In this rare, sweeping history, Michael Barone draws from deep within the political and social record of modern America to tell the story of how the country of our parents and of our grandparents became the prosperous and powerful nation we know today.Barone points out that the single most significant issue to dominate American politics in this century is that of who really is an American. Gone are the vaunted battles over the distribution of wealth and income. In their place are t...

A peculiar feature of our country today, says Michael Barone, is that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds. Indeed, American students lag behind their peers in other nations, but America remains on the leading edge economically, scientifically, technologically, and militarily.The reason for this paradox, explains Barone in this brilliant essay, is that “from ages six to eighteen Americans live mostly in what I call Soft America...

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into health and human-centric systems reshapes the way care, well-being, and social services are delivered. By leveraging AI technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, these systems can better understand, predict, and respond to human needs with accuracy and personalization. From improving diagnostics and patient outcomes in healthcare to enhancing accessibility and support in public services, AI off...

"Enjoyable entertainment . . . a mystery/suspense novel with links to classic rock history and mythology" featuring recovering detective Mike Travis (Foreword).After twenty years at the LAPD Homicide Bureau, Mike Travis is finally retiring and starting over on Santa Catalina Island. In the small town of Avalon, he lives and works on his yacht, sailing and chartering scuba diving trips. There, among tourists and quirky locals, he tries to banish the residua...

Environmental sustainability and human cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. Reversing damaging human impact on the global environment is ultimately a cultural question, and as with politics, the answers are often profoundly local. Cultural Sustainabilities presents twenty-three essays by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, musicians, artists, and activists, each asking a particular question or presenting a s...

In this deft, multilayered thriller, a disgraced lawyer trying to revive his tattered career stumbles across a hidden case of cold-blooded murder and discovers that he must pursue justice even though doing so might just cost him what little he has left—possibly even his life.Attorney David Hirsch was the managing partner of one of St. Louis’s most prestigious law firms, until he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the federal penitentiary for seven years. He emerges from pris...

The election of 2016 prompted journalists and political scientists to write obituaries for the Republican Party—or prophecies of a new dominance. But it was all rather familiar. Whenever one of our two great parties has a setback, we’ve heard: “This is the end of the Democratic Party,” or, “The Republican Party is going out of existence.” Yet both survive, and thrive.We have the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world—the Democratic Party founded in 1832 to reelect A...

Many Americans feel swamped by immigrants with alien cultures, languages, and customs apparently flooding into our country.

It is often said that America has become culturally diverse only in the past quarter century. But from the country’s beginning, cultural variety and conflict have been a centrifugal force in American politics and a crucial reason for our rise to power.The peopling of the United States is one of the most important stories of the last five hundred years, and in Shaping our Nation, bestselling author and demographics expert Michael Barone illuminates a new an...

‘Michael Barone is the perfect person to write this important and thought-provoking book.'Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with DestinyThe Founding Fathers were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from particular places in already diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures in different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain,...

The ideals of freedom and individual rights that inspired America's Founding Fathers did not spring from a vacuum. Along with many other defining principles of our national character, they can be traced directly back to one of the most pivotal events in British history—the late-seventeenth-century uprising known as the Glorious Revolution.In a work of popular history that stands with recent favorites such as David McCullough's 1776 and Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothe...

Tennyson was one of the true great Victorian poets - much of his work is known throughout the world:'Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all'His genius is expressed through the precision and delicacy of the language of his lyrical poems. Some of his words were engraved in the 2012 Olympic village and his early poetry was a major influence on and inspiratio...