Showing results by narrator "William Hughes" in All Categories

By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats" like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: race war.

In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster.

The murder of a young Tibetan nun at the hands of Chinese border guards at the rooftop of the world offers a unique parable for the tale of modern Tibet. Chinese police are instructed to take any measures necessary to protect the border of Tibet. When a group of climbers witness the murder of a young Tibetan nun who is fleeing to India, two men have a choice: turn a blind eye and preserve their climbing careers or alert the world to the grand scale of human injustice played out daily in Tibet.

The Civil War conjures images of blood-soaked battlefields in the United States. Few are aware of the equally important diplomatic and intelligence contest that raged between the North and South in Europe. While the Confederacy sought Great Britain as a strategic ally, the Union utilized diplomacy and espionage to avert both the construction of a Confederate navy and the threat of war with England.

Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the globe? The Empire Strikes Out gives us the sweeping story of how baseball and America are intertwined in the export of “the American way."

During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

Here is a bold, new account of the lives and ideas of the great economists - Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and many others - all written by a top free-market economist and presented in an entertaining and persuasive style. Professor Mark Skousen tells a powerful story of economics with dozens of anecdotes of the great economic thinkers.

With its trillions of connections, the human brain is more beautiful and complex than anything we could ever build, but it’s far from perfect: our memory is unreliable; we can’t multiply large sums in our heads; advertising manipulates our judgment; we tend to distrust people who are different from us; supernatural beliefs and superstitions are hard to shake; we prefer instant gratification to long-term gain; and what we presume to be rational decisions are often anything but.

The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health, while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes - and indeed because of them - our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the 20th century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific hubris have altered the way new medicines are discovered, with dire implications for both health and the economy.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.

The 2012 presidential campaign will, above all else, be a referendum on the Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, recalling the period when Obama’s “audacity of hope” met the austerity of reality. Central to this is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - the largest economic recovery plan in American history. Senator Mitch McConnell gave a taste of the enormity of the money committed: if you had spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, it still would not add up to the price tag of the stimulus package.

Known by his troops in World War II as "The GI General" because of his close identification with the men under his command, Omar Bradley commanded the U.S. Twelfth Army Group in Europe. By the spring of 1945, this group contained four field armies, 12 corps, 48 divisions, and more than 1,300,000 men, the largest exclusively American field command in U.S. history.

Periods of economic instability bring challenges that deeply affect personal and business finances. Decisions made under pressure can jeopardize the financial future, but it is possible to navigate these periods with practical strategies and a conscious approach. This book delves into the interaction between emotions and financial choices during times of crisis. Through insights rooted in behavioral finance and neuroscience, it provides tools to face economic adversities, from building a solid financial plan to overcoming cognitive biases that influence decisions in critical moments.

Best-selling author Chris Mooney uses cutting-edge research to explain the psychology behind why today’s Republicans reject reality - it’s just part of who they are. From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy, and much more. Why won’t Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts?

We are told that, when we vote and elect representatives, we gain a voice in government and its policies. Yet, it hasn't translated our preferences into higher living standards for the majority of us. In America, the wealthy few have built a system that works in their favor, while maintaining the illusion of democracy. American voters have little influence on policies engineered by lawmakers. Political scientists call it the "income bias", causing lawmakers to compete to satisfy preferences of donors from the top one percent instead of the middle class.

Pulitzer Prize-nominated former Wall Street Journal reporter Ronald G. Shafer tells the colorful story of the election battle between sitting president Martin Van Buren, a professional Democratic politician from New York, and Whig Party upstart William Henry Harrison, a military hero who was nicknamed "Old Tippecanoe" after a battlefield where he fought and won in 1811. Shafer shows how the pivotal campaign of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" marked a series of firsts that changed presidential politicking forever.

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses", becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process.

A fascinating new angle on presidential history, assessing the performances of all 44 presidents in their freshman years of the toughest job in the world. Grouped by the issues the new presidents confronted in their first years in office, The President's First Year takes listeners into the history, thought processes, and results on a case-by-case basis, including how the presidents' subsequent actions prove that they learned - or didn't learn - from their mistakes.

In the winter of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt remarked in a fireside chat, "I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making." Certainly apt in the midst of the Great Depression, the idea of a nation in the making still resonates today as we measure the achievements and shortcomings of our democracy. Over the 20th century, Americans have worked, organized, marched, and fought to make the nation's ideals a reality for all.

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between north and south, east and west.