsistence problems of Africans. Sachs believed he knew the reason: the developed world simply hadn't spent enough. In 2006, Sachs, backed by tens of millions of donor dollars, launched the five-year Millennium Villages Project. Sachs would test his theories in villages in different African countries, then, with each success, scale up until until the program was continent-wide. His first village "make-over" was a small community in Sauri, Kenya, and the immediate effect was encouraging. With that first inkling of success achieved, Sachs rolled out a dozen model Millennium villages in ten countries. For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Project, following Sachs on official trips and listening in on conversations with heads of states, rival organisations and potential donors. And she has immersed herself in the lives of people in two of the remote villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting hospitality from these camel herders and smallhold farmers, and sharing in their struggles, Munk came to understand the on-the-ground issues challenging Sachs' one-size-fits-all approach to global poverty. The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happened when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man met messy human reality.

The outspoken political advisor and commentator offers a survey of history's most memorable coups and failures. Dick Morris is one of the frankest and most incisive political observers in America today. A fiercely intelligent advisor to candidates at the highest levels of government, Morris is a popular columnist and a political analyst for the Fox News Channel, bringing his brilliant strategic mind and insider's political savvy to a weekly audience of millions. Now, in Power Plays, Morris reaches into history to create this fresh and fascinating survey of the most dramatic political moves ever made, from the wildly effective to the disastrous. The result is a strategy playbook that holds lessons equally valuable to the planning of a political campaign, a business venture -- or even the War on Terror. Drawing on American and international examples, Morris identifies five different types of power play, and focuses on politicians whose careers have skyrocketed after implementing them successfully -- or foundered in the wake of misjudgment. Morris explores ideologues like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill, who stood on principle and waited for their moment to shine, and "triangulators" like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and François Mitterrand, who seized the opportunity to defang their opponents by stealing their pet issues and solving them. He looks at figures as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon -- who rose to power by dividing and conquering their enemies -- and at reformers like Britain's Tony Blair and Japan's Junichiro Koizumi, who ascended by purging their parties of corruption. And he shines a light on how Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson used technology and new media to electrify their political careers. In a chapter inspired by the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Morris also reviews the efforts of FDR and Churchill to mobilize their nations in the face of Nazi Germany -- and compares their performance to that of George W. Bush in mounting America's ongoing campaign against terrorism. Morris also devotes attention to unsuccessful power plays, from Woodrow Wilson's failed attempt to launch the League of Nations to the disavowal of environmental issues that, he argues, cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000. His analysis is surprising, often irreverent, but always enlightening. And the conclusion he draws -- that candidates who best serve the people also serve themselves -- is a breath of fresh air in the often bloodthirsty arena that is politics. - Jacket flap.

An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus exposes the darkest secret in American nuclear history—sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands that decimated a people and their land. The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands—an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here—with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll—that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people became unwilling test subjects in the first large scale study of nuclear radiation fallout when the ashes rained down on powerless villagers, contaminating the land they loved and forever changing a way of life. In Blown to Hell , Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus tells for the first time the tragic story of the Marshallese people caught in the crosshairs of American nuclear testing. From John Anjain, a local magistrate of Rongelap Atoll who loses more than most; to the radiation-exposed crew of the Japanese fishing boat the Lucky Dragon ; to Dr. Robert Conard, a Navy physician who realized the dangers facing the islanders and attempted to help them; to the Washington power brokers trying to keep the unthinkable fallout from public view . . . Blown to Hell tells the human story of America’s nuclear testing program. Displaced from the only homes they had known, the native tribes that inhabited the serene Pacific atolls for millennia before they became ground zero for America’s first thermonuclear detonations returned to homes despoiled by radiation—if they were lucky enough to return at all. Others were ripped from their ancestral lands and shuttled to new islands with little regard for how the new environment supported their way of life and little acknowledgement of all they left behind. But not even the disruptive relocations allowed the islanders to escape the fallout.

The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University work to increase knowledge of the cultures, histories, environment, and contemporary affairs of Latin America; foster cooperation and understanding among the people of the Americas; and contribute to democracy, social progress, and sustainable development throughout the hemisphere. Book jacket.

Over 50 momentous and thought-provoking speeches from throughout history. Includes a DVD with recordings of many of the featured speeches. With over a million copies already sold, this is the newly updated edition of the definitive collection of great speeches ancient and modern. From calls to arms to demands for peace, and from cries of freedom to words of inspiration, this stirring anthology captures the voices of prophets and politicians, rebels and tyrants,soldiers and statesman, placing them in historical context. This revised edition includes speeches that have shaped the modern world: from Aung San Suu Kyi on freedom to Al Gore on the environment and from Malala Yousafzai on the education of women to Pope Francis on peace. A biography of each speechmaker reveals how they came to stand at the crossroads of history,and each speech is accompanied by an introduction explaining its historical context and how it influenced the momentous events of the day - as well as those that followed. Moving and thought-provoking, this new edition will continue to inspire and enlighten readers, offering them a fascinating perspective on historical milestones through the power of the spoken word. Contents include: Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Martin Luther King, Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, George Washington,Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, General George S. Patton, Mao Zedong, Malcolm X, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Indira Gandhi and Winston Churchill to name a few.

In this highly readable account by a renowned expert on Chinese politics, we enter China's real channels of power, known to all participants but invisible to most observers. In this shadow world behind the formal organizational charts, power runs vertically through gateways, or mouths (kous), that connect Beijing to the smallest local neighborhoods in this far-flung land. The mouths of power are guarded by the most powerful men in the nation. It is a world of organizations but no institutions, of constantly changing rules. With a focus on the period of Communist Party rule since 1949, Lieberthal shows how the ways and forms of power were precipitated out of the rush of historical events in twentieth-century China. He presents compelling accounts of major events from the Long March through the Cultural Revolution, to China's post-Tiananmen economic surge, and incisive analyses of their political meaning. Lieberthal also explores the key issues challenging China now - succession at the top, a destabilizing level of economic growth, a degraded environment, human rights, the impending takeover of Hong Kong, and relations with Taiwan.

Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during the 1940s were under increasing threat as they were stripped of their rights and forced to live in a guarded ghetto away from the non-Jewish Polish population. Within the ghettos, a small but distinct group existed: the assimilated, acculturated, and baptized Jews. Unwilling to integrate into the Jewish community and unable to merge with the Polish one, they formed a group of their own, remaining in a state of suspension throughout the interwar period. In 1940, with the closure of the Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw, their identity was chosen for them. Person looks at what it meant for assimilated Jews to leave their prewar neighborhoods, understood as both a physical environment and a mixed Polish Jewish cultural community, and to enter a new, Jewish neighborhood. She reveals the diversity of this group and how its members’ identity shaped their involvement in and contribution to ghetto life. In the first English-language study of this small but influential group, Person illuminates the important role of the acculturated and assimilated Jews in the history and memory of the Warsaw Ghetto.

More than twenty years after Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method was first published in English, this extraordinary collection remains a classic. The book brings together essays about Renaissance witchcraft, National Socialism, sixteenth-century Italian painting, Freud's wolf-man, and other topics. In the influential centerpiece of the volume Carlo Ginzburg places historical knowledge in a long tradition of cognitive practices and shows how a research strategy based on reading clues and traces embedded in the historical record reveals otherwise hidden information. Acknowledging his debt to art history, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology, Ginzburg challenges us to retrieve these cultural and social dimensions. In his new preface, Ginzburg reflects on how easily we miss the context in which we read, write, and live. Only hindsight allows some understanding. He examines his own path in research during the 1970s and its relationship to the times, especially the political scenes of Italy and Germany. Was he influenced by the environment, he asks himself, and if so, how? Ginzburg uses his own experience to examine the elusive and constantly evolving nature of history and historical research. Book jacket.