**A New York Times Best SellerA full-color, lushly illustrated graphic novel that recounts the many-layered past and present of beer through dynamic pairings of pictures and meticulously researched insight into the history of the world's favorite brew.**The History of Beer Comes to Life!We drink it. We love it. But how much do we really know about beer? Starting from around 7000 BC, beer has emerged as a major element driving humankind’s de...

A fully illustrated graphic adaptation that offers a new look at the Gettysburg Address, the bloody battle that prompted it, and the Civil WarMost of us can recall "Four score and seven years ago," but much of what we know about this historic speech, and what it has to say about the Civil War itself, has been lost since we left grade school.The Gettysburg Address offers a revolutionary way to experience Lincoln's masterwork. Striking at the underlying meaning of Lincoln's w...

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today’s corporate polic...

A complete, illustrated history of video games--highlighting the machines, games, and people who have made gaming a worldwide, billion-dollar industry/artform--told in a graphic novel format.Author Jonathan Hennessey and illustrator Jack McGowan present the first full-color, chronological origin story for this hugely successful, omnipresent artform and business. Hennessey provides readers with everything they need to know about video games--from their early beginni...

The Ulster Unionist Party: Country Before Party? uses unprecedented access to the party that dominated Northern Ireland politics for decades to assess the reasons for its decline and to analyse whether it can recover. Having helped produce the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) struggled to deliver the deal amid unease over aspects of what its leadership negotiated. Paramilitary prisoner releases, policing changes, and power-sharing with the republican ...

American politics seems to grow more contentious and complicated by the day, and whether American democracy works well is hotly debated. Amidst all this roiling partisan argument and confusing claims and counterclaims, there has never been a greater need for an impartial primer on the basics of the American political system. This Very Short Introduction gives readers a concise, accessible, and sophisticated overview of the vital elements of American democracy, emphasizing both how these el...

Whether it’s Michael Moore or the New York Times, Hollywood or academia, a growing segment in America is waging a war on capitalism. We hear that greedy plutocrats exploit the American public; that capitalism harms consumers, the working class, and the environment; that the government needs to rein in capitalism; and on and on. Anticapitalist critiques have only grown more fevered in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom. Indeed, the 2004 presidential campaign has brought ...

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor—and how racism helped bring this about.The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Te...

The American way of life, built on individual liberty and limited government, is on life support.American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to figh...

“The American taxpayer”—angered by government waste and satisfied only with spending cuts—has preoccupied elected officials and political commentators since the Reagan Revolution. But resistance to progressive taxation has older, deeper roots. American Tax Resisters presents the full history of the American anti-tax movement that has defended the pursuit of limited taxes on wealth and battled efforts to secure social justice through income redistribution for the past 150 years.

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare ...

Finally, the truth from a Washington insider: An audacious and desperately needed primer on how America’s Ruling Class have upended the Constitution and taken over our country—and how we must unite to regain control of our liberty.A Ruling Class have emerged in America against the hopes and designs of our Founders. Over the last hundred years, they have rejected the Constitution and expanded their own power, slowly at first and now rapidly. These people think that ...