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History and Current Events August 2026 |
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American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Unionby Jon MeachamIn a polarized era, history can become a subject of political contention. Many see America as perfect; many others argue that the national experiment is fundamentally flawed. The truth, Meacham shows, likely lies between these extremes. America has had shining hours, and also dark ones. In American Struggle, Jon Meacham illuminates the nation’s complicated past. This rich and diverse collection covers a wide spectrum of history, from 1619 to the twenty-first century, with primary-source documents that take us back to critical moments in which Americans fought over the meaning and the direction of the national experiment. From the founders to Lincoln to Obama, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, from Seneca Falls to the March on Washington, this chorus—sometimes discordant and always fascinating—tells the story of the country and of its people. As clashes over liberty and slavery, inclusion and exclusion, play out, these voices, brilliantly framed by Meacham’s singular commentary, remind us that contentious citizenship and fair-minded observations are essential to bringing about the more perfect union envisioned in the Preamble to the Constitution, which Frederick Douglass called a “glorious liberty document.” Conflict is nothing new in our democracy; rather, as Meacham and these texts show, tensions are inherent, stubborn, and perennial. And American Struggle teaches us anew that to know what has come before, to watch as long-running disputes rise and fall, is to be armed against despair.
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Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by Chris MurphyToday, the United States is in a crisis―and it’s not just a political one: over fifty years, the pursuit of profit has undermined virtue and character, while too many of us have become convinced that happiness results from acting as good consumers, rather than as good citizens. New technologies threaten essential human capabilities, like friendship, thinking, and creation. And a winner-takes-all mentality has given the rich and well-connected nearly uncontested control of our politics and has corrupted our government. The result: Americans have lost the sense of daily purpose and connection that are vital to happiness, becoming anxious, angry, and adrift. In this vacuum, Donald Trump, feeding off the emptiness and resentment, has come to power. In recent years, Senator Chris Murphy has stepped forward to challenge the Trump administration’s assaults on our democracy. But he also sees that these assaults are a symptom of a deeper crisis: the abandonment of the common good as our country’s organizing principle. In his unflinching new book, he draws on history and political philosophy to expose how six different cults have seized hold of American life and paved the way to our current troubles: a cult of profit that punishes workers, a cult of globalism that weakens communities, a cult of technology that turns us against one another and poisons our young, a cult of consumption that undermines citizenship, a cult of credentialism that devalues those without degrees, and a cult of corruption that threatens democracy. Refusing despair, Murphy offers a new politics of the common good that is both deeply rooted in our past and a radical challenge to the status quo. It is also capable of drawing support across the political spectrum: as Murphy shows, a majority of Americans―including many Trump voters―favor policies that confront these destructive cults by curbing corporate power, controlling predatory technology, enhancing face-to-face connection, granting workers greater control of their lives, and removing big money from our politics. The common good, Murphy shows, is no object of nostalgia; it is a vital principle ready to be claimed today.
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The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy by James TraubA sharp critique of our failure to teach civics effectively and a roadmap to a better way. Schools make citizens. Yet the typical American student is stunningly ignorant of history and government: In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 20 percent scored a "proficient" level in civics. In The Cradle of Citizenship, James Traub chronicles a year of observing public schools across the country, mapping the polarized pedagogical landscape that fails to teach in-depth civics knowledge-of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the country's founding, and more. Traub examines the history of civic education, the debates between partisans of the 1619 Project and 1776 Report, and the state of Florida's "war on 'woke.'" He also finds sources of hope, both in new attempts to bridge the ideological divide and in more traditional forms of instruction that emphasize knowledge and promote deep engagement with works of history and literature. The Cradle of Citizenship combines a withering critique of conventional schooling with a vision of civics education as it should be.
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| Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast by Pamela ColloffFor more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married nine women—some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida, he became a frequent witness for the state, thinking nothing of exaggerating men’s wrongdoing or implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, fueling his growing sense of invincibility. Soon he was not just committing fraud; he was preying on girls in their teens or barely into adolescence. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik’s account of his "confession" helped put Dailey on death row. Skalnik, meanwhile, walked free. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Pamela Colloff, reporting for the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused. By then, Skalnik had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he exploited, to the dozens of men he helped imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who went on to receive an execution date. In this mesmerizing debut, Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than finding the truth. |
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The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States by David J. SilvermanWhen the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission-of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone. In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny"; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race. The epochal story of race in America is typically understood as a Black and White issue. The Chosen and the Damned restores the defining role Native people have played, and continue to play, in our national history.
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| Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane RogoyskaSince its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history, too―from the years before, during, and after the second World War. In this short period, the Lutetia witnessed some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In Hotel Exile, Jane Rogoyska evokes in novelistic prose the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of the hotel’s patrons. In the 1930s, Europe’s bohemian artists and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, met at the Lutetia with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service―and the center of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception center for Holocaust survivors who sought refuge after the Liberation. Rogoyska explores what it meant for these three profoundly different groups to live in exile, under the shadow of the dark ideology that dictated the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Hotel Exile is about what happens at the edges of a war, passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and, finally, a shelter and place of healing. Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events. |
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Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment by Rhae Lynn BarnesNever before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. With Darkology, Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes meticulously unravels the complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history of "Darkology"--the insidious study, commodification, and dehumanization of Black life, through which performers caricatured the enslaved and formerly enslaved for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor. Given the extraordinary research reflected in Darkology, it's not surprising that Barnes spent twenty years tracking down "fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy" (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). Painstakingly piecing together these scattered shards of evidence, Barnes reveals the shocking extent to which blackface took center stage in every era of American history.
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American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate by Eric LichtblauFrom the Pulitzer-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Nazis Next Door, a deeply reported exploration of the violent resurgence of hatred and white supremacy through the lens of Orange County, California--"ground zero" for racial extremism--and the story of one brutal murder there that revealed the deep roots of violent bigotry as a bellwether for the country. One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents' house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze--a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn--out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again. In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze's life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in the years leading up to Blaze's disappearance, Orange County was changing: like the country as a whole, it was rapidly diversifying, to the outrage of many of its white residents. No one was more opposed to the changes than America's resurgent neo-Nazi groups, one of which had recently gained a new member: Sam Woodward. Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America's fractured soul and our hope for healing.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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The Public Library
501 Copper NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102
505-768-5141abqlibrary.org |
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