History & Theory

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot comes a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans....

New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host Chris Hayes offers a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

This audiobook contains all 3 volumes of Capital, as well as Marx and Engel's most renowned work, The Communist Manifesto....

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral....

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation....

This classic, definitive account of totalitarianism traces the emergence of modern racism as an "ideological weapon for imperialism"....

Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before.

Twenty-five years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years....

Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America....

In this powerful, epic biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams....

A report on how the greed of a privileged few, subsidized by public funding, creates substantial profits for themselves from mass human suffering....

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system–a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded....

This audiobook narrated by Fajer Al-Kaisi overturns simplistic portrayals of Iran as a theocratic pariah state, revealing how its strategic moves on the world stage are driven by two pervasive threats—external aggression and internal dissolution.

Originally publishing in 1944, The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production....

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president....

The definitive history of the military's decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena....

Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency....

In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73....

In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the USSR and inspiring copycat terror programs....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....

In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel....

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic - Adams, Burr, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington....

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era....

Jonathan Turley takes a timely, revelatory look at freedom of speech—our most basic right and the one that protects all the others....

On November 5, 2024, Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to secure his position as the 47th president of the United States. But when it came time for the inauguration, some Trump supporters remained skeptical. They remembered him bending over for Fauci in 2020. They remembered his horrific staffing choices during his first term, many of whom made enormous sums of money by publicly turning on him. They were worried this would be the same old, same old. Within a day, even his biggest skeptic had to concede that they were wrong. The winning had started and still has yet to stop.

The experts had it wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Election Night 2024 stunned the nation—maps bleeding red in ways no network model saw coming. CNN stammered, MSNBC scrambled, and Lichtman’s vaunted 13 Keys collapsed under the weight of a new political reality. One forecast stood alone in the chaos: The Five-Point Forecast. It didn’t just predict the outcome—it explained it. This is the electrifying autopsy of a broken prediction industry—and the rise of a model that dared to put voters, not pundits, at the center. In Why Trump Won, you’ll witness the fall of academic orthodoxy and...

The Communist Manifesto (German: Kommunistisches Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party, is a political pamphlet written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents.[citation needed] It presents an analytical approach to class struggle and criticizes capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, without attempting to predict communism's potential future forms.

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? Typically, cosmopolitanism is understood as a broad moral orientation, involving some kind of commitment to global moral equality. On this understanding, to be cosmopolitan is simply to evidence that moral orientation oneself. By contrast, Being Cosmopolitan takes up a thoroughly political approach. The focus is on what it might mean, and what it is like, to be political in a distinctly cosmopolitan form.

What does it mean to call something "new"? Why is Western art and culture, even after postmodernism, still so obsessed with the concept? What are the consequences of relying on culture to bring about social change? In this provocative book, David Balzer argues that Western culture was never designed to produce truly new or original artifacts. Rather, we move from fixation to fixation, trend to trend—a cycle of creation and destruction with deep origins in Judeo-Christianity and the paganism that preceded it.