William Hughes

The 2012 presidential campaign will, above all else, be a referendum on the Obama administration's handling of the financial crisis, recalling the period when Obama's “audacity of hope” met the austerity of reality. Central to this is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the largest economic recovery plan in American history. Senator Mitch McConnell gave a taste of the enormity of the money committed: if you had spent $1 million...

Inspired by the work of Psychologist Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crises has defined the radical right, transforming the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

In Solid State, Kenneth Womack offers the most definitive account of the conception, recording, mixing, and reception of Abbey Road. In February 1969, the Beatles began working on what became their final album together. Abbey Road introduced a number of new techniques and technologies to the Beatles' sound and included "Come Together," "Something," and "Here Comes the Sun," which all emerged as classics. Womack's colorful retelling of how this landmark...

Think FDR was a great president? Think again. In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster, swelled the federal government, and prevented the country...

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between north and south, east and...

Swine flu, bird flu, unusual concentrations of cancer, food recalls due to deadly E. coli bacterial contamination: our American food system has gone terribly wrong. Recent public-health crises are raising urgent questions about how our animal-derived food is produced and brought to market. In Animal Factory, bestselling author and investigative journalist David Kirby follows three families and communities whose lives are utterly changed by immense

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From modest beginnings as a tea shop, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, with nearly sixteen thousand stores. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to mom-and-pop grocery stores across the nation. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, leading the Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman administrations to investigate the Great A&P. In a remarkable court case, the government pressed...

The world's largest company, Wal-Mart Stores, has revenues higher than the gross domestic product of all but twenty-five of the world's countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost one hundred nations. The world's largest asset manager, a New York company called BlackRock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet. A private philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, spends as much worldwide on health...

The introduction of new medicines has dramatically improved the quantity and quality of individual and public health while contributing trillions of dollars to the global economy. In spite of these past successes-and indeed because of them-our ability to deliver new medicines may be quickly coming to an end. Moving from the twentieth century to the present, A Prescription for Change reveals how changing business strategies combined with scientific...

In November 2001, a thirty-one-year-old Yemeni man named Salim Ahmed Hamdan was captured near the Pakistan border and turned over to US forces in Afghanistan. After confessing to being Osama bin Laden's driver, Hamdan was transferred to Guantánamo Bay and designated for trial before a special military tribunal. The Pentagon assigned a young military defense lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, to represent him in a defense that no one expected...