From 1968 until 1970, William Hershey served as the only Peace Corps volunteer in a small Ethiopian town. Hershey taught seventh and eighth grade students the English that they would need to continue their educations and brighten their futures. He became part of the community, eating the local food and doing his best to communicate in Amharic. He also navigated cultural gaffes-having his house stoned by disgruntled students, angered at being assigned to cleaning the outhouses, and nearly s...

William Hershey used his weekly columns as the Akron Beacon Journal's Washington correspondent to send letters home from a foreign country with strange and self-important ways. The columns looked at how members of Congress from Ohio contributed to the headlines and what the headlines meant for readers in terms of issues such as the economy, clean air, trade and the United States' place in the world. The columns also kept readers up to date on the victories and setbacks of Ohio's n...

This collection of profiles highlights the careers of Ohio political trailblazers and high achievers covering nearly a century – from Republican Ray Bliss' humble start as an errand boy in Akron's 1931 mayoral race to Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine today. Bliss worked quietly behind the scenes as party chairman to elect mayors, governors and presidents. Democrat Howard Metzenbaum earned a reputation as a high-profile political battler in the U.S. Senate....

Ray Bliss was a masterful behind-the-scenes force in the Republican Party for more than three decades at the local, state, and national levels. Recognized as a master of the "nuts and bolts" of practical politics, Bliss was among the first to use polling and television in campaigns. When Bliss took over as national chairman in 1965, the GOP was on life support after Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential election. Bliss rebuilt the party through hard work, innovation, ...

“A detailed and dramatic narrative of the rise of the modern right...It's an amazing story, and Perlstein, a man of the left, does it justice” (William Kristol, The New York Times Book Review)Before the Storm begins at the tail end of the 1950s, with America affluent, confident, and convinced that political ideology was a thing of the past.But when John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, conservatives—editor William F. Buckley Jr., ...

Barack Obama's inspirational politics and personal mythology have overshadowed his fascinating history. Young Mr. Obama gives us the missing chapter: the portrait of the politician as a young leader, often too ambitious for his own good, but still equipped with a rare ability to inspire change. The route to the White House began on the streets of Chicago's South Side.Edward McClelland, a veteran Chicago journalist, tells the real story of the first black president's politi...

David Daley’s “extraordinarily timely” (New York Times Book Review) account uncovers the fundamental rigging of our House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide.Lauded as a “compelling” (The New Yorker) and “eye-opening tour of a process that many Americans never see” (Washington Post), David Daley’s Ratf**ked documents the effort of Republican legislators and political operatives to hack American democracy through ...

Barack Obama's speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches should have represented the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial unity. Yet, in Fracture, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore.Wit...

From Face the Nation moderator and contributing editor for The Atlantic John Dickerson come the stories behind the stories of the most memorable moments in American presidential campaign history.The stakes are high. The characters full of striving and ego. Presidential campaigns are a contest for control of power in the most powerful country on earth. The battle of ideas has a clear end, with winners and losers, and along the way there are sharp t...

The story of the behind-the-scenes political battle to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act: "Excellent . . . a highly readable play-by-play." — The AtlanticIt was a turbulent time in America—a time of sit-ins, freedom rides, a March on Washington, and a governor standing in the schoolhouse door—when John F. Kennedy sent Congress a bill to bar racial discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations. Countless civil rights measures had died on Ca...

When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted African Americans the right to vote, it seemed as if a new era of political equality was at hand. Before long, however, white segregationists across the South counterattacked, driving their black countrymen from the polls through a combination of sheer terror and insidious devices such as complex literacy tests and expensive poll taxes. Most African Americans would remain voiceless for nearly a century more, citizens in name only until the passa...

Today's political scene looks nothing like it did thirty years ago, and that is due mostly to Reagan's monumental reshaping of the Republican party. What few people realize, however, is that Reagan's revolution did not begin when he took office in 1980, but in his failed presidential challenge to Gerald Ford in 1975-1976. This is the remarkable story of that historic campaign-one that, as Reagan put it, turned a party of "pale pastels" into a national party of "bold colors." Featuring inte...