Traces the political and personal life of the Delaware senator, discussing the untimely deaths of his first wife and daughter, his presidential campaigns, and his hopes for the future.

"A sweeping 50-year history of how the Baby Boomers took the reforms of the 1960s too far, leading to a multitude of contradictions in American society and values that caused our current political polarization"--

"This biography of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, documents how his idiosyncratic philosophizing infused right-wing politics in America. Edward H. Miller explores every aspect of Welch, detailing his youthful egotism; his innovationsin candy-making; his mix of brilliance and incompetence; and the development of his raging political beliefs. The John Birch Society was long seen as occupying the farthest reaches of the political...

"In The Polarizers, Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was then cast as the solution. Republicans and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label-with the toxic results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians,...

Wilentz, the eminent Princeton historian, argues that for the past thirty-five years U.S. political history has been defined by the new politics of conservatism brokered by its major powerhorse, Ronald Reagan. Following an analysis of Reagan's presidency, Wilentz concludes that Reagan not only transformed the stage of geopolitics, but also the American judiciary and government bureaucracy, while lifting the hearts of Americans who lived through Vietnam...

"Racism. Sexism. Russian interference. A few thousand votes in key swing states. There are no shortage of explanations for the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump. In How Trump Happened, political experts Steven Schier and Todd Eberly step back to trace the factors driving his election, arguing that Trump's victory was decades in the making. As Americans prepare once again to cast their presidential ballots, How Trump Happened will be indispensable...

"An insider's account of how politicians representing a radical minority of Americans are using "the greatest deliberative body in the world" to hijack our democracy. Every major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the US Senate, yet the Senate allows an almost exclusively white, predominantly male, and radically conservative minority of the American electorate to impose its will on...

"Two award-winning historians explore the origins of a divided America. In the middle of the 1970s, America entered a new era of doubt and division. Major political, economic, and social crises--Watergate, Vietnam, the rights revolutions of the 1960s--had cracked the existing social order. In the years that followed, the story of our own lifetimes would be written. Longstanding historical fault lines over income inequality, racial division, and a...