Reckoning with History brings together original essays from a diverse group of historians who consider how writing about the past can engage with the urgent issues of the present. Covering a broad range of topics, these essays illuminate what it means to be a socially and politically engaged historian.

Explore the lives of America's 45 presidents, as well as notable first ladies, famous speeches, and major constitutional events, with The Presidents Visual Encyclopedia. From George Washington to the new leader taking office in January 2017, this visual reference guide presents a unique insight into life in the White House. More than 150 easy-to-read entries cover the presidents, first ladies such as Eleanor Roosevelt, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gettysburg Address, and more, and over 200 fascinating photographs add to kids' knowledge of these leaders and the key moments that defined their time in office. The Presidents Visual Encyclopedia is the perfect one-stop reference guide, teaching kids all they need to know about the history of the United States and the remarkable impact our country has had on the rest of the world.

"The 'New Materialism, ' as developed by such thinkers and critics as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, have provided new ways of thinking about the relationship of humans to the material world, the division of nature and culture, and nonhuman agency. Despite the political urgency found in many of these thinkers' work, it often sidesteps certain social and economic concerns found in historical materialism and Marxism such as extraction, accumulation, or commodity fetishism, all of which have been central to Latin American history and literature. In Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism in Latin America, Hector Hoyos argues that recent Latin American fiction offers a way to integrate various materialisms, old and new, to understand how objects shape social and political relations and how narrative and literary form allow us to rethink our place within the material world. In each chapter, Hoyos examines a specific material configuration crucial to understanding the contemporary. In his discussions of novels since 1989 but also looking back to earlier moments in Latin American literature, Hoyos considers, among other subjects, the desire for control over natural resources and how literary form confronts both the ungraspable vastness of earth or the unfathomable smallness of the sub-atomic. Hoyos combines close readings of authors like Roberto Bolano, Blanca Wiethuchter, Cesar Aria, and Alejandro Zambra with an engagement with theorists such as Jane Bennett, Tim Morton, Karl Marx, and Julia Kristeva to provide a model to invigorate traditional ideology and cultural critique with the powerful insights of new materialism"--

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021

Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilizations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, American culture was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn't the end? In History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, he takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilization in today's debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. Should the coronavirus pandemic be regarded as an opportunity to build a new kind of society? What will its values be, and what will this new America look like? Maçães traces the long arc of US history to argue that in contrast to those who see the US on the cusp of decline, it may well be simply shifting to a new model, one equally powerful but no longer liberal. Consequently, it is no longer enough to analyze America's current trajectory through the simple prism of decline vs. progress, which assumes a static model-America as liberal leviathan. Rather, Maçães argues that America may be casting off the liberalism that has defined the country since its founding for a new model, one more appropriate to succeeding in a transformed world.

Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité? Or just plain gall? In this provocative and brilliantly researched history of how the French have dealt with the United States, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky demonstrate that the cherished idea of French friendship has little basis in reality. Despite the myth of the “sister republics,” the French have always been our rivals, and have harmed and obstructed our interests more often than not. This history of French hostility goes back to 1704, when a group of French and Indians massacred American settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The authors also debunk the myth of French aid during the Revolution: contrary to popular notions, the French did not enter the war until very late and were mainly interested in hurting their rivals, the British. After the war, the French continued to see themselves as major players in the Western hemisphere and shaped their policies to limit the growth and power of the new nation. The notorious XYZ affair, involving French efforts to undermine the government of George Washington, led to an undeclared naval war with France in 1798. During the Civil War, the French supported the Confederacy and installed a puppet emperor in Mexico. In the twentieth century, Americans clashed with the French repreatedly. The French victory over President Wilson at Versailles imposed a short-sighted and punitive settlement on Germany that paved the way for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. During World War II, Vichy French troops killed hundreds of American soldiers in North Africa, and diehard French fascist units fought against the Allies in the rubble of Berlin. During the Cold War, Charles DeGaulle yanked France out of NATO and obstructed our efforts to roll back Soviet expansion. The legacy of French imperial power has been no less disastrous. The French left Haiti in a shambles, got us into Vietnam, and educated many of the world’s worst tyrants at their elite universities, including Pol Pot, the genocidal Cambodian dictator. The fascist Baath regimes in Iraq and Syria are another legacy of failed French colonialism. Americans have been particularly irritated by French cultural arrogance—their crusades against American movies, McDonalds, Disney, and the exclusion of American words from their language have always rubbed us the wrong way. This irritation has now blossomed into outrage. Our Oldest Enemy shows why that outrage is justified.

As a kid, Noam Chomsky handed out the Daily Mirror at his uncle's newsstand on 72nd Street, inadvertently finding himself in a buzzing intellectual and political hub for European immigrants in New York. Iranian human rights Nobelist Shirin Ebadi and her husband signed their own legal contract, attempting to restore equality to their marriage after the Iranian Revolution effectively erased the legal rights of women. Elizabeth Warren set out to expose those frauds declaring bankruptcy and taking advantage of the system-only to discover, in her research, a very different story of hard-working middle-class families facing economic collapse in the absence of a social safety net. While studying at Oxford, a young Tariq Ali made a bet with a friend that he could work the Vietnam War into every single answer on his final exams. In this rousing, thoughtful, often funny, and always inspiring volume, a diverse and impressive group of thinkers reflect on those formative experiences that shaped their own political commitments. A fascinating new window into the revealing links between the personal and the political, Political Awakenings will engage readers across generations.

With Amusement for All contextualizes what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships among social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the ways in which the entertainment world has reflected, changed, or reinforced the values of American society.

For over twenty-five years John Dickson served the United States as a Foreign Service officer in North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In History Shock: When History Collides with Foreign Relations Dickson offers valuable insights into the daily life of a Foreign Service officer and the work of representing the United States. Dickson organizes History Shock around a country-by-country series of lively personal experience vignettes followed by compelling historical analyses of the ways in which his inadequate understanding of the host country’s history, particularly its prior history with the United States, combined with his lack of knowledge of his own nation’s history led to history shock: where dramatically different interpretations of history blocked diplomatic understanding and cooperation. John Dickson offers these “stories with a history” to highlight the interaction between history and foreign relations and to underscore the costs of not knowing the history of our partners and adversaries, much less our own. In both Mexico and Canada in particular we see how our lack of knowledge and understanding of how our long history of military interventions continues to complicate our efforts at developing mutually beneficial relationships with our two closest neighbors. In Nigeria and South Africa, Dickson experienced firsthand how the history of racism in the United States plays out on a world stage and clouds our ability to effectively work with key African nations. Perhaps the starkest example of history shock, of two nations with deeply conflicted views of their own histories and their shared history, is another country near at hand, Cuba. Not all of the gaps are too wide for bridge building; in Peru, Dickson provides an example of how history can be deployed to mutual advantage. The Foreign Service has long sought to improve its training, to provide some form of “playbook” or “operating manual” with systematic case studies for its officers. In History Shock Dickson provides not only a model for such case studies but also a unique contribution of an interpretive framework for how to remedy this deficit, including recommendations for strengthening historical literacy in the Foreign Service.

Providing a theoretical paradigm for understanding the relationship of history and literature in Russia, this book traces how major Russian writers of the past 200 years defined the nation's past through creating fictional and non-fictional works on historical themes.