In 1877, the American Humane Society was formed as the national organization for animal and child protection. Thirty years later, there were 354 anticruelty organizations chartered in the United States, nearly 200 of which were similarly invested in the welfare of both humans and animals. In The Rights of the Defenseless, Susan J. Pearson seeks to understand the institutional, cultural, legal, and political significance of the perceived bond between these two kinds of helpless creatures, and the attempts made to protect them. Unlike many of today’s humane organizations, those Pearson follows were delegated police powers to make arrests and bring cases of cruelty to animals and children before local magistrates. Those whom they prosecuted were subject to fines, jail time, and the removal of either animal or child from their possession. Pearson explores the limits of and motivation behind this power and argues that while these reformers claimed nothing more than sympathy with the helpless and a desire to protect their rights, they turned “cruelty” into a social problem, stretched government resources, and expanded the state through private associations. The first book to explore these dual organizations and their storied history, The Rights of the Defenseless will appeal broadly to reform-minded historians and social theorists alike.

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans feared an invasion or attack would occur on US soil. In this timely and authoritative book, Matthew Dallek narrates the creation of a federal agency, the Office of Civilian Defense, founded to protect the homeland.

When these two [authors] combine their considerable experience, the reader has to pay attention. Naval Aviation NewsIn 1999, by a vote of 52 to 47, the U.S. Senate cleared the names of Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short of blame for leaving Pearl Harbor vulnerable to attack. According to the declaration, Kimmel and Short had performed their duties "competently and professionally," and that America's losses at Pearl were "not the result of dereliction of duty." Revisionist historians have been trying for years to portray Short and Kimmel as innocent scapegoats. However, Major General Kenneth Bergquist is among the many witnesses who went to their graves crying "foul," but not before telling their stories to historians Jack Lambert and Norman Polmar.This book combines the evidence of never-before-seen photos and documents, Lambert's taped interviews with some of the last surviving witnesses, exhaustive research of all remaining evidence, Polmar's perspective as naval warfare commentator for the History Channel, and Barry Levenson's legal experience trying cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, to finally put the case of the tragic failure of command and dereliction of duty leading up to December 7, 1941, to rest.Senator Strom Thurmond called Kimmel and Short "the final two victims of Pearl Harbor." In reality, was the last victim the truth?

An analysis of “the Trump era, but not about Trump. . . . but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption” (New York Times Book Review). “There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are.” So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of modern-day American institutions and the corruption that besets them—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. And it’s our fault. What Lessig brilliantly shows is that we can’t blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people, as our discourse all too often tends to do. Rather, he explains, “We have allowed core institutions of America’s economic, social, and political life to become corrupted. Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise.” Through case studies of Congress, finance, the academy, the media, and the law, Lessig shows how institutions are drawn away from higher purposes and toward money, power, quick rewards—the first steps to corruption. Lessig knows that a charge so broad should not be levied lightly, and that our instinct will be to resist it. So he brings copious detail gleaned from years of research, building a case that is all but incontrovertible: America is on the wrong path. If we don’t acknowledge our own part in that, and act now to change it, we will hand our children a less perfect union than we were given. It will be a long struggle. This book represents the first steps. “A devastating argument that America is racing for the cliff's edge of structural, possibly irreversible tyranny.” —Cory Doctorow

Fear can be more dangerous than the threats we think loom over us—how Germans and German Americans were perceived as a dangerous enemy during World War I. Although Americans have long celebrated their nation's diversity, they also have consistently harbored suspicions of foreign peoples both at home and abroad. In Age of Fear, Zachary Smith argues that, as World War I grew more menacing and the presumed German threat loomed over the United States, many white "Anglo-Saxon" Americans grew increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of their race, culture, and authority. Consequently, they directed their long-held apprehensions over ethnic and racial pluralism onto their German neighbors and overseas enemies whom they had once greatly admired. Smith examines the often racially tinged, apocalyptic arguments made during the war by politicians, propaganda agencies, the press, novelists, and artists. He also assesses citizens' reactions to these messages and explains how the rise of nationalism in the United States and Europe acted as a catalyst to hierarchical racism. Germans in both the United States and Europe eventually took the form of the proverbial "Other," a dangerous, volatile, and uncivilized people who posed an existential threat to the nation and all that Anglo-Saxon Americans believed themselves to be. Exploring what the Great War meant to a large portion of the white American population while providing a historic precedent for modern-day conceptions of presumably dangerous foreign Others, Age of Fear is a compelling look at how the source of wartime paranoia can be found in deep-seated understandings of racial and millennial progress.