A shelf
The Contemporaries
Democracy Awakening
The historian's long view of how American democracy has been challenged and reclaimed, written for the readers who start their mornings with her newsletter. Richardson sets...
How the South Won the Civil War
The argument that ideas defeated on the battlefield did not die there. Richardson traces how an oligarchic vision of who truly counts as an American migrated...
On Tyranny
Twenty lessons from the twentieth century, pocket-sized and urgent, the most-carried civic book of the era. Snyder distilled the hard-won knowledge of how free societies fall...
On Freedom
The affirmative sequel to On Tyranny: not what to resist, but what to build. Snyder argues that freedom is not merely the absence of interference but...
Twilight of Democracy
Why intellectuals and elites, the people who should know better, turn toward authoritarianism. Applebaum writes partly from personal knowledge, having watched friends across Europe and America...
Autocracy, Inc.
Today's autocrats do not work alone. Applebaum documents how dictatorships that share no ideology nonetheless cooperate across borders, trading surveillance tools, laundering money, and amplifying one...
Affairs of Honor
The founding generation's politics as they actually lived it: a world of reputation, insult, rumor, and the duel, where honor was political capital and a slight...
The Field of Blood
Congress was a violent place before the Civil War, and Freeman documents it: the canings, the brawls, the pistols carried onto the floor, the routine intimidation...
The Soul of America
The reassuring long view: the country has faced its fears before, and its better angels have, more often than not, prevailed in the end. Meacham surveys...
And There Was Light
Lincoln read through his moral development, the slow forming of the conscience that would hold the Union together and end slavery. Meacham is less interested in...
These Truths
The single-volume national history most scholars think impossible, attempted anyway, and organized around the country's own stated ideals. Lepore asks whether the facts of American history...
Reconstruction
The definitive history of America's unfinished revolution, the years after the Civil War when the country tried to build a multiracial democracy and was forced, by...
The Second Founding
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments read as what they were: a refounding of the country, an attempt to write the promise of equality into the...
How Democracies Die
The comparative study of democratic backsliding, and the moment it described has not passed. Levitsky and Ziblatt show that democracies now more often erode from within,...
Tyranny of the Minority
The institutional sequel to How Democracies Die. Levitsky and Ziblatt turn from the behavior of leaders to the rules of the game, and argue that features...
The People vs. Democracy
Liberalism and democracy, long assumed to be partners, coming apart, and what might hold them together. Mounk distinguishes rights without democracy from democracy without rights and...
The Great Experiment
Can a diverse democracy actually hold together? Mounk takes up the question directly, surveying the record of multiethnic societies and arguing that success is possible but...
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
How authoritarian leaders rise, rule, and fall, traced across a century and many countries by a historian of fascism. Ben-Ghiat anatomizes the strongman's toolkit, the propaganda,...
How Civil Wars Start
The political scientist's data-driven warning. Drawing on decades of comparative research and her service on a government task force that predicted instability abroad, Walter lays out...
The Constitution of Knowledge
A defense of the institutions that turn disagreement into shared truth, the press, the academy, the courts, the professions, and an account of the forces now...
Giving Up Is Unforgivable
A former federal prosecutor's first book, turning years of public legal explanation into a sustained case for staying in the fight. Vance sets the present strain...
The Cruelty Is the Point
Essays on the present American political moment, durable enough to outlast the news that prompted them. Serwer's argument is that the recent crises are not departures...
Arguing with Zombies
The Nobel economist on the ideas that, in his account, have been disproven again and again yet refuse to die, shambling through public debate eating the...
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
The political economy of inequality and power, from a former Secretary of Labor who has spent decades on the question. Reich argues that wealth and political...
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The defining modern work on inequality, built on centuries of records rather than theory. Piketty's central finding is uncomfortable and durable: that wealth, left to itself,...
Trumpocracy
The conservative-institutionalist account of democratic erosion, written from the right by someone arguing about institutions he has worked inside. Frum examines how democratic norms and one...
Personal History
Watergate and the Pentagon Papers from inside the Washington Post, told by the publisher who had to decide whether to print and risk the paper's survival....
Confidence Man
The chronicler's book, built from decades of close reporting on a single subject. Haberman assembles the contemporaneous record into a sustained portrait, the reporter's accumulated detail...
All the President's Men
The reporting that brought down a presidency, told by the reporters who did it. Woodward and Bernstein traced the Watergate break-in to the White House through...
Tired of Winning
A broadcast correspondent's contemporaneous record of a turbulent political stretch, the reporter's notebook turned into narrative history. Karl writes from inside the press corps, close to...