Encounter Books

"...Ned Ryun reveals the History of the Deep State, which has seized unConstitutional control over our Nation, and unleashed Death and Destruction on the World. This is not what our Founders’ intended."

"...a much needed and timely eleventh-hour clarion call for citizens to wake up and rebirth the republic as the Founders intended."

—Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

American Leviathan is the story of the rise of Progressive Statism and their massive, bureaucratic Administrative State at the turn of the 20th century and how we got to where we are today in the 21st century with governmental abuse by a class of so-called experts. 

Because of Progressives' quiet regime change over the last century and their replacing the Constitutional Republic with that Administrative State, our government today has very little to do with what the Founders' envisioned. So the question for us today is will we restore the American Republic and actually have a government of, by and for the people? 

American Leviathan details how an empowered Executive in the White House can actually devolve and break apart the Administrative State that is the leviathan crushing the freedoms of the American people.

Trust in American institutions is at historic lows. The answer from the Progressive Left? Make voting and counting ballots even more complicated.

Ranked-choice voting is their latest fad to remake elections. It makes voting harder: longer lines, more mistakes, and lower turnout. And it makes election administration so complicated that, in 2022, one California county certified the wrong winner in a school board race.

In this Broadside, two election experts explain what ranked-choice voting is, who is behind it, and why it threatens the integrity of our elections.

The Communist Party of China is fast-tracking the largest military buildup since the Second World War; it is sanctions-proofing itself; it is stockpiling grain; it is surveying America for nuclear weapons strikes; and, most ominously, it is mobilizing China’s civilians for battle. 

In the past decade, ruler Xi Jinping has militarized the Chinese political system. As a result, the People’s Liberation Army has become so powerful that, like the bloodthirsty Japanese military of the 1930s, it believes it can do whatever it wants. 

Xi Jinping has no answer for mounting internal crises. He knows the Chinese people are increasingly angry. His only way out is to unify the nation with the prospect of conflict. Inside the Party, there is an almost irresistible imperative for war. Meanwhile, Washington and other Western capitals lack urgency.

Naysayers tell us that war is neither inevitable nor imminent, but how many times in history has a militant regime embarked on a breakneck military buildup and not launched a war of aggression?

Ever heard of Arabella Advisors? Probably not. And that’s strange, since they’ve done a lot to destroy the world you grew up in. You should know, so read this book.

—Tucker Carlson 

While billionaires like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett are well known as left-wing megadonors transforming the country’s politics, few Americans know about Arabella Advisors, a “dark money” operation that channels much of this money into particular causes via pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots outfits. Citizens across the spectrum will be shocked to learn how Arabella’s empire secretly operates using arrangements that produce the darkest of “dark money.” Thanks to the author and his colleagues at the Capital Research Center, which first exposed Arabella, even the mainstream press have begun to report on this scandalous story. As this book reveals, Arabella is a major player in battles over Supreme Court nominations, environmentalism, abortion, Medicare for All, fake local news outlets, “Zuck Bucks” that manipulate election offices, lawsuits brought by Democratic super-lawyer (and Steele dossier booster) Marc Elias, and much more. The money is staggering. In the 2018 election cycle, Arabella’s nonprofits took in $1.2 billion, more than double the fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee combined. In the 2020 election cycle, Arabella’s fundraising spiked to $2.4 billion. This mountain of money explains why the left-leaning major media are alarmed. Arabella is “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money,” warns the Atlantic. A “dark-money behemoth,” says Politico. An “opaque network,” says the New York Times, that funnels “hundreds of millions of dollars through a daisy chain of groups supporting Democrats and progressive causes.”

“Gilder’s originality, plus the sheer force of his enthusiasm for the extraordinary virtues of the beleaguered Jewish state, sweep away the prevailing vitriol and make for a book that is nothing less than thrilling to read.”
—Norman Podhoretz

In this timely and courageous book, George Gilder demonstrates that the widespread antagonism toward the state of Israel is based – as is anti-Semitism itself – on self-defeating envy and resentment of its superior accomplishments and moral leadership.     

Israel’s stunning rise as a world capitalist and technological power, he argues, stems in part from the Jewish “culture of mind” and in part from Judaism itself, which encourages intellectual curiosity and rational analysis while providing a rigorous moral framework for entrepreneurial creativity. Israel’s critics throughout the Middle East and in Western Europe – all facing socialist decline – have failed the “Israel Test” because they seek to destroy Israel’s capitalist success rather than to emulate it.

America’s continued support for Western Civilization in the Middle East will define our future survival as a nation. “If Israel is destroyed,” Gilder predicts, “capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by its own Jewish citizens, will be in grave moral and economic jeopardy.”

At a time when ignorant students and overtly anti-Semitic politicians champion Israel’s murderous enemies and rush to abandon Israel, Gilder’s clarity of vision makes The Israel Test required reading not only for college students, but also for policy-makers in Washington, and throughout the world.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home

High School and College Age Students

The Original Land of Hope Narrative in Paperback Edition 

The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. They are more likely to reflect the skeptical outlook of specialized professional academic historians, an outlook that supports a fragmented and fractured view of modern American society, and that fails to convey to young people the greater arc of that history. Or they reflect the outlook of radical critics of American society, who seek to debunk the standard American narrative, and has an enormous, and largely negative, effect upon the teaching of American history in American high schools and colleges. 

This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding: and it needs to convey that narrative to its young effectively. It perhaps goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale or a whitewash of the past; it will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But there is no necessary contradiction between an honest account and an inspiring one. This account seeks to provide both. 

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

American History for Middle School — Grades 6-8 

The FIRST book in a two-volume narrative for Young Readers studying Land of Hope 

VOLUME ONE: SHAPING A NEW NATION, From 1492 to 1877

From its beginnings America was a land of hope, a magnet for those seeking a new beginning for themselves. The American Founders created a unique plan of government designed to realize those ideals. Implementing the plan was not easy, though, and a bloody civil war would push the American experiment to the breaking point — and to a new birth of freedom. 

Prestige no longer ensures substance at Ivy League schools; students must navigate a maze of shallow, politicized courses to uncover the rare gems of a classical education, exposing the need for academic renewal.

"This book is a banquet of the absurdities that Ivy League universities serve up to their students under the rubric of general education. Anyone who wonders how the graduates of America’s elite institutions come by their jaundiced view of our country should start here. The few who refuse to “slack” are limited to the hard sciences and the few remaining excellent courses in the humanities."
—Peter Wood, President, National Association of Scholars

Ivy League universities can no longer be trusted to produce well-educated students. Even a cursory review of the course titles at top schools shows that these $320,000-plus diplomas may confer legacy prestige to graduates, but not necessarily knowledge or wisdom. 

At Cornell, for example, students can take Queer Girlhood, Beyoncé Nation, and Intersectional Disability Studies. The course list at Yale includes Pop Sapphism and Comparative Settler Geographies. At Princeton: Shoes. Penn offers Reality TV and Gender and Decolonizing French Food. Even worse, these courses actually fulfill general education requirements. It is still possible to earn a great education at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth, but doing so requires prudence and persistence. 

In Slacking, Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan dedicate one chapter to each Ivy League college, providing specific information about the coursework that serious students should pursue to extract a real education from these decaying institutions. Every chapter concludes with two course lists, both of which meet the school’s general education requirements. One displays the worst collection of courses that an inveterate “slacker” could take to skate through the requirements for entertainment, reinforcement of political biases, and narrow specialization. The other lists the best choice of courses a dedicated striver could take to acquire a well rounded, content-rich liberal education. 

The contrast between the two sounds a rousing alarm bell for curriculum reform at America’s best-known colleges.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

American History for Middle School — Grades 6-8

The SECOND book in a two-volume narrative for Young Readers studying Land of Hope 

VOLUME TWO: THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA, From 1877 to 2020

The Founders of the American nation would have had trouble recognizing the America that emerged after the Civil War. By century’s end we had rapidly evolved into the world’s greatest industrial power. It was a nation of large new cities populated by immigrants from all over the world. And it was a nation that was taking an increasingly active role on the world stage, even to the point of acquiring an empire of its own. Many Americans began to wonder whether this modern nation had outgrown its original Constitution. That document had been written back in the eighteenth century, after all, and one of its main goals was limiting the size and scope of government. But did that goal make sense in the dynamic new America of the twentieth century?
That became a central question. The Progressive movement and its successors believed it was time to replace the Constitution with laws permitting a larger and more powerful government. Others firmly rejected such changes and insisted on the permanent validity of the Constitution’s ideal of limited government. In addition, with the two great world wars of the twentieth century, and the Cold War that came after them, America found itself thrust into a position of overwhelming world leadership—something else that the Founders never imagined or wanted. Such leadership required the development of a large and permanent military establishment whose very existence ran up against the nation’s founding traditions. With the end of the Cold War, America faced a decision. Should it shed the world responsibilities it had taken on during the twentieth century? Or should it treat those responsibilities as a permanent obligation? That debate, which has deep roots in American history, continues to this day.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Workbook for High School Students studying Land of Hope

This workbook accompanies Land of Hope 

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Guide for Teachers using Land of Hope in the classroom

This Guide accompanies the original Land of Hope for High School and College age students 

While many famous writers – Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde – are buried at Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, “there are also writers, many more of them in fact, buried there who have been completely forgotten, not necessarily because they were not good but because cultural memory is necessarily limited.”

In eight chapters, the inimitable Anthony Daniels dilates on some forgotten writers of Père Lachaise, exploring their literary merit and the amusing byways of history,  aiming “to entertain while illustrating the inexhaustible depth of our past.”

The 1776 Report is the official report of The President's Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.” This edition features the original text with the addition of notes and commentary by Chair Larry P. Arnn, Vice Chair Carol Swain, and Executive Director Matthew Spalding.

The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.

The media–Democrat “collusion narrative,” which paints Donald Trump as cat’s paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion.

Despite Clinton’s commanding lead in the polls, hyper-partisan intelligence officials decided they needed an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. Thus was born the collusion narrative, built on an anonymously sourced “dossier,” secretly underwritten by the Clinton campaign and compiled by a former British spy. Though acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified” at the FBI’s highest level, the dossier was used to build a counterintelligence investigation against Trump’s campaign.

Miraculously, Trump won anyway. But his political opponents refused to accept the voters’ decision. Their collusion narrative was now peddled relentlessly by political operatives, intelligence agents, Justice Department officials, and media ideologues—the vanguard of the “Trump Resistance.” Through secret surveillance, high-level intelligence leaking, and tireless news coverage, the public was led to believe that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election.

Not one to sit passively through an onslaught, President Trump fought back in his tumultuous way. Matters came to a head when he fired his FBI director, who had given explosive House testimony suggesting the president was a criminal suspect, despite privately assuring Trump otherwise. The resulting firestorm of partisan protest cowed the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, whose seemingly limitless investigation bedeviled the administration for two years.

Yet as months passed, concrete evidence of collusion failed to materialize. Was the collusion narrative an elaborate fraud? And if so, choreographed by whom? Against media–Democrat caterwauling, a doughty group of lawmakers forced a shift in the spotlight from Trump to his investigators and accusers. This has exposed the depth of politicization within American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. It is now clear that the institutions on which our nation depends for objective policing and clear-eyed analysis injected themselves scandalously into the divisive politics of the 2016 election.

They failed to forge a new Clinton administration. Will they succeed in bringing down President Trump?

The World's Medicine Chest details how America became the world's leader in biopharmaceutical innovation and reveals how new threats to this industry will have disastrous consequences for patients and the U.S. economy.

In the 1970s, Europe was the global hub for pharmaceutical innovation. European drug companies developed more than twice as many drugs in that decade as their U.S.-based counterparts. But times have changed. Today, nearly half of all new drugs come from the United States. Just 22 percent are of European origin. And U.S. patients get access to innovative medicines before anyone else in the world.

 Drawing on her decades of experience as a health policy scholar, Sally Pipes details how America became the world’s leader in biopharmaceutical innovation. She argues that efforts over the last few years by Democrats and Republicans alike to impose price controls on prescription drugs will have disastrous consequences for patients and for the U.S. Economy.

This pamphlet exposes how the Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to “transform” America.

On a near-daily basis, the Democrats are issuing radical proposals to socialize medicine, industry, and higher education. So how can the Democrats win elections when their agenda is so far to the left of the American people?

That’s easy—it’s because the means of public debate are being manipulated.

In this explosive Encounter Broadside, Congressman Devin Nunes exposes the nexus between the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media corporations. These three entities cooperate to blast out the Democrats’ message and downplay their extremism while suppressing and censoring conservative points of view.

Tens of millions of Americans are only seeing one side of the debate. The information they get from newspapers and social media is not “news”—it’s contrived content designed to help one political party and punish its opponents.

In the run-up to the most consequential election of our lifetime, read this book to learn how your information is being skewed and regulated to force America onto the path to socialism.

About Encounter Broadsides: In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy as we know it. Encounter Broadsides seek to revive this medium to make the case for ordered liberty and democratic capitalism in our time. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear. 

The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys.

An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyalties and myths, bringing the story of four generations of “America’s family” fully into view. Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition; the dynastic ebb and flow; the invention of a mythic identity; the corrosive underside of the dream of Camelot—developed over four generations—that led one young Kennedy to say, “We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them.”

The Kennedys: An American Drama is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys’ rise and fall. The authors have added new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., and the other family tragedies of the last few years, on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.

In addition to The Kennedys, Peter Collier and David Horowitz are the authors of dynastic biographies of the Fords, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, and Fondas.

A personal, journalistic ethnography of the modern American working class, based on the travels and interactions of the author through the American heartland.

"Second Class is the most important book you will read all year. A political realignment is coming, and it’s my hope that the end result will work in favor of our all-too-neglected American working class. When that realignment comes, Batya and her book will help lead the way."

—Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life?

While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working class who are fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them. Second Class combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinions on America’s emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education. 

America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land, where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? It’s not that hard actually. All it would take, as this book illustrates, is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work—and the American worker.

In this firsthand account, David Bernhardt, 53rd Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, describes how he witnessed firsthand the administrative state's transformation from a collection of departments under the command of the President into a sprawling and unaccountable bureaucracy.

“Resistance” to the Trump presidency within the civil service drew media attention, but it was only part of a larger problem: a federal bureaucracy that often goes its own way, contrary to the policies of elected leadership. In this insider’s account, David L. Bernhardt reveals how the bureaucratic swamp really operates and how unaccountable power has been concentrated deep within the administrative state, resulting in dysfunction.

Executive agencies were created to implement legislation and presidential directives, yet career civil servants use them to advance their own agendas instead. Congress often writes laws broadly, letting subject-matter experts at administrative agencies fill in the details with regulations. Then, agency employees sometimes substitute their own policy preferences for actual statutory or regulatory language. They may also fail to appreciate that their authority is delegated from an official who answers to the president. Bernhardt gives examples of federal employees undermining the administration’s policies simply by refusing to work on a task, slow-walking it, or doing a subpar job.

Administrative agencies have further gained power through judicial deference to an agency’s own interpretation of a statute when its enforcement action is challenged. Courts essentially abdicate their role of interpreting the law, leaving citizens with little recourse against penalties or prohibitions. Both legislative and judicial powers have thus been shifted to the executive branch, where they are exercised without adequate political oversight.

Drawing on his experiences working under two administrations, Bernhardt explains how President Trump’s enabling leadership showed a path for reining in the administrative state. He calls on political leadership to turn off autopilot and take control of their agencies, and on Congress and the judiciary to assert their constitutional authority, before an unaccountable federal bureaucracy destroys the Founders’ vision of government by consent of the governed.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Workbook for students studying the Young Readers Edition of Land of Hope. Middle School, Grades 6-8

The SECOND Student Workbook to accompany the two-volume Young Readers Edition of Land of Hope 

This Student Workbook to the Young Reader’s Edition of Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story is an invaluable supplement for students reading the Land of Hope in their courses. Prepared by Wilfred McClay in collaboration with John McBride, a master teacher with more than thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience, the workbook expands on the Land of Hope, offering corresponding primary source documents and hands-on map reading exercises. It will help students develop their close reading and geography skills in order to better understand the materials presented in the Land of Hope.

This Student Workbook and the Teacher’s Guide are complementary and designed to be used together. Both provide chapter summaries which instructors may use in teaching students to read for the main idea. The Student Workbook contains reading questions for each chapter of the Land of Hope text; the Teacher’s Guide has the same questions with answers. Primary source documents, including speeches, diary entries, song lyrics, compacts, letters, essays, legal documents, and more, accompany each chapter and are broken into shorter segments to help with reading comprehension. In the Student Workbook, each primary source is followed by reading questions directed to help students understand the main ideas; the Teacher’s Guide provides the answers. The Student Workbook offers fourteen map exercises; the Teacher’s Guide provides the keys. Both editions offer synthetical essay questions for each chapter and for final exams, learning strategies, and study “tricks.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, European economies went through a period of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, what some economists described as “secular decline.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States enjoyed a robust recovery during those years by reducing taxes, eliminating regulations on business, and tightening monetary policy. 

Now, after two decades of subpar growth, the question is whether or not the American economy has entered into its own era of secular decline.

This Broadside examines this troubling development, recognizing that there are no easy solutions to the problem. Lacking workable solutions, Americans will have to adjust to a future of slow economic growth, with all that implies for inter-generational progress, American strength abroad and political conflict at home. 

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Guide for Teachers using Land of Hope: Young Readers Edition. Middle School — Grades 6-8

The FIRST Teachers Guide to accompany the two-volume narrative Land of Hope: Young Readers Edition

This Teacher's Guide to the Young Reader's Edition of Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story is an invaluable supplemental resource for teachers who use the Young Reader's Edition as a textbook for middle-grade courses in US history. Prepared by McClay in collaboration with John McBride, a master teacher with more than thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience, it is an exceptionally rich and useful tool for classroom instructors.

Each chapter of this Teacher's Guide receives a five-part treatment: a short summation of the chapter's contents questions and answers about the chapter, a list of key names and terms appearing within each one, a crossword puzzle based on those names and terms, and one or more primary source documents for class analysis with accompanying questions and answers. Longer documents are broken into shorter passages with questions interspersed to help younger readers. 

This Teacher's Guide also features a collection of map exercises as well as special units to assist instructors in teaching students about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the two-party system.

Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens.

Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical more or less interchangeably without understanding their place in American history. Kevin Slack describes the distinct aims of the movements they represent and weighs their consequences for the American republic.

Each of the three movements rejected older republican principles of governance in favor of an administrative state, but there were substantial differences between Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers, who battled trusts and curbed immigration; Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s secular liberals, who forged a government-business partnership and promoted a civil rights agenda; and the 1960s radicals, who protested corporate influence in the Great Society, liberal hypocrisy on race and gender, and the war in Vietnam. Each sought to overturn what came before.  

Following the revolution of the 1960s, elites on both left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and advance globalization abroad. Each side claimed to serve the interests of disadvantaged or underrepresented groups. Radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to advance their vision of social justice for women and minorities, while neoliberal elites promoted monopoly finance, open borders, and the outsourcing of jobs to benefit consumers. The administrative state became a global American empire, but the neoliberals’ economic and military failures precipitated a crisis of legitimacy. In the “great awokening” that began under Barack Obama, neoliberal elites, including establishment conservatives, openly broke with the populist base of the Republican Party, embraced identity politics, and used COVID-19 and a myth of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. 

Today, an incompetent kleptocracy is draining the wealthiest and most powerful people in history, thus eroding the foundations of its own empire. 

Part history, part political analysis, and part memoir, Mexifornia is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Victor Davis Hanson, known for his military histories and his social commentary, is a fifth-generation Californian who lives on a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies on the decline of agrarianism, Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything. Here too, he ponders what has changed in California over the past quarter century, examining how the state and the Southwest more broadly—indeed, the entire nation—have been altered by hemorrhaging borders.

Hanson admires the ambition and vigor of immigrants who have helped make California strong, but he indicts the disordered immigration policies that led to the present mess. He also illuminates the ways those policies are harmful to people who have come from Mexico and Central America seeking a better life in the United States.

Nearly twenty years after the first publication of Mexifornia, Hanson offers an update on the continuing tragedy of illegal immigration. At the same time, he remains hopeful that our traditions of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage may yet remedy a predicament created by politicians and ideologues.

With private space companies launching rockets, satellites, and people at a record pace, and with the U.S. and other governments committing to a future in space, Glenn Harlan Reynolds looks at how we got here, where we’re going, and why it matters for all of humanity.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Workbook for Students studying the Young Readers Edition of Land of Hope. Middle School — Grades 6-8

The FIRST Student Workbook to accompany the two-volume Young Readers Edition of Land of Hope

This Student Workbook to the Young Reader’s Edition of Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story is an invaluable supplement for students reading the Land of Hope in their courses. Prepared by Wilfred McClay in collaboration with John McBride, a master teacher with more than thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience, the workbook expands on the Land of Hope, offering corresponding primary source documents and hands-on map reading exercises. It will help students develop their close reading and geography skills in order to better understand the materials presented in the Land of Hope.

This Student Workbook and the Teacher’s Guide are complementary and designed to be used together. Both provide chapter summaries which instructors may use in teaching students to read for the main idea. The Student Workbook contains reading questions for each chapter of the Land of Hope text; the Teacher’s Guide has the same questions with answers. Primary source documents, including speeches, diary entries, song lyrics, compacts, letters, essays, legal documents, and more, accompany each chapter and are broken into shorter segments to help with reading comprehension. In the Student Workbook, each primary source is followed by reading questions directed to help students understand the main ideas; the Teacher’s Guide provides the answers. The Student Workbook offers fourteen map exercises; the Teacher’s Guide provides the keys. Both editions offer synthetical essay questions for each chapter and for final exams, learning strategies, and study “tricks.”

This companion teacher's guide to A Student Workbook for Land of Hope for young readers provides parents or teachers everything they need to give their children or students a fun, inspiring, and age-appropriate grounding in American history.

“Professor McClay has brought faith, hope, and charity to this comprehensive and readable narration of our National Story.” 

—Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

Designed to accompany the Student Workbook, the Teacher's Guide provides chapter summaries which teachers may use in teaching students to read for the main idea. There are reading questions with answers for each chapter of the LAND OF HOPE text; the Students Workbook has the same questions with blank spaces for students to write answers. Primary documents accompany each chapter, broken into shorter segments to help with reading comprehension; these documents also have reading questions with answers. Documents are often the text of speeches but may include diary entries and song lyrics. There are about two dozen map exercises, with keys. (The maps, without the answers, are also in the Student Workbook.) Extensive testing materials are included: multiple choice and put-in-order short answer questions, quote identifications, and synthetical essay questions for each chapter and for final exams. Teaching strategies are suggested, as well as supplementary materials to "thicken" topics covered in the text when teachers or students desire further details or alternate interpretations. The authors have long experience with teaching US History and know, and share here, a lot of tricks. 

Did you know the original Wizard of Oz was a spoof of the Populist Party in the late 18th century? The Populists wanted to get off the gold standard (the yellow brick road) and into greenbacks (the Emerald City). Dorothy is accompanied by an industrial worker (no heart), a farmer (no brain), and the Cowardly Lion (William Jennings Bryan). Any student who has seen the movie then remembers the Populists!  

Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames reveal what is behind the inflationary storm that is wreaking havoc on American pocketbooks.

Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It explains what’s behind the worst inflationary storm in more than forty years—one that is dominating the headlines and shaking Americans by their pocketbooks. The cost-of-living explosion since the COVID pandemic has raised alarms about a possible return of a 1970’s-style “Great Inflation.” Some observers even fear a descent into the kind of Weimar-style hyperinflation that has torn apart so many nations. Is this true? If so, what should be done? How should we prepare for the future?

Inflation answers these and other questions in an engaging discussion that draws on the singular expertise of Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Media, acclaimed for his insights on money and the economy; Nathan Lewis, internationally renowned expert on money and taxation; and author and journalist Elizabeth Ames.

The authors say that today’s problems can be solved by discarding longstanding beliefs that helped bring on the current crisis. They include the notion that central banks can create prosperity through artificially creating money “out of thin air,” and also that economic “stability” requires “a little inflation.” Such ideas for decades have been Holy Writ in official Washington. Inflation shows why they are misguided. The book also explains why the current rage for heedless money-printing advocated by left-wing advocates of so-called Modern Monetary Theory is likely to lead the nation—and the world—down the road to disaster.

Packed with examples from the headlines and from history Inflation is a unique, real-world exploration of the subject that addresses everyday concerns of Americans under siege by rising prices, including steps you should take to protect your wealth.

Inflation is essential reading for everyone seeking to navigate these tumultuous times.

Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely explanation. His inference is based on specific research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute’s lack of adequate safety precautions, together with the continuing absence of any direct evidence to support natural emergence.

The essay discusses the failure of the mainstream media to penetrate the self-interested assurance of virologists that lab escape was a dismissible conspiracy theory. It also notes how the politicization of discussion impeded consideration of the scientific facts.

The United States' approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state.

Forty years later the hope of producing a benign People's Republic of China utterly failed. The Communist Party of China deceived the West into believing that the its system and the Party-ruled People's Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat. In fact, these misguided policies produced the emergence of a 21st Century Evil Empire even more dangerous than a Cold War version in the Soviet Union.

Successive American presidential administrations were fooled by ill-advised pro-China policymakers, intelligence analysts and business leaders who facilitated the rise not of a peaceful China but a threatening and expansionist nuclear-armed communist dictatorship not focused on a single overriding strategic objective: Weakening and destroying the United States of America.

Defeating the United States is the first step for China's current rulers in achieving global supremacy under a new world order based an ideology of Communism with Chinese characteristics.

The process included technology theft of American companies that took place on a massive scale through cyber theft and unfair trade practices. The losses directly supported in the largest and most significant buildup of the Chinese military that now directly threatens American and allied interests around the world. The military threat is only half the danger as China aggressively pursues regional and international control using a variety of non-military forces, including economic, cyber and space warfare and large-scale influence operations.

Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy details the failure to understand the nature and activities of the dangers posed by China and what the United States can do in taking needed steps to counter the threats.

America has always been committed to the idea that citizens can work together to build a common world. Today, three afflictions keep us from pursuing that noble ideal. The first and most obvious affliction is identity politics, which seeks to transform America by turning politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. For now, the sacrificial scapegoat is the white, heterosexual, man. After he is humiliated and purged, who will be the object of cathartic rage? White women? Black men? Identity politics is the anti-egalitarian spiritual eugenics of our age. It demands that pure and innocent groups ascend, and the stained transgressor groups be purged.

The second affliction is that citizens oscillate back and forth, in bipolar fashion, at one moment feeling invincible on their social media platforms and, the next, feeling impotent to face the everyday problems of life without the guidance of experts and global managers. Third, Americans are afflicted by a disease that cannot quite be named, characterized by an addictive hope that they can find cheap shortcuts that bypass the difficult labors of everyday life. Instead of real friendship, we seek social media “friends.”

Instead of meals at home, we order “fast food.” Instead of real shopping, we “shop” online. Instead of counting on our families and neighbors to address our problems, we look to the state to take care of us. In its many forms, this disease promises release from our labors, yet impoverishes us all. American Awakening chronicles all of these problems, yet gives us hope for the future.

"...a timely and entertaining account of how class rivalries as well as political conflicts have shaped and sometimes warped the news industry."—Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?

It all has to do with who our news media is written by—and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century—from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalized and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades.

The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals—some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America’s unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.

Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.

From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times’ 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower Compact in 1620.

"1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America’s past is still America’s best future." —Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation

"Peter Wood’s pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound." —Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center

When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.

This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, most notably the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But the quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620.

Schools across the country have already adopted the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?