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Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history until the Oklahoma City bombing. In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effo...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023 Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy Winner of the American History Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography When he became director of the FBI in 1924, J. Edgar Hoover was a dazzling wunderkind buzzing with big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people – many of them communists or racial minorit...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2023 Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography Winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy Winner of the American History Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlisted for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction When he became director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater into a modern machine. He stayed in power for decades, and created a personal fiefdom unrivalled in US history. In this masterful, multi-award-winning biography, Beverley Gage explores the full sweep of Hoover's life and career. In Gage's portrait...
Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall St...
For nearly 40 years, Ronald Reagan's vision--small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism--has remained America's dominant political ideology. The Democratic Party has offered no truly convincing competing vision. Instead, American liberalism has fallen under the spell of identity politics.Mark Lilla argues with acerbic wit that liberals, originally driven by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, have now unwittingly invested their energies in social movements rather than winning elections. This abandonment of political priorities has had dire consequences. But, with the Republican Party led by an unpredictable demagogue and in ideological disarray, Lilla believes liberals now have an opportunity to turn from the divisive politics of identity, and offer positive ideas for a shared future. A fiercely-argued, no-nonsense book, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author and “one of our most talented biographers and historians” (The New York Times) David Maraniss delivers a “thoughtful, poignant, and historically valuable story of the Red Scare of the 1950s” (The Wall Street Journal) through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication. Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerge...
'An eerily prescient foreshadowing of current affairs' Guardian 'Not only Lewis's most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in the United States' New Yorker A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, 'Professional Common Man', who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path. As the new regime slides into authoritarianism, newspaper editor Doremus Jessup can't believe it will last - but is he right? This cautionary tale of liberal complacency in the face of populist tyranny shows it really can happen here.
John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian and acclaimed author of The Cold War, has for almost two decades co-taught the grand strategy seminar at Yale University with his colleagues Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy. Now, in On Grand Strategy, Gaddis reflects with insight and wit on what he has learned. In chapters extending from the ancient world through World War II, Gaddis assesses grand strategic theory and practice in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Octavian/Augustus, Saint Augustine, Machiavelli,Elizabeth I, Philip II, the American Founding Fathers, Clausewitz, Tolstoy,Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Isaiah Berlin.
Between the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in govern-ment responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to destroy this anti-capitalist movement. The result was an escalating class conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy. In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American social movements.
During the presidency of Richard Nixon, homegrown leftist guerrilla groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army carried out hundreds of attacks in the United States. The FBI had a long history of infiltrating activist groups, but this type of clandestine action posed a unique challenge. Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents, Daniel S. Chard shows how America's war with domestic guerrillas prompted a host of new policing measures as the FBI revived illegal spy techniques previously used against communists in the name of fighting terrorism. These efforts did little to stop the guerrillas—instead, they led to a bureaucratic struggle between the Nixo...