"Running water. Electricity. Antibiotics. Dentistry. Air conditioning. Democracy. The rule of law. Such things are not only remarkably new inventions in human history, they are all alien to humanity's natural habitat. Here is what is natural: poverty, hunger, violence, tribal hatred, and an early death. If the Garden of Eden existed, it was a slum. Only once in the last 250,000 years did humans lift themselves out of their natural environment of poverty....

Examines how the identity-shaping idea of an open and ever-expanding American frontier has evolved from early westward expansion into the reactionary populism of Donald Trump's border-wall proposals.

Beck makes the case that when you're traveling in the wrong direction, slight course corrections won't cut it. He exposes the idea of "transformation" for the progressive smokescreen that it is, while maintaining that a return to individual rights, an uncompromising adherence to the Constitution, and a complete rethinking about the role of government in a free society is the only way forward.

"In Of Thee I Sing, Ben Railton describes a spectrum of competing visions of patriotism that can be traced across key moments and texts in American history and that comprise a crucial debate in our 21st century moment. Drawing on the four verses as of America the Beautiful, Railton finds four central competing threads of American patriotism: celebratory, mythologizing, active, and critical. He traces each of these competing visions across a series...

"Union tells the story of how the myth of our national origins, identity, and purpose was intentionally created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned a history that attempted to erase the fundamental differences and profound tensions between the nation's regional cultures, the motive for the Confederacy's secession (protecting a slave system), and even...

The governor of Louisiana explores how fourteen different lessons from U.S. history have influenced and defined current affairs, including the Louisiana Purchase, the conflict between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, and Reagan and Nixon's welfare fight.