Here you will find the finest essays “judiciously selected from countless publications” (Chicago Tribune), ranging from The New Yorker and Harper’s to Swink and Pinch. In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in.” David Sedaris’s quirky, hilarious account of a childhood spent yearning for a home where history was properly respected is also a poignant rumination on surviving the passage of time. In “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem ponders the intriguing phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a person believes herself to be creating something new but is really recalling similar, previously encountered work. Ariel Levy writes in “The Lesbian Bride’s Handbook” of her efforts to plan a party that accurately reflects her lifestyle (which she notes is “not black-tie!”) as she confronts head-on what it means to be married. And Lauren Slater is off to “Tripp Lake,” recounting the one summer she spent at camp—a summer of color wars, horseback riding, and the “wild sadness” that settled in her when she was away from home.

In the end, Gopnik believes that the only real ambition of an essayist is to be a master of our common life. This latest installment of The Best American Essays is full of writing that reveals, in Gopnik’s words, “the breath of things as they are.”

Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.

Ray Kurzweil is a prize-winning author and scientist. He was named Inventor of the Year by MIT in 1988 and was awarded the Dickson Prize, Carnegie Mellon's top science prize, in 1994. He is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and honors from two American presidents. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

The long and storied career of Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. one of the nation's finest speakers, has carried him from work on the civil rights front lines in the South to the National Urban League to positions of influence at the highest level of business and politics. A friend and confidant to presidents, Vernon Jordan has never forgotten the men and women, from Wiley Branton to Martin Luther King, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Whitney Young to Primus King, whose oratorical skill in service to social justice deeply influenced him. Their examples, and voices, mixed with Vernon's own make this book both a history and an embodiment of black speech at its finest, full of emotion, controlled force, righteous indignation, love of country, and awe in front of the challenges ahead.

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. is a senior managing director of Lazard Frères & Co. LLC in New York. He was previously president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, executive director of the United Negro College Fund, Inc., and director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. He served as chairman of the Clinton Presidential Transition Team in 1992 and is senior counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP.

In Returning to the Lakota Way, prolific author Joseph Marshall presents the follow-up to his highly regarded book The Lakota Way. Using beautiful storytelling to relay traditional tales passed down through the generations, Marshall once again takes the reader on a journey of growth and inspiration. Each chapter presents one story that exemplifies a quality or way of life that will encourage in readers a sense of inner peace amidst the busyness of modern life.

From the hunting adventures of the raven and the wolf, we see the importance of tolerance; the lessons of the grasshopper impart the wisdom of patience; and the experiences of a young man named Walks Alone teach us about silence and turning within. Speaking to these and other universal qualities, such as faith and selflessness, Marshall gives readers insight into their own lives using tales from the past interspersed with stories from his own life growing up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In him, we see a clear example of the wisdom of history enhancing the state of the current world. This magnificent work will give readers an insider’s view of the Lakota people while providing universal lessons to enrich life.

This is a re-issue of Sloane's classic folksy history of barn folklore, architecture, and history, which has been out of print for twenty years. Eric Sloane's An Age of Barns is filled with fabulous black-and-white illustrations from this great American artist. Covering all types of American and Canadian barns and everything associated with them-implements and tools, hex signs, silos, out buildings, hinges, barn raising, and more-Eric Sloane's An Age of Barns is a spectacular album tribute to this important facet of our architecture and agriculture. This book is sure to once again become a collector's item.

From Library Journal

An unfortunate result of progress is that many older technologies or styles are lost to future generations. With preservation in mind, Sloane created the original edition of this title, which has been out of print for 20 years. This reissue is of great value to anyone interested in barns or early Americana. The black-and-white illustrations are simply beautiful, showing the amazing array of barn designs and related agricultural buildings. Sloane also covers barn raisings, smoke houses, and the specific parts of all of these structures. This remarkable book will appeal to those interested in construction, Americana, or rural living; this title should be part of every public library collection.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Eric Sloane, formerly of Connecticut, was a famous American painter, illustrator, and author who published more than 40 books, including Diary of an Early American Boy and Museum of Tools.

This acclaimed survey of 20th-century architecture and its origins has become a classic since it first appeared in 1980. Now revised, enlarged and expanded, Kenneth Frampton brings the story up to date and adds an entirely new concluding chapter that focuses on four countries where individual talent and enlightened patronage have combined to produce a comprehensive and convincing architectural culture: Finland, France, Spain and Japan. The bibliography has also been reviewed and extended, making this volume more indispensable than ever. 362 illustrations

The buildings of the Smithsonian Institution not only contain impressive collections; they are themselves icons of great cultural significance, many of them part of the historic National Mall. The Smithsonian's unique buildings illustrate the changing styles and sensibilities of America as an evolving nation. Representing the work of major architects, each building evokes a specific time in history: the mid-19th-century turreted Castle, the sky-reflecting mid-century modern Air and Space Museum, and the golden, undulating, 21st-century American Indian Museum.

‟This is a well written book that deals with 12 of the well known artist at this museum. Interesting opinions, not fully expounded on, only 1 or 2 works of each artist, mostly dealt with paintings and the history of the evolution of art (again, mostly painting) during this particular time period, about 1850 to 1920. Great time line in the back that covers political, artistic and social events.”—Joan L. Peirce

‟Vanina Costa's book on the Musee D'Orsay is the kind of book that makes you interested in something that you were only vaguely acquainted with before you read it. 12 paintings by twelve 19th century painters featured at the Musee D'Orsay are analyzed for their style and content, with a sort of expert detail that you would not expect to see in a guidebook to a museum. The one regret I have is that Renoir was not included in this survey, but we get to learn about Seurat, Courbet and Vuillard as well as Monet, Manet, Van Gogh , Degas, Cezanne and Gaughin. A really good read that should be made widely available to patrons of art museums across North America, Europe and Japan and elsewhere in Asia.”—Michael Gutierrez-May (Mikegtz@aol.com)

“Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.” — Booklist (starred review)

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.

The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.

Simon Winchester takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.

As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?

The Master Algorithm : How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos - Paperback

"Wonderfully erudite, humorous, and easy to read." --KDNuggets

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner--the Master Algorithm--and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society. If data-ism is today's philosophy, this book is its bible.

Review

"Pedro Domingos demystifies machine learning and shows how wondrous and exciting the future will be."―Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators

"An impressive and wide-ranging work that covers everything from the history of machine learning to the latest technical advances in the field."―Daily Beast

"Domingos writes with verve and passion."―New Scientist

"Unlike other books that proclaim a bright future, this one actually gves you what you need to understand the changes that are coming."―Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google and coauthor of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

"Domingos is the perfect tour guide from whom you will learn everything you need to know about this exciting field, and a surprising amount about sience and philosophy as well."―Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, and author of Six Degrees and Everything Is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer 

"[The Master Algorithm] does a good job of examining the field's five main techniques.... The subject is meaty and the author...has a knack for introducing concepts at the right moment."―The Economist

"Domingos is a genial and amusing guide, who sneaks us around the backstage areas of the science in order to witness the sometimes personal (and occasionally acrimonious) tenor of research on the subject in recent decades."―Times Higher Education 

"An exhilarating venture into groundbreaking computer science." ―Booklist, starred review

"[An] enthusiastic but not dumbed-down introduction to machine learning...lucid and consistently informative.... With wit, vision, and scholarship, Domingos decribes how these scientists are creating programs that allow a computer to teach itself. Readers...will discover fascinating insights." ―Kirkus Reviews 

"This book is a must have to learn machine learning without equation. It will help you get the big picture of the several learning paradigms. Finally, the provocative idea is not only intriguing, but also very well argued."―Data Mining Research

About the Author

Pedro Domingos is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He is a winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award, the highest honor in data science. A fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, he lives near Seattle.

A top strategic analyst explains what the Cold War can teach us about the War on Terror

September 11 was a product of bad intelligence and wrongheaded expectations about al-Qaeda’s motivations, intentions, resourcefulness, and capabilities. But it also sprang from a failure of the kind of predictive strategic thinking that kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates both the genius of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), plus the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists’ intellectual fertility and flexibility. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust abated, the American strategic community— from intelligence officers to policymakers to think tanks—lost the capacity to forecast and prepare for impending new threats to U.S. and global security. Complementing the cold-eyed revelations of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower and Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable is a probing, urgent exhortation: if we are to extricate America from its current strategic predicament, we must regenerate for a new age the pragmatic creativity that once distinguished its strategic brain trust.

Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the Naval War College. He spent most of the 1990s in sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Ireland, and his previous books include “We Wrecked the Place”: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles and Losing Mogadishu. He has published articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, as well as in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. 

A challenging, clear-eyed, and authoritative history of American conservatism and its grave effect on our country's foreign policy

In this compelling and sometimes alarming analysis, J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic, traces the history of American foreign policy and how it has evolved from the Cold War conservatism of the 1950s to today. The belligerence, intransigence, and disinclination for diplomacy that mars the right wing once brought us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. More recently it has failed to meet the post-9/11 challenges posed by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Scoblic argues forcefully that the only way to face these new threats practically and seriously is by adopting an approach exactly opposite to that suggested by conservatism. By diagnosing the origins of Bush's foreign policy, U.S. vs. Them illuminates the path to renewed American leadership in the twenty-first century as the most serious danger ever faced looms before us: nuclear terrorism.

In the wake of civil war, American politics were racially charged and intensely sectionalist, with politicians waving the proverbial bloody shirt and encouraging their constituents, as Republicans did in 1868, to “vote as you shot.” By the close of the century, however, burgeoning industrial development and the roller-coaster economy of the post-war decades had shifted the agenda to pocketbook concerns—the tariff, monetary policy, business regulation.

In From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner-Pail, the historian Charles W. Calhoun provides a brief, elegant overview of the transformation in national governance and its concerns in the Gilded Age. Sweeping from the election of Grant to the death of McKinley in 1901, this narrative history broadly sketches the intense and divided political universe of the period, as well as the colorful characters who inhabited it: the enigmatic and tragic Ulysses Grant; the flawed visionary James G. Blaine, at once the Plumed Knight and the Tattooed Man of American politics; Samuel J. “Slick Sammy” Tilden; the self-absorbed, self-righteous, and ultimately self-destructive Grover Cleveland; William Jennings Bryan, boy orator and godly tribune; and the genial but crafty William McKinley, who forged a national majority and launched the nation onto the world stage. From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner-Pail also considers how the changes at the close of the nineteenth century opened the way for the transformations of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century.

History is to society what memory is to the individual. Without it, we don't know who we are and we can't make wise decisions about our future. But while the nature of memory is constant, the nature of history has changed radically over the past forty years.

In The Purpose of the Past, historian Gordon S. Wood examines this sea change in his field through consideration of some of its most important historians and their works. Along the way, he offers wonderful insight into what great historians do, how they can stumble, and what strains of thought have dominated the marketplace of ideas in historical scholarship. The result is a history of American history--and an argument for its ongoing necessity.

A commanding assessment of the field by one of its masters, The Purpose of the Past will enlarge every reader's capacity to appreciate history.

Doctor Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago from 1956 until his death in 1981, first made his mark as a historian with his famous book Capitalism and Slavery, to which the present volume was a worthy and logical successor.  It is a narrative history written with great verve and vigour, and derived from a wealth of material, which collates all existing knowledge of the Caribbean in relation to the rest of the world.

The first complete history of the region as a whole to have been written, it contributes to our understanding of the modern world by illuminating one important but neglected and misrepresented area of it.  Caught up in the political and economic net of the metropolitan counties for over four and a half centuries, and for part of that time the 'cockpit of the world', it is only in the last fifty years that the Caribbean has achieved independence.  Today the task of interpreting accurately the  colonial past as a guide to the consolidation of that Independence is more necessary than ever.

The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, “from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research.” Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather. 

“A universal history of infamy [that] contains all the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies....”—Jorge Luis Borges 

“The tale is one of blood, excitement and debauchery.”—The New York Times Book Review 

“The Gangs of New York is one of the essential works of the city....”—Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books

WINNER OF THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER
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NAMED A FINALIST for the 2016 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION
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NOMINATED for the 2016 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK OF NONFICTION, and the 2017 HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD IN NONFICTION
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, The Root, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and Entropy
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THE MOST AMBITIOUS BOOK OF 2016 -- The Washington Post
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A KIRKUS BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2016, BEST BOOK OF 2016 TO EXPLAIN CURRENT POLITICS & BEST HEARTRENDING NONFICTION BOOK of 2016
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Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America.

Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.

"ENGROSSING AND RELENTLESS" --The Washington Post

"THIS DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING" --The Root

"NOVELISTIC FLAIR" --The Stranger

"AMBITIOUS, MAGISTERIAL" --Starred Kirkus Review

"MUST FOR SERIOUS READERS" --Library Journal

"HEAVILY RESEARCHED YET READABLE" --Booklist

"WORTH THE TIME OF ANYONE WHO WANTS TO UNDERSTAND RACISM" --The Seattle Times

"EVER-RELEVANT CONTEXT FOR THE WHITE SUPREMACIST MOMENT" --The Dallas Morning News

"A COMPELLING, THOROUGHLY ENLIGTENING, UNSETTLING, AND NECESSARY READ" --Vox

"GRACEFUL, ENGAGING PROSE" --Tampa Bay Times

A sweeping, authoritative history of the expansion of slavery in America, showing how forced migrations radically altered the nation's economic, political, and cultural landscape.

"The overwhelming power of the stories that Baptist recounts, and the plantation-level statistics he's compiled, give his book the power of truth and revelation."―Los Angeles Times

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution--the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

"Thoughtful, unsettling.... Baptist turns the long-accepted argument that slavery was economically inefficient on its head, and argues that it was an integral part of America's economic rise."―Daily Beast

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize

Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014

Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014

"Wonderful.... Baptist provides meticulous, extensive, and comprehensive evidence that capitalism and the wealth it created was absolutely dependent on the forced labor of Africans and African-Americans, downplaying culturalist arguments for Western prosperity."―Nation

"By far the finest account of the deep interplay of the slave trade...and the development of the U.S. economy."―Stephen L. Carter

"Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose.... The Half Has Never Been Told's underlying argument is persuasive."―New York Times Book Review

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved. 

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. 

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution“ in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

From Publishers Weekly

Instead of focusing on cotton plantations or broad historical patterns, this extraordinary study is a flesh-and-blood daily history of the slave market. NYU history professor Johnson takes readers inside the Dixie slave pens and traders' coffles (long rows of slaves manacled and chained to one another). His focus is New Orleans, North America's largest slave market, hub of a trade that decimated African-American slave communities by tearing families asunder--destroying marriages and separating children from parents. Using former slave survivors' narratives, letters written by slaveholders, docket records of cases of disputed slave sales and Southern medical and agricultural journals, Johnson interweaves the voices of traders, buyers, auctioneers and the slaves themselves. He shows that, for white Southern slaveholders, buying slaves buoyed a fantasy of manly bourgeois self-control, speculative savvy and economic independence. Slaves, meanwhile, assessed the character of particular buyers and sometimes, at enormous risk, manipulated a sale to their own advantage. The evil business of slavery has seldom been exposed with so much humanity and insight as in this eloquent study, scholarly yet wholly accessible, a compelling cross-sectional microcosm of millions of human tragedies.  
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2017
Long-listed for the National Book Award

"Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation." ―William Julius Wilson

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

13 illustrations

In these “urgently relevant essays,”* the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me “reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath”*—including the election of Donald Trump.

New York Times Bestseller • One of Time’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year • One of USA Today’s top 10 books of the year • A New York Times Notable Book

“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

“Essential . . . Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment.” —The Boston Globe

But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates has published a collection of the major magazine essays he wrote throughout the Obama years. . . . But Coates adds an unexpected element that renders We Were Eight Years in Power both new and revealing. Interspersed among the essays are introductory personal reflections. . . . Together, these introspections are the inside story of a writer at work, with all the fears, insecurities, influences, insights and blind spots that the craft demands. . . . I would have continued reading Coates during a Hillary Clinton administration, hoping in particular that he’d finally write the great Civil War history already scattered throughout his work. Yet reading him now feels more urgent, with the bar set higher.”—Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.

“Essential . . . Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment.”—The Boston Globe 

“Biting cultural and political analysis from the award-winning journalist . . . [Ta-Nehisi Coates] reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath, and his own evolution as a writer in eight stunningly incisive essays. . . . He contextualizes each piece with candid personal revelations, making the volume a melding of memoir and critique. . . . Emotionally charged, deftly crafted, and urgently relevant.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between the World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Coates is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author

“This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.”
—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials

In her groundbreaking  bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.

“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

A revealing collection that restores Dr. King as being every bit as radical as Malcolm X

“The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies. . . . The response of the radical King to our catastrophic moment can be put in one word: revolution—a revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. . . . Could it be that we know so little of the radical King because such courage defies our market-driven world?” —Cornel West, from the Introduction

Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was.

Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes twenty-three selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King’s revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism. As West writes, “Although much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today—the FBI and US government did. They called him ‘the most dangerous man in America.’ . . . This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.”

Did you know that Uncle Sam was at the Battle of Lexington and Concord? He was only 12 years old at the time. How about the most cursed ship of the American Navy that, upon her defeat, indirectly won the War Of 1812? Did you ever hear of the river that changed the course of American history; or how about Otis Merrithew, the real hero of World War I, who disappeared for 12 years after the war? These and many other unique war stories are revealed in this book.

"George Twelvetrees Hewes wasn't a midget, but he was close. After his funny exploits during the American Revolution, he wrote a journal, and the author uses this journal to weave his tantalizing true story of those great and little known characters who won our independence from England. People like Revere, John Adams and Hancock were not considered heroes by their co-patriots, whereas the eccentric Otis and the crafty Warren were the real leaders, their names are almost forgotten now. A real insight into the courage, humor and day-to-day lives of our revolutionaries."

"Most of the servants who came to the New World with the Pilgrims and Puritans were Irish and Scots-Irish, yet their names were not recorded for posterity. The Irish snuck into Boston by the hundreds in the 1600s and by the thousands in the early 1700s. The famed Boston Massacre was really an Irish Massacre, since most who participated on both sides were Irish. The greatest American privateersman was Irish, and many of Washington's generals were Irish, as were a high percentage of his troops. If you're of Irish blood, this is the book for you!"

Thirty years ago in the attic of an old estate in Massachusetts, John Hanson Mitchell discovered over two thousand antique glass plate negatives. He was told that the photographs had been taken by nineteenth-century ornithologist and conservationist William Brewster, but as a result of a tip from a Harvard research assistant, he began to suspect that the images were actually the work of Brewster's African American assistant, Robert A. Gilbert.

So begins the author's journey. From the maze-like archives at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Virginia countryside and haunts of American expats in 1920s Paris, as well as the rich cultural world of blacks in nineteenth-century Boston, Mitchell brings sharp focus to the figure of Mr. Gilbert, a quiet, unassuming Renaissance man who succeeded as best as he could beneath the iron ceiling of American racism. Told with Mitchell's trademark grace and style, the fascinating story of this "invisible man" deepens our understanding of the African American past as well as the history of American photography.

This is a look at American history dating back to the time of the Revolution.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. International News Books & Gifts uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1917, James Ford Rhodes's History of the Civil War, 1861–1865 stands among the essential works in American history. Remarkable for its scholarly research, objectivity and engrossing narrative style, this volume is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding studies — and the first unbiased history — of the Civil War.

The book presents a neutral approach to the bloody struggle, neither distorting nor coloring the facts. Rhodes worked methodically, collecting the evidence, considering the opinions of others, and then precisely and lucidly presenting his own conclusions. Distilling material from official military records, diaries, reminiscences, letters, memoirs, newspapers, manuscripts, books, and interviews, the author produced an essential, carefully weighed, and complete account. The critics agreed: "a clear outline of the Civil War . . . it is well worthy of the welcome it has already received." — American Historical Review. " . . . the author's notable faculty of summarizing without leaving out the spirit, the life, and the color of events . . . infuses his narrative with unusual power to re-create the time of which he writes." — The New York Times.

While the narrative is neutral, choosing neither villains nor heroes, the ideological direction of Rhodes's work is surprisingly current. In accord with such present-day interpreters of the Civil War period as James McPherson and Ken Burns, Rhodes saw the Civil War as essentially a fight for freedom, and focused upon Abraham Lincoln as the deciding factor in the granting of freedom and the winning of the war.

This Dover edition contains a cogent new introduction by John Herbert Roper, Richardson Professor of American History, Emory and Henry College, Emory, Virginia.

From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a century-old manuscript called “The Oral History of Our Time.”

“A breezy, compulsively readable inquiry that touches on several big subjects, including what constitutes due diligence in journalism versus in history…No one could accuse Lepore of shoddy research: Undaunted by archives, she pores over reams of Gould’s letters and diaries, pans for gold in Mitchell’s boxes of notes at the New York Public Library, and corroborates her findings with extensive footnotes.….Joe Gould’s Teeth is more than just a fascinating footnote to a beloved literary landmark. Using the tools of her trade, Lepore ended up broadening her search for his lost notebooks to encompass trenchant questions about journalism, race, and mental illness. The result has bite.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life’s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. “I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,” he explained, because “as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.” By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould’s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a second profile, Mitchell claimed that “The Oral History of Our Time” had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould’s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out.  

Joe Gould’s Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention. Digging through archives all over the country, Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks—including volumes of his lost manuscript—Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

“A well-aimed hand grenade of a book, fiercely concentrated in its precision and unflinching in its revelations. Best-selling Lepore’s exciting approach to hidden and scandalous historical stories is drawing an enthusiastic, ever-growing readership that will be well primed for this thoughtful exposé.” —Booklist, *starred review*

“Engrossing…. Lepore’s book is as much about all the people, including herself, who project meaning and significance onto the work and personality of Joe Gould as it is about the man himself. Throughout history there have been peculiar characters who have captured the imagination of everyone they come into contact with, blinding them to obvious flaws and permitting all of us to imagine wonders just beyond what most of us can fathom. We owe Lepore a debt of gratitude for re-introducing us to one of the strangest strangers to have ever walked among us.” —Chicago Tribune

“Revelatory….Lepore’s inquiry, which first appeared as a long New Yorker article, discovers richer depths to Gould’s character than Mitchell ever explored, even if Gould’s likability is a casualty…. an impressive study of paradoxes….Lepore, a young prolific academic at the other end of the productivity spectrum from Mitchell, has upended the subject and author of the New Yorker’s most-read article….she ends up with more to get your teeth into.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelous….Lepore has established herself as perhaps the most prolific, nimble and interesting writer of American history today, vigorously kicking at the past until she dislodges it from the ossifying grip of received wisdom…. As she brings to bear the methods of an ace historian at the top of her game, Lepore turns “Joe Gould’s Teeth” into a ripping detective story….Of all the stories swirling around Gould’s, none interests Lepore so much as that of Augusta Savage, an African American sculptor and civil rights activist from Harlem who became the unreciprocated love of Gould’s life, an unwilling muse and, after she refused his offer of marriage, an object of outright harassment. No other writer has made this connection between Savage and Gould, and one of the central satisfactions of “Joe Gould’s Teeth” is the way it unexpectedly veers away from Gould to take Savage’s story on its own terms, delivering by Trojan horse, as it were, a gift-wrapped second biography, a personal history set against Gould’s in striking, illuminating relief.” —The Washington Post

“Lepore has taken up the mantle of literary resurrectionist, and in ‘Joe Gould’s Teeth’ she succeeds despite the unsavory nature of her subject’s life and spurious literary legacy. Lepore shrewdly recounts her quest to find a near-mythical ‘lost’ manuscript by her subject, the New York eccentric who claimed to have written down nearly everything anyone ever said to him, starting before the outbreak of World War I….A madman’s grossly engrossing tale.” —The New York Times

“America’s story from 1898 to 1945 is nothing less than the triumph of American exceptionalism over liberal progressivism, despite a few temporary victories by the latter.”

Conservative historian Larry Schweikart has won wide acclaim for his number one New York Times bestseller, A Patriot’s History of the United States. It proved that, contrary to the liberal biases in countless other his­tory books, America had not really been founded on racism, sexism, greed, and oppression. Schweikart and coauthor Michael Allen restored the truly great achievements of America’s patriots, founders, and heroes to their rightful place of honor.

Now Schweikart and coauthor Dave Dougherty are back with a new perspective on America’s half-century rise to the center of the world stage. This all-new volume corrects many of the biases that cloud the way people view the Treaty of Versailles, the Roaring Twenties, the Crash of 1929, the deployment of the atomic bomb, and other critical events in global history.

Beginning with the Spanish-American War— which introduced the United States as a global military power that could no longer be ignored—and con­tinuing through the end of World War II, this book shows how a free, capitalist nation could thrive when put face-to-face with tyrannical and socialist powers. Schweikart and Dougherty narrate the many times America proved its dominance by upholding the prin­ciples on which it was founded—and struggled on the rare occasions when it strayed from those principles.

The authors make a convincing case that America has constantly been a force for good in the world, improving standards of living, introducing innova­tions, guaranteeing liberty, and offering opportunities to those who had none elsewhere. They also illustrate how the country ascended to superpower status at the same time it was figuring out its own identity. While American ideals were defeating tyrants abroad, a con­stant struggle against progressivism was being waged at home, leading to the stumbles of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite this rocky entrance on the world stage, it was during this half century that the world came to embrace all things American, from its innovations and businesses to its political system and popular culture. The United States began to define what the rest of the world could emulate as the new global ideal.

"Schweikart and Dougherty examine nearly 50 years of growing American political and military mastery from the Spanish-American War to WWII. Choosing a theme of Yankee exceptionalism (with four pillars: common law, Protestantism, free market capitalism, and private property), the authors (Schweikart is a professor of history at the University of Dayton and coauthored The Patriot's History Reader with Dougherty) make a convincing case for the series of trial-and-error achievements from Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations through Prohibition to the ultimate victory over Japan with the atomic bomb: "America's ascent to world power demonstrated that so long as the essence of American exceptionalism remained at the core of all efforts foreign and domestic, the likelihood of success was nearly guaranteed." There is a conservative slant on some issues, such as the criticism of FDR's New Deal, but the sections on Margaret Sanger's embrace of eugenics (less well known than her birth control advocacy) and the rise of the fascists in Europe are noteworthy in their detail. Sweeping in scope and, as the title indicates, unapologetically patriotic, this book honors the American way at home and abroad with its firm emphasis on "human dignity and prosperity."-- Publishers Weekly

A Patriot’s History of the Modern World provides a new perspective on our extraordinary past—and offers lessons we can apply to preserve American exceptional­ism today and tomorrow.

A moving memoir of the beloved fortieth president of the United States, by his son.

‟I read a lot of political biographies and was delighted and surprised by the uniqueness of this one. I had no idea that Ron Reagan could write like this. He is truly gifted. While he doesn't really get into the politics or the historical significance of his father's presidency, he portrays his father as an intriguing human being. He tries to give us a sense of how Reagan became the man we all saw. Unlike other famous and powerful men, Reagan seemed to be what he appeared to be. Or, from his son's description, Reagan thoroughly created himself to be the man he appeared to be. Whether or not you are a fan of Reagan, a liberal or a conservative, this book is fascinating.”—reviewer at Amazon

February 6, 2011, is the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. To mark the occasion, Ron Reagan has written My Father at 100, an intimate look at the life of his father-one of the most popular presidents in American history-told from the perspective of someone who knew Ronald Reagan better than any adviser, friend, or colleague. As he grew up under his father's watchful gaze, he observed the very qualities that made the future president a powerful leader. Yet for all of their shared experiences of horseback rides and touch football games, there was much that Ron never knew about his father's past, and in My Father at 100, he sets out to understand this beloved, if often enigmatic, figure who turned his early tribulations into a stunning political career.

Since his death in 2004, President Reagan has been a galvanizing force that personifies the values of an older America and represents an important era in national history. Ron Reagan traces the sources of these values in his father's early years and offers a heartfelt portrait of a man and his country-and his personal memories of the president he knew as "Dad."