Catalog Search Results
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"American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including...
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"Fifteen families. Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America's history. For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to Joseph Alsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to...
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"In the age of hot takes and trolling, this expansive and funny study of the art and science of trash talk reveals something essential about public life--and even human nature. In the modern economy and culture, fame and virality have become increasingly difficult to separate from success. From athletes to comedians to politicians to big-ticket CEOs, everyone seemingly has to manage their brand. Saying the wrong thing is often more profitable than...
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For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom - a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings...
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"A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, revealing the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real. Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of...
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Tough choices loom if the world wants to go green. The United States and other countries must decide where and how to procure the materials that make our renewable energy economy possible. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and nickel. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate...
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"Red America and Blue America are so divided they could be two different countries, with wildly diverging views of why government exists and who counts as American. Their ideologies are grounded in different versions of American history, endorsing irreconcilable visions of patriotism and national identity. A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today's culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America's foundational...
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A "magisterial" (Sunday Times) illumination of how books were used in war across the twentieth century--both as weapons and as agents for peace. We tend not to talk about books and war in the same breath--one ranks among humanity's greatest inventions, the other among its most terrible. But as esteemed literary historian Andrew Pettegree demonstrates, the two are deeply intertwined. The Book at War explores the various roles that books have played...
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"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent...
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"Conservatives have succeeded in establishing their vision of education in America, one in which government funds can be used to pay for both public and private schools. As a result, the very meaning of public education in the United States has shifted away from the idea of a universal good. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. The Death of Public School tells...
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"In Rise Up and Sing!, Andrea Warner explores how music has contributed to the fight for social justice. Across eight areas of activism--the climate emergency, Indigenous rights, civil rights, disability rights, 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, gender equality, the peace/anti-war movement, and human rights--Warner introduces some of the artists, past and present, who have made a difference both on stage and off. Through ground-breaking artists and iconic moments,...
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"A call to reform our antiquated political institutions before it's too late-from the New York Times bestselling authors of How Democracies Die. America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault...
16) Founding partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the brawling birth of American politics
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"From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States Founding Partisans is a lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were an existential threat to republican virtues....
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"An unprecedented and intimate portrait of Russia, and a fearless cri de cœur for journalism in opposition to the global authoritarian turn To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless and unrelenting attempt to document Putin's Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian...
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"From the collaborators behind the modern business classic All the Devils are Here comes a damning indictment of American capitalism--and the leaders that left us brutally unprepared for a global pandemic In 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic made it painfully clear that the U.S. could not adequately protect its citizens. Millions of Americans suffered--and over a million died--in less than two years, while government officials blundered; prize-winning...