Basic Books: 1466 books
Toussaint Louverture
A Revolutionary Life
Language: English
Release Date: November 22, 2016
The definitive biography of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, leader of the only successful slave revolt in world history
Toussaint Louverture's life was one of hardship, triumph, and contradiction. Born into bondage in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the richest colony in...
Degrees of Inequality
How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream
Language: English
Release Date: March 4, 2014
America's higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one surpassed by eleven other nations in college graduation rates. Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers...
The Battle of Blair Mountain
The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2006
In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners-- outraged over years of brutality and exploitation-- picked up their Winchesters and marched against their tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion...
by Stefan Halper, Jonathan Clarke
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: February 13, 2007
What has happened to American foreign policy? Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke argue that the members of what used to be called the foreign policy establishment are no longer doing the job of keeping our foreign policy informed and rational. Instead, hungry to coin the next Big Idea, they are in...
The Atlantic and Its Enemies
A History of the Cold War
Language: English
Release Date: May 25, 2010
After World War II, the former allies were saddled with a devastated world economy and traumatized populace. Soviet influence spread insidiously from nation to nation, and the Atlantic powers-the Americans, the British, and a small band of allies-were caught flat-footed by the coups, collapsing armies,...
India's War
World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Between 1939 and 1945 India underwent extraordinary and irreversible change. Hundreds of thousands of Indians suddenly found themselves in uniform, fighting in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Europe and-something simply never imagined-against a Japanese army poised to invade eastern India....
The Constitution
An Introduction
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2017
From war powers to health care, freedom of speech to gun ownership, religious liberty to abortion, practically every aspect of American life is shaped by the Constitution. This vital document, along with its history of political and judicial interpretation, governs our individual lives and the life...
Dismantling America
and other controversial essays
Language: English
Release Date: August 10, 2010
These wide-ranging essays—on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues—have as a recurring, underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries. This decline has been more than an erosion....
Three Squares
The Invention of the American Meal
Language: English
Release Date: September 10, 2013
We are what we eat, as the saying goes-but we are also how we eat, and when, and where. Our eating habits reveal as much about our national identity as the food on our plates, as food historian Abigail Carroll vividly demonstrates in Three Squares. Reaching back to colonial America, when settlers...
The Idea That Is America
Keeping Faith With Our Values in a Dangerous World
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2007
What values does America truly stand for? In The Idea That Is America, a preeminent foreign policy scholar elegantly reminds us of the essential principles on which our nation was established: liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance, faith, justice, and humility. Our ongoing struggle to live up to...
Song of Wrath
The Peloponnesian War Begins
Language: English
Release Date: November 2, 2010
Song of Wrath tells the story of Classical Athens' victorious Ten Years' War (431 421 BC) against grim Sparta-the first decade of the terrible Peloponnesian War that turned the Golden Age of Greece to lead. Historian J.E. Lendon presents a sweeping tale of pitched battles by land and sea, sieges,...
The Real State Of The Union
From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2009
Resulting from a collaboration between The Atlantic Monthly magazine and the New America Foundation, The Real State of the Union features 18 original essays on the most important facets of our national well-being. Written by many of our nation's most insightful observers, the essays provide an objective...
An Unlikely Conservative
The Transformation Of An Ex-liber
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2009
When President George W. Bush nominated Linda Chavez to be Secretary of Labor in 2001, few people realized that this hard-nosed conservative began her career among socialists and labor union officials, teaching in college affirmative action programs and writing political propaganda for the Democratic...
Russia and the Arabs
Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present
Language: English
Release Date: September 22, 2009
Part memoir, part history, Russia and the Arabs reveals the past half-century in the Middle East from a viewpoint seldom seen by Westerners. Yevgeny Primakov, formerly the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister of Russia, exposes how key political events...