books

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/27/2020
  

  When a Kidnapping Ring Targeted New York’s Black Children (Review)

  In “The Kidnapping Club,” the historian Jonathan Daniel Wells describes the circle of slave catchers and police officers who terrorized New York’s Black population in the three decades before the Civil War.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  10/26/2020
  

  "Time's Monster" by Priya Satia Review – Living in the Past

  Time’s Monster is a book about history and empire. Not a straightforward history, but an account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonisation, “making it ethically thinkable”.

• 
• SOURCE: George Washington University Textile Museum
  10/23/2020
  

  Online Lecture: Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (11/2)

  The George Washington DC Mondays series supports discussion with local authors and historians about the DC region. 

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  10/18/2020
  

  Reframing America’s Role in the World: The Specter of Isolationism

  by Andrew Bacevich

  The release of Stephen Wertheim's book shoud prompt a reconsideration of American intervention abroad. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Decoded
  10/13/2020
  

  The Cuban Missile Crisis: Once More Unto the Breach

  by Sheldon M. Stern

  As the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis approaches, longtime JFK Library historian Sheldon Stern reviews Theodore Voorhees Jr.'s new book, which argues that Kennedy and Kruschev each assumed personal control of negotiations in a way that rendered threats of war from hawkish subordinates all bark and no bite.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/6/2020
  

  Eleanor Roosevelt, First Among First Ladies

  David Michaelis's new biography is an excellent resource for those unfamiliar with the life and work of Eleanor Roosevelt and her political partnership with FDR.

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• SOURCE: Woodrow Wilson Center
  10/5/2020
  

  TODAY: Washington History Seminar: "A World Safe For Democracy" with G. John Ikenberry

  G. John Ikenberry joins the Washington History Seminar today at 4:00 PM Eastern to discuss "A World Safe For Democracy" and the crisis of the liberal international order. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/1/2020
  

  The Most Essential Books of the Trump Era are Barely About Trump at All

  Most of the wave of political books on the Trump administration fixate on the President's personality or disregard for norms and niceties instead of evaluating the structural factors that made his presidency possible. 

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• SOURCE: National History Center
  10/1/2020
  

  Washington History Seminar 10/2: Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962

  The National History Center, The Woodrow Wilson Center and Politics & Prose Books prouldy host Martin Sherwin on Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1962. Friday, October 2, 6:00 PM. 

• 
• 9/27/2020
  

  Was Charles Lindbergh a Man Who Got Away?

  by Lise Pearlman

  A new book reexamines the possible role of Charles Lindbergh himself in the 1932 kidnapping of his son, once the "crime of the century."  

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  9/22/2020
  

  How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)

  by Pablo Pryluka

  Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/21/2020
  

  Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

  Adam Gopnik considers new books about Lincoln by David S. Reynolds and Sidney Blumenthal that address the personality and governing of the 16th president. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  9/18/2020
  

  How Jimi Hendrix’s London Years Changed Music

  A new book, at the 50th anniversary of the guitar master's death, takes Jimi Hendrix's leap from chitlin circuit sideman to London sensation as a turning point for rock music. 

• 
• SOURCE: National History Center
  9/14/2020
  

  JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Video)

  Author Fredrik Logevall discusses his new political biography of JFK in a virtual seminar with the National History Center.

• 
• 9/13/2020
  

  Richard Haass on the Need for Historically Informed Policy in a Changing World

  by David O'Connor

  "A democracy requires that its citizens be informed, and it was evident far too many citizens in the United States and other countries could not be described as globally literate."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/8/2020
  

  ‘JFK,’ by Fredrik Logevall: An Excerpt

  Read an excerpt from Fredrik Logevall's new biography of John F. Kennedy touching on the collegiate Kennedy's observations of Europe as World War II began.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  9/10/2020
  

  A New Theory of Western Civilization (Review)

  "The WEIRDest People in the World" is the latest addition to the Big History category. The outstanding feature of the genre is that it wrangles all of human existence into a volume or two, starting with the first hominids to rise up on their hind legs and concluding with us, cyborg-ish occupants of a networked globe.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/8/2020
  

  Groomed to Be President: David Kennedy Reviews Fredrik Logevall's JFK Bio

  Fredrik Logevall's new book, the first of two volumes on the life of JFK, pushes back against perceptions of the young Kennedy as an accidental politician or intellectual lightweight, and describes the way world events shaped his worldview.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/3/2020
  

  In Act of Heresy, N.R.A.’s Former No. 2 Calls for Gun Control

  “The N.R.A. fueled a toxic debate,” Mr. Powell writes, “by appealing to the paranoia and darkest side of our members, in a way that has torn at the very fabric of America.”

• 
• SOURCE: Haymarket Books
  9/2/2020
  

  Book Launch: Roberto Lovato's Unforgetting: Family, Migration, Gangs, Borders, and Revolution

  Roberto Lovato discusses his new book "Unforgetting" with Mike Davis.