It is often said that America has become culturally diverse only in the past quarter century. But from the country’s beginning, cultural variety and conflict have been a centrifugal force in American politics and a crucial reason for our rise to power.The peopling of the United States is one of the most important stories of the last five hundred years, and in Shaping our Nation, bestselling author and demographics expert Michael Barone illuminates a new an...

The election of 2016 prompted journalists and political scientists to write obituaries for the Republican Party—or prophecies of a new dominance. But it was all rather familiar. Whenever one of our two great parties has a setback, we’ve heard: “This is the end of the Democratic Party,” or, “The Republican Party is going out of existence.” Yet both survive, and thrive.We have the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world—the Democratic Party founded in 1832 to reelect A...

The ideals of freedom and individual rights that inspired America’s Founding Fathers can be traced directly back to one of the most pivotal events in British history: the late-seventeenth-century uprising known as the Glorious Revolution.In this work of popular history,Michael Barone brings the story of this unlikely and largely bloodless revolt to American readers and reveals that, without the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution may never have happened.

In this deft, multilayered thriller, a disgraced lawyer trying to revive his tattered career stumbles across a hidden case of cold-blooded murder and discovers that he must pursue justice even though doing so might just cost him what little he has left—possibly even his life.Attorney David Hirsch was the managing partner of one of St. Louis’s most prestigious law firms, until he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the federal penitentiary for seven years. He emerges from pris...

Praise for the Second Edition:"The author has done his homework on the statistical tools needed for the particular challenges computer scientists encounter... [He] has taken great care to select examples that are interesting and practical for computer scientists. ... The content is illustrated with numerous figures, and concludes with appendices and an index. The book is erudite and … could work well as a required text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course." ---Computing...

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) needs little introduction as the central figure in Romantic poetry and a crucial influence in the development of poetry generally. This broad-ranging survey redefines the variety of his writing by showing how it incorporates contemporary concepts of language difference and the ways in which popular and serious literature were compared and distinguished during this period. It discusses many of Wordsworth's later poems, comparing his work with that of his regio...

‘Michael Barone is the perfect person to write this important and thought-provoking book.'Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with DestinyThe Founding Fathers were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from particular places in already diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures in different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain,...

A peculiar feature of our country today, says Michael Barone, is that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds. Indeed, American students lag behind their peers in other nations, but America remains on the leading edge economically, scientifically, technologically, and militarily.The reason for this paradox, explains Barone in this brilliant essay, is that “from ages six to eighteen Americans live mostly in what I call Soft America...

Many Americans feel swamped by immigrants with alien cultures, languages, and customs apparently flooding into our country.

This book comprises 26 exciting chapters by internationally renowned scholars, addressing the central psychological process separating humans from other animals: the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, and to reflect on the contents of our own mindsa theory of mind (ToM). The four sections of the book cover developmental, cultural, and neurobiological approaches to ToM across different populations and species. The chapters explore the earliest stages of development of T...

The ideals of freedom and individual rights that inspired America's Founding Fathers did not spring from a vacuum. Along with many other defining principles of our national character, they can be traced directly back to one of the most pivotal events in British history—the late-seventeenth-century uprising known as the Glorious Revolution.In a work of popular history that stands with recent favorites such as David McCullough's 1776 and Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothe...

A lost ship glimpsed across the stars.A saint born of suffocating fear.A warrior surviving the massacre of her people, walking the snow with her heart exposed.A girl in a floating city, dejectedly searching for symbols to match her grief.In this collection, Michael Le Baron, accompanied by Amanda M. Jansson's art, spins twelve stories of dark wonder and mythic horror across strange planets and forgotten ages. Otherworldly saints. Collapsing gods. Love that f...