Designing and operating an effective White House are critical to the success of any presidency—and to democracy in the United States. Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Christopher Liddell offers a strategic approach to building a strong and successful presidency. An astute and experienced operative, he demonstrates persuasively that action must be taken early, comprehensively, and visibly, starting in what he calls Year Zero, the year before governing.

There are ninety thousand registered dams in the United States, fifty thousand of them classified as “major.” Nearly all of this infrastructure was built during a forty-year period, from 1932 to 1972, in an era of public investment and political consensus that seems inconceivable today. These incredible structures—sometimes called the American Pyramids—helped the country rebound from the Great Depression, brought water and electricity to enormous reaches, helped win World War II for the Allies, and became the basis for decades of prosperous stability.

From the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century, America's flocks played a key role in the nation's development. Furthermore, much consternation centered around the sheep the United States lacked, so that dependency on foreign wool became a full-blown crisis in wartime. But more than just providers of wool, sheep were valued for their meat, for their byproducts after slaughter, and even for their efficiency at lawn maintenance.

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with "attempting to incite insurrection"—a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang.

Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans.