|
|
History and Current Events September 2026 |
|
|
|
|
|
A Perfect Coincidence: The Extraordinary Friendship and Astonishing Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
by Jim Rasenberger
A revelatory new look at the long and complex relationship between Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died on the same historic day--July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In creating the Declaration of Independence, approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, Jefferson and Adams collaborated in what Jefferson later called a perfect coincidence of thought and action. Exactly fifty years later, in the most perfect coincidence in American history, they died within hours of each other--both former US presidents, both essential architects of the nation. This book explores those two remarkable coincidences and the fifty-year relationship in between. Thomas Jefferson, a charismatic Southern aristocrat, and John Adams, a cantankerous Yankee, were once close friends, then bitter political enemies. In the last years of their lives, they reconciled and resumed an extraordinary correspondence, totaling some 380 letters that continued until their final months. Other than the Declaration of Independence, the greatest symbolic gift either man gave his country may have been dying together on that fateful Independence Day in 1826. For many Americans, this moment was viewed as a visible and palpable manifestation of Divine favor--as one contemporary put it--and fueled the conviction that America was a land of miracles. Published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the United States--and the 200th anniversary of the men's deaths--this book is essential reading for anyone interested in presidential biographies, the Revolutionary War era, and the enduring power--yet terrible fragility--of American democracy.
|
|
| The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915 by Joseph KellyHistorian Joseph Kelly's well-researched revisionist account explores the origins of American fascism in the Antebellum South, detailing how the 1818 Missouri Compromise helped advance the ideology. Further reading: The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy by Steven J. Ross. |
|
|
|
Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife
by Imogen Willetts
From the glamorous depravity of Studio 54 to the underground cabarets of Weimar Berlin, from Georgian London's gaudy pleasure gardens to the birth of techno in post-industrial Detroit, a brilliantly researched history charting four centuries of nightlife, showing the fascinating evolution of how humans have gone out after darkThere is a specific energy to it. Cafes and shops close their shutters. Darkness descends. The air begins to tingle, wrote John Dos Passos of twenties New York. It's tonight if you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, that the train of magical events will begin.Nightlife, as defined by party historian Imogen Willetts, is a commercial and secular environment designed to offer a variety of pleasures at night. Up All Night traces its history back to a surprising starting point: seventeenth-century Japan, in a remote party destination built outside the shogun's capital. Nightlife has been at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression ever since, making cities famous, nurturing iconic countercultures, and growing into a multibillion-dollar industry, yet its sweeping history has been left largely untold.Up All Night is the story of the good nights and the great ones. How did jazz develop in the dancehalls of turn-of-the-century New Orleans? What was it like to party in 1920s Paris? Why were we so obsessed with the messy chaos of the early aughts LA scene? And what, in our increasingly online lives, are we missing when we pass up the chance of a big night out? Join party historian Imogen Willetts for a guided tour behind the velvet rope of history's wildest nights out.
|
|
|
|
Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City
by Anand Giridharadas
From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation A tour de force of sharp-eyed reporting, powerful narrative, and heartbreaking tragedy. . . . Brilliant and spellbinding.--Robert B. Reich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coming Up Short In 2023, the lives of two men--Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer--collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement. Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning--and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters' strivings and struggles--to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice--reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character's eyes and then another's, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life. At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.
|
|
|
|
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre...the book is packed with news that will stay news...This is reporting of consequence. --David Remnick, The New Yorker A flabbergasting feat of political reporting. --Tina Brown Riveting and richly textured...What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan's counternarrative so vital. --Fintan O'Toole, The New York Times A riveting, intimate, and revelatory account of the most radical and consequential presidency of our time. From the two reporters who have covered him more closely than perhaps anyone else over the past decade comes this definitive portrait of Donald Trump in the White House. Regime Change covers the first year of Trump's second presidency--a term liberated from every constraint that defined his first. The generals who once told him no are gone, and the lawyers who remain have learned to pick their battles. His administration has flouted court orders and he has claimed powers that Congress once checked. What remains is a President willing to take enormous risks that have upended global markets and toppled heads of state; an imperial President operating almost entirely on instinct alone. Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms, Regime Change takes the reader inside the Situation Room and into the secret Oval Office deliberations that have launched a new war in the Middle East and seen Trump seal the border, surge National Guard troops into cities, and send immigration agents into deadly clashes with protestors. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan bring us behind the scenes of a presidency that has transformed the culture, turned the Justice Department into an agent of retribution against the President's enemies and the office itself into a brazen vehicle for profit. They reveal a second term propelled by a historical irony that Trump himself has come to understand: that the indictments, the convictions, the assassination attempts, and four years of exile made him not weaker but far more powerful, more vengeful, and more willing to gamble than any President in modern history. This is the story of how Trump has used that power, who has tried to stop him, and why nearly all of them have failed. It is also the story of something American journalists are more accustomed to chronicling in distant capitals than in their own: a President who has fundamentally altered the nature of the office he holds--and, with it, how the rest of the world understands American power. It is an account of Regime Change right here in America--a landmark real-time history of a modern presidency like no other.
|
|
| Triage by Claudia RankinePoet Claudia Rankine's thought-provoking, genre-defying latest blends cultural criticism with elements of fiction and memoir, exploring our current moment through the lens of a longtime friendship between the narrator (implied to be Rankine herself) and "the theorist." Try this next: Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye. |
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
|
|
|