Books on History

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By Ann Louise Bardach
As world grapples with the question of what an ailing Fidel Castro means for Cuba, comes the publication of this historic first English publication of his letters from prison.
Read the Introduction here.
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The Story of Frank Wilkinson, His 132,000-Page FBI File, and His Epic Fight for Civil Rights and Liberties
By Robert Sherrill
Frank Wilkinson was one of the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment. This is his story.
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A Memoir of Love, Sex, and the Mystery of the Violin
By Norma Barzman
The End of Romance is a riveting memoir set against the backdrop of the rise of the Red Brigades and the resurgence of fascism in Italy.
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Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation
By Denis O'Hearn
The life, resistance, and death of Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands inspired millions around the world. This is his story.
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Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechaniks
By Clifford D. Conner
In the traditional history of science, a few extraordinary men--Galileo, Newton, Einstein--tower over the masses. But science has always been a collective endeavor. This book turns our attention to the ordinary, working people who furthered the development of science.
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By Kathie Klarreich
Civil violence, mass slaughter, coups and US intervention: Kathie Klarreich saw all this up close and on a daily basis in Haiti as a reporter for NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, NBC News and Time during the past decade. This compelling chronicle of tumultuous political events is also an intensely personal memoir of her experiences throughout Haiti's turbulent years.
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A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution
By Jorge Edwards
In 1970 Jorge Edwards was dispatched by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the Revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted.
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Excerpts From Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968
By Eric Bentley
This absorbing collection reveals with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel investigating potentially subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a monstrous and unrelenting accusatory force from which no one was safe.
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An Icon Reconsidered
By Jesse Larner
Mount Rushmore, conceived in the 1920s as a tourist attraction, was quickly recast by the sculptor into an icon of democracy, freedom and hope. The history of the Black Hills and the sense of manifest destiny that haunts the monument, however, render the faces more ironic than iconic. |

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By Jack Newfield
In this anthology of original essays, leading American writers discuss individuals who reconciled authentic patriotism with original artistic creation, unpopular opinion, and real moral principles. |

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My Crash Course in International Diplomacy
By Michael Soussan
In 1997, Michael Soussan accepted his dream job at the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, the largest humanitarian operation in the organization's history. On March 8, 2004, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, he became the first insider to call for "an independent investigation" of the UN's dealings with Saddam Hussein. Backstabbing for Beginners is at once the darkly comic tale of one man's political coming of age, and a stinging indictment of the hypocrisy that prevailed at the heart of the world's most idealistic institution.
The Wall Street Journal listed Backstabbing for Beginners as one of the 12 best books of 2008. |

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How Blind Faith in Markets Has Cost Us Our Future
By Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson
Over the past three decades, governments have ceded economic control to a new elite of free-market operatives in national and international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They praised economic stability but have delivered chaos. Their speculation has left the global economy more vulnerable to a financial collapse than any time since 1929. Two leading financial economists dissect this financial elite, tracing their origins to a secretive gathering of free-market economists in 1947, and propose a series of far-reaching reforms that can save us from a new depression. |

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Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America
By William Kleinknecht
Since Ronald Reagan left office—and particularly since his death—his shadow has loomed large over American politics. But his carefully calibrated image is complete fiction, argues award-winning journalist William Kleinknecht. The Reagan presidency was epoch-shattering, but not because it invigorated private enterprise or made America feel strong again. His real legacy was the dismantling of an eight-decade period of reform in which working people were given an unprecedented sway over our politics, economy and culture. Kleinknecht shows that as the Reagan legend grows, his true legacy continues to decimate middle America.
"'The Man Who Sold the World' is the most concise and well-thought-out argument against Reagan."
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Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
By Rick Perlstein
Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Repulican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Moyers.
"One of the most stylish, riveting achievements in narrative history to appear."
—Mark Greif, The Village Voice |

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Stories of Almost Everyone
By Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors is a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen—and mirrored to us—through the eyes and voices of history's unseen, unheard, and forgotten. Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the "thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth," Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.
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Journeys With The Dead And The Living In Viet Nam
By Wayne Karlin
On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer S. Steedly shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier after a surprise encounter on a jungle trail. Forty years later, Homer traveled back to Viet Nam to seek forgiveness and redemption from the family of the man whose death had overshadowed Homer's life. Wandering Souls is the story of this homecoming, and an unforgettable exploration of the terrible price of war paid by soldiers and their loved ones. It reveals that we heal not by forgetting war's hard lessons, but by remembering them.
Wandering Souls was listed in the New York Post's Required Reading column. |

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Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
By John Ross
John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in what the Aztec-Mexicas described as "the umbilicus of the universe" since the great Mexico City earthquake of 1985 crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—the Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with unease that the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world, the monster he has grown to know and love, is doomed to be globalized into one more McCity.
"Monstrously entertaining and tenderhearted."
"...a brave, stirring love letter, cautionary tale and travelogue."
—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW)
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The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
By Jeff Biggers
For more information on the book tour, please click here. Watch a multimedia theater performance hosted by The Nation Institute in June here.
Set in the ruins of his family's strip-mined homestead in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, award-winning journalist and cultural historian Jeff Biggers delivers a deeply personal portrait of the largely overlooked human and environmental costs of our nation's dirty energy policy, uncovering a century of regulatory negligence and vividly describing the epic mining wars for union recognition and workplace safety and the devastating consequences of industrial strip-mining. Along the way, Biggers exposes the fallacy that lies at the heart of the Obama administration's controversial pursuit of "clean coal."
Watch Jeff Biggers on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show. |

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Volume Two of the Memory of Fire trilogy
By Eduardo Galeano
"A bracingly original narrative of America's 500 years of history...a mosaic of miniatures, strung together to fashion a powerful and moving portrait." —Marie Arana, Washington Post
Faces and Masks tells the tangled, cataclysmic history of our hemisphere from the 1700s up to the dawn of our present century, told through characters as resonant and compelling as Simon Bolívar, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Billy the Kid. |

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Volume Three of the Memory of Fire trilogy
By Eduardo Galeano
"A book as fascinating as the history it relates...[Galeano] deserves mention alongside John Dos Passos, Bernard DeVoto, and Gabriel García Márquez."
—Los Angeles Times The third volume of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, Century of the Wind offers us our own turbulent century, from the bucolic New Jersey laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison to the armies of Emiliano Zapata and Fidel Castro to the Reagan-era CIA “neutralizations” in the forests of Latin America. A brilliant work that explodes this century's most pivotal moments, Century of Wind unravels the inextricable histories of the Americas. |
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undef 0 | Marfa, Texas
See acclaimed Nation Books authors Charles Bowden and Mark Danner speak at Marfa Dialogues: Politics and Culture of the Border, three days of art, film, music, and literature. Presented by Ballroom Marfa and The Washington Spectator, in collaboration with The Big Bend Sentinel, Marfa Public Radio and Marfa Book Company.
September 9 - October 22
Robert Scheer: Author Tour
(West Coast, United States)
Please join Nation Books author Robert Scheer as he travels to Washington, California and Oregon on an author tour to discuss his latest book, The Great American Stickup.
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September 16
| 5:30 pm
Investigating Impunity After Katrina
(New York University, New York City)
Please join us for "Investigating Impunity After Katrina," the launch event for The Backstory, a new monthly series of public conversations with investigative reporters and nonfiction authors affiliated with The Nation Institute. Investigative Fund reporter A.C. Thompson will discuss his award-winning reporting in New Orleans. (See Katrina's Hidden Race War and Body of Evidence, published in The Nation in January 2009.)
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September 18
| 1 pm
Author Talk: Wayne Karlin
(Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C.)
Please join Nation Books author Wayne Karlin as he discusses his book, Wandering Souls: Journeys With The Dead And The Living In Viet Nam at Washington, D.C.'s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library on September 18 at 1 p.m.
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September 24 - October 5
Fatima Bhutto: Author Tour
(Across the United States)
Please join Fatima Bhutto as she travels from New York to Massachusetts, Oregon and California on an author tour to discuss her new memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword.
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October 5
| 7 pm
Herding Donkeys: Howard Dean and Ari Berman on the Future of the Democratic Party
(92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York City)
Nation Institute Fellow Ari Berman talks about his new book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, with former Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean.
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October 23 - January 16
Eugene Richards: Photo Exhibit
(Exhibition around the world)
Institute Fellow and award-winning photographer is the winner of the 2010 World Press Photo of the Year contest. Every year following the World Press Photo Contest, the winning images go on tour. The exhibition is officially opened in Amsterdam as part of the award ceremony in April and can be seen at venues around the globe until the next year. The tour program takes in approximately 100 cities in 45 countries and is still expanding.
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