Showing titles in Civics & Citizenship

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker.

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver's license, verifying information for employers, or claiming state and federal benefits. Yet as Donald Trump and his fellow "birthers" reminded us when they claimed that Barack Obama wasn't an American citizen, it plays a central role in determining identity and citizenship. The Birth Certificate: An American History traces the document's two-hundred-year history to explain when, how, and why birth certificates came to matter so much in the United States.

When discrimination is race-based, we call it racism; when it's gender-based, we call it sexism. Somebodies and Nobodies introduces rank-based discrimination - or "rankism" - a form of injustice that everyone knows, but no one sees. It explains our reluctance to confront rankism, shows where analyses based on identity fall short and, using dozens of examples, traces many forms of injustice and unfairness to rankism.

In this updated and expanded nonpartisan New York Times bestselling book, Andy Andrews emphasizes that seeking and discerning the truth is of critical importance, and that believing lies is the most dangerous thing you can do. You’ll be challenged to become a more careful student of the past, seeking accurate, factual accounts of events that illuminate choices our world faces now.

Almost 250 years ago, our Founders thought We the People were the solution. Today, it looks like we have become the problem. What happened, and what can We the People do about it? Every day, the news delivers the same story: as a nation, we are so divided, we spend more time picking fights than solving our most urgent problems. It’s exhausting and exasperating. In Remaking the Space Between Us, Smith invites us to see what lies behind this story: a growing trend in which more and more of us are seeking refuge in like-minded groups while distancing from groups different from our own.

Richard Dreyfuss is a forceful advocate for civic education. His latest work, One Thought Scares Me…, explains how the lack of civics education in American education for the last fifty years has led to the deterioration of all aspects of the lives of us, the people. And it shows us the path to reclaiming our American ideals.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world.

In The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact, celebrated nonprofit executive Jacob Harold delivers an expert guide to doing good in the twenty-first century. In the book, you'll explore nine tools that have driven world-shaking social movements and billion-dollar businesses--tools that can work just as well for a farmers market or fire department or small business.

Australian writer Amaryllis Gacioppo has been raised on stories of original homes, on the Palermo of her mother, the Benghazi of her grandmother and the Turin of her great-grandmother. But what does belonging mean when you're not sure of where home is? Is the modern nation state defined by those who flourish there or by those who aren’t welcome? Is visiting the land of one’s ancestors a return, a chance to feel complete, or a fantasy?

How Election Fraud Is Rampant, and How to Stop It before It Kills America. Stealing Your Vote tells the story of corruption within the Democratic Party—but also reveals the cowardice throughout the Republican Party, as fat and happy politicians from both parties desperately worked to protect the status quo. Bobb also tells the story of a handful of brave patriots who tried, and continue trying, to find out just what happened in 2020.

The only book with exclusive analysis by the Pulitzer Prize - winning staff of The Washington Post, and the most complete and authoritative available. Includes a PDF of documents and other reference materials. Listen to the findings of the Special Counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, complete with accompanying analysis by the Post reporters who’ve covered the story from the beginning.

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of American politics that has endured since our nation’s birth. In The Reactionary Spirit, Beauchamp explains what he calls the reactionary spirit: as strides towards true democracy are made, there is always a faction that reacts by seeking to undermine them and thereby resist change. Brilliantly combining political history and reportage, Beauchamp reveals how the United States was the birthplace of this strange and harrowing authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in diverse nations including Hungary, Israel, and India.

Andreas Karelas has a message we don’t often hear: We have all the tools we need to solve the climate crisis, and doing so will improve our lives, our economy, and our society. But to engage people in the climate fight, we need stories that are empowering, inclusive, and solutions-oriented, not based in fear. Karelas digs into the latest data on the rapidly falling costs and increased efficiencies of clean energy technologies compared to fossil fuels, looks at the rate of job creation in the clean energy sector, and introduces the listener to the inspiring work of climate heroes.

In the very near future, smart “technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency?

A louca e tragicômica história dos nossos vizinhos contada no estilo único do jornalista Ariel Palacios. Com sua verve inconfundível e seu talento notável para a reportagem que se tornaram famosos na TV e no rádio, Ariel Palacios, correspondente da GloboNews e apresentador da CBN, monta um rico e divertidíssimo mosaico dos países que compõem a América Latina, reunindo toda a gama de absurdos, abusos, loucuras e atos nonsense protagonizados por monarcas, ditadores, presidentes e até mesmo líderes religiosos com alguns (ou muitos) parafusos a menos.

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as best-selling historian Rick Shenkman shows in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. This isn't because we aren't smart. Instead, modern cues are setting off ancient, instinctive responses that worked to keep us safe in the Stone Age but lead us astray today.

There are hundreds of ways to lead a more environmentally friendly, socially conscious, and liberally minded life - ways that can even be enjoyable. Justin Krebs explains that being liberal, or progressive, isn’t only a political act - it’s a lifestyle that’s suited to our changing America.

At a critical time in American life, Parker J. Palmer looks with realism and hope at how to deal with our political tensions for the sake of the common good - without the shouting, blaming, or defaming so common in our politics today.

Extended solitary confinement has been condemned as a severe violation of human rights. Yet it is still widely used in Iranian prisons. In White Torture, thirteen women, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, share their experiences of imprisonment: harassment and beatings by guards, total blindfolding and denial of medical treatment. Angry interrogators threaten their families and lie about their whereabouts. One prisoner is even told she is dead.

Tammy Duckworth takes listeners through the amazing - and amazingly true - stories from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew through the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth's US Army Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her right arm, was a turning point in her life. But as Duckworth shows in Every Day Is a Gift, that moment was just one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns.