Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history.The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatu...

Controversy swirled around the Black Panthers from the moment the revolutionary black nationalist Party was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Since that time, the group that J. Edgar Hoover called “the single greatest threat to the nation’s internal security” has been celebrated and denigrated, deified and vilified. Rarely, though, has it received the sort of nuanced analysis offered in this rich interdisciplinary collection. Historians, along with scholars in the fields of politica...

A "brilliant" history of American beliefs about the family, and how those ideas have affected our politics since the 1960s ( Washington Monthly).In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty promised an array of federal programs to assist working-class families. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP the party of "family values" and promised to keep government out of Americans' lives. Again and again, historians have sought to expla...

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar OaklandAs the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights a...

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.“Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.”—ScienceScientists and enthusiastic ...

"No part of the judiciary exposes the chasm between American ideals and institutional practice like federal Indian law. In By the Fire We Carry, Nagle, a Cherokee journalist, turns a case most Americans haven’t heard of into a legal thriller." —New York Times Book ReviewNATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year • NPR 2024 "Books We Loved" Pick • Esquire Best Book o...

**A New York Times bestseller • A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The New Republic, and Mother Jones“Greg Grandin's argument is compelling and written with zest. His history is punchy, the array of sources is vast, and the narrative pace is superb.” —

**WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Through the “revelatory and gut-wrenching” (Associated Press) stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the working homeless in cities across America.“An exceptional feat of reporting, full of an immediacy that ca...

**“Few people understand the centrality of the Vietnam War to our situation as much as Christian Appy."—Ken BurnsThe critically acclaimed author of Patriots offers profound insights into Vietnam’s place in America’s self-image**.How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy, author of the widely praised oral history of the Vietnam War Patriots, now examines the relationship between the war’s...

A James Beard Foundation Book Award–winning study of how the Great Depression changed the way the United States eats."With a dinner plate as their lens, the authors explore one of America's darkest hours." — Wall Street JournalThe idea of America as a place of abundance is enshrined in our culture, from Jefferson's agrarian democracy to the immensity of our supermarkets. The Great Depression, which left a quarter o...

A New Statesman best book of the year | New York Times Editors' Choice pickA Financial Times best economics book of 2019An accessible, story-driven look at the future of the global economy, written by a leading expertTo predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes readers to the margins of the modern economy and beyond ...

A revised and updated edition of the iconic grammar guide for the 21st century.In this expanded and updated edition of Woe Is I, former editor at The New York Times Book Review Patricia T. O'Conner unties the knottiest grammar tangles with the same insight and humor that have charmed and enlightened readers of previous editions for years. With fresh insights into the rights, wrongs, and maybes of English grammar and usage, O'Conner offers in Woe I...