Encounter Books

"Lee Smith is a great American patriot who has understood, from the very beginning, that the radical left is the true THREAT TO DEMOCRACY."

—Donald Trump, former president of the United States 

From Lee Smith, bestselling author of, The Permanent Coup and The Plot Against the President, comes another riveting exposé of the secret war against President Trump and American democracy. 

Even before a would-be killer tried to murder President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, a clique of political assassins set about eliminating him from public life entirely. 

In Disappearing the President, New York Times bestselling author Lee Smith exposes how a shadow network of powerful partisan activists has waged a years-long, scorched-earth war to eradicate President Trump and any vestige of his influence. 

Resorting to an unprecedented campaign of domestic spying, election rigging, brute-force censorship, and political violence, anti-Trump zealots have undermined the federal government and sabotaged countless other vital institutions in their relentless quest to crush the former president. 

In this alarming book, Lee Smith reveals: 

How U.S. intelligence services, trained to sabotage foreign governments and leaders, have turned their expertise against Americans. 

How the Shadow Network exploited Covid to censor dissidents and rig the 2020 election. 

Why Big Tech firms hired hundreds of former intelligence officials after 2018. 

How Barack Obama, widely viewed as a benign elder statesman, created and leads the anti-Trump operation.

Finally, Smith shows how censorship of Trump supporters has provoked a free-speech backlash. 

The hour is late, and the stakes are high. Including exclusive interviews with President Trump, Devin Nunes, Dan Bongino, and many others, Disappearing the President is an unsettling expose of a rogue cabal that will pay any price to annihilate the one man who threatens their agenda.

"...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.

Years ago, James V. Schall wrote Another Sort of Learning, a book listing those things you should read but probably were never required to read. It is not a curriculum, except maybe one “for life.” This book you have in your hands is something of a mathematical tribute to Schall’s basic idea and is aptly titled Another Sort of Mathematics. Like Schall’s book, it is not a curriculum. It is, however, a list of some things from mathematics you should experience but probably were never required to experience. The theorems and proofs in this book represent, in a small way, some of the best that has been said within the discipline of mathematics.

There is something unique in the human soul that can only be satisfied by wondering about mathematics. And that means, regardless of your background, this book is for you. Reclaim your mathematical inheritance. Embrace the mathematician within you. Choose to wonder.

Exposes Arabella Advisors as a major "dark money" operation that channels billions into progressive causes through opaque networks and deceptive grassroots groups, revealing its significant influence on U.S. politics and its far-reaching impact on issues from Supreme Court nominations to election manipulation.

"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.” 

The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, sexist, etc.

Jacobinism, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, and now the new woke dispensation have all iterated upon this central conceit. Their adherents were all frenziedly preoccupied with being on “the right side of history”—the side of “progress.”

In The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, Daniel Mahoney chronicles each manifestation of the Ideological Lie, up to and including contemporary wokeism. He explains how each is marked by the same errors: impatience with piecemeal reform, contempt for self-limiting constitutional order, and the belief that people are guilty for their immutable characteristics—belonging to the wrong class or race—rather than for their actions. He shows how the woke, moved by self-loathing and a disdain for our civic inheritance, are transmuting our so-called democracy into a new form of despotism.

Mahoney ultimately argues that our failure to learn from the totalitarian tragedy of the twentieth century allowed the ideological virus to metastasize in new and alarming ways. Above all, he takes aim at the omnipresent “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton called it, and elucidates multiple paths for overcoming the ideological clichés that continue to deform intellectual and political life today.

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 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 opinion 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.

 The American story is one of great physical, intellectual, and spiritual adventure. Gems of American History explores how this extraordinary republic came to be—and what is required to preserve its legacy of liberty.

In this collection of twelve essays, the renowned historian Walter McDougall examines some of the most pivotal events and figures of the American saga to date. He revisits the “Machiavellian moment” that ignited the awakening of republican thought across the Atlantic. He reflects on the forg­ing of America’s civic identity from its earliest seeds in the colonial era. His profiles of William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and the philanthropist and tycoon Stephen Girard reveal the profound role Philadelphia played in shaping the nation. He recounts the story of the Wright brothers’ romance with flight and how it captures America’s indefatigable spirit.

McDougall also warns that, for more than a century, leaders following in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson have steered the United States down a path of foreign policy ruin that undermines our national interests and threatens our national character.

Leavened with a lifelong scholar’s wisdom and insight, Gems of American History assem­bles the wide-ranging sources of American principles and traditions, many of which have been lost to ideological amnesia, in a way that helps explain who we are and where we are going.

Former CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc. Andrew F. Puzder exposes how the secretive consolidation of financial power under the guise of "ESG" represents a new collectivist threat to the free market.

Over the last thirty-five years, asset manager mega-giants BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard have accumulated unprecedented levels of stock ownership in virtually every major US company. Voting the shares they hold for clients allows these companies to force their own “environmental, social, and governance” or “ESG” agenda on the American corporate sector and, by extension, on all of us.

An asset manager’s traditional duty is to maximize returns for its investors, but these financial elites expand their duties through “stakeholder capitalism,” the idea that a company is responsible not only for its actual shareholders, but for everyone who is affected by the company—which translates to everyone in the community.  Thus, they can impose their preferred ESG goals under the guise of benefitting an amorphous group of non-investors—a group that has no say over whether ESG goals actually “benefit” them.

This elite-dominated economic system is nothing more than socialism in sheep’s clothing. “ESG” defines the champagne socialist agenda that would devastate the working and middle classes globally. Now, in the face of rising opposition, these financial elites are suddenly rebranding—shifting their terminology to conceal their intent.

A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims exposes how, although they may abandon the acronym “ESG,” these elites have pursued—and will continue to pursue—their ESG goals: to transform our consumer-driven free-market economy into one that is subject to their elitist demands, overriding the will of the people whom they deem incapable of self-government.

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?

Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War. Our differences are not merely moral and political, but philosophical, and even spiritual. We hardly seem to experience the same reality anymore, preferring to self-select into media perception chambers whose projections vary according to political persuasion.

Something has gone terribly wrong in the American political community. We have entered an era wherein the federal government’s democratically elected officers are powerless in comparison to their unelected, bureaucratic counterparts. The old balance of power, laid out in the Constitution, has been replaced by an entirely new structure.

The American regime has become post-constitutional. But what is this post-constitutional arrangement? How does it operate? Who is in charge? Can it be overcome? What role will the Constitution play in the nation’s future?

Glenn Ellmers—senior fellow with the Claremont Institute, widely-published analyst of current affairs, and scholar of political philosophy—provides answers to these and other questions, as he explores the deepest roots of our political turmoil, illustrating the connections between government bureaucracy, the misuse of science, and the leftwing ideology that controls so much of our public and private life.

“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.

The Meese Revolution explores how Ed Meese became the most powerful and important Attorney General in American history.

Edwin Meese III is the most influential person ever to hold the office of U.S. Attorney General – and almost no one knows it. Ed Meese was at the center of virtually every major accomplishment of Ronald Reagan’s transformative presidency, from winning the Cold War without firing a shot to the economic boom that by the end of the 1980s was the envy of the world. More to the point for this book, Ed Meese is the person most responsible for the rise of constitutional originalism, which treats the text and original meaning of the Constitution rather than the policy fads of the moment as authoritative law. 

In 2024, originalism is a major force in the courts, with a majority of Supreme Court justices and a raft of lower-court and state-court judges at least taking it seriously as a major contributor to decision-making. That result was unthinkable in 1985 when Meese took office and originalism was essentially unknown to the legal academy and almost wholly absent from the judicial process. Ed Meese turned the U.S. Department of Justice into “the academy in exile,” where originalism was developed, refined, theorized, and put into practice.

This book describes the rise of originalism, which necessitates telling the story of Ed Meese, without whom it surely does not happen. Meese’s story threads through virtually all important legal and policy events of the 1980s, many of which continue to shape the world of the twenty-first century. We are still living through the Meese Revolution.

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.”

Curiosity led Edward Epstein to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, such as the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. Seeking more information, he often found himself a fly on the wall at the highest reaches of the establishment, observing how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. This memoir recounts his life as a pursuer of lost truths. 

Some accuse Epstein of being a conspiracist, but that is incorrect. He is a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom, he searches for the missing pieces of the picture, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission. Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence may result in overturning an established narrative, as happened with the publication of Inquest, Epstein’s book about the official probe into the JFK assassination. But that is very different from looking for a conspiracy. 

Sometimes, Epstein’s work has in fact uncovered a deep conspiracy, as with the world diamond cartel. Other times, it has discredited belief in a conspiracy, as when he delved into the murders of numerous Black Panthers. After his findings were published in the New Yorker, newspapers including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times issued editorial apologies for their own reporting on the murders, which had suggested that an FBI conspiracy was behind them.

Epstein’s primary interest has never been to advance an agenda, but rather to spot gaps in the conventional narrative and fill them in. Assume Nothing is the story of a lifelong quest for missing puzzle pieces, and also a story of self-actualization. 

This stunning whistleblower account reveals how the Deep State weaponizes federal powers against its political enemies and explores the disastrous reality of the Obama Doctrine, which seeks to create a global balance of power by weakening American preeminence and strengthening America's foreign adversaries.

During his eight-year reign, Barack Obama transformed the U.S. national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies as no other president in history has done, advancing a policy of U.S. diminishment that has undermined our global primacy to this day.

In The Insider Threat, Adam Lovinger draws on more than ten years of experience at the Pentagon to explain how the Obama administration orchestrated this coup.

Obama spent his first year in office persuading Americans that the U.S. should step back from its global leadership role to create a new world order based on “balance of power” politics. But what he never said out loud was that this meant Washington would transfer power to its enemies. When his 2009 worldwide “apology tour” proved a debacle, Obama changed tack—to subversion by bureaucratic fiat.

He spent the next eight years staging a stealth revolution inside America’s most sensitive government agencies, using ideological infighters to replace America’s strategic objectives with those of China, Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In return, through a range of acts and omissions described in this book, America’s adversaries helped Obama and Joe Biden win elections, wealth, and prestige.  

Equal parts George Orwell and Franz Kafka, The Insider Threat exposes—for the first time—the secret playbook that Lovinger discovered on his U.S. Department of Defense computer. This file reveals how corrupt senior officials enrich their patrons at taxpayer expense, advance the interests of America’s enemies, undermine core U.S. national interests from within, and make administrative reform impossible.

Even longtime Washington insiders will be shocked at the extent of lawlessness that now passes for normal in America’s administrative state.  

An inside perspective of the federal bureaucracy, with personal intrigue and prescriptions for future administrations.

"In the United States you can elect any president you want, but a small group of people you’ve never heard of still run everything — year after year, administration after administration. That’s not democracy. It’s oligarchy, and Mark Moyar explains exactly how it works." 

—Tucker Carlson

This book tells a remarkable true story of bureaucratic assassination during the Trump presidency, revealing in vivid detail how career federal employees thwarted President Trump’s efforts to drain the swamp.

Mark Moyar, a senior political appointee at the US Agency for International Development, discovered evidence of corruption involving five career bureaucrats and reported it to agency officials in 2018. Senior bureaucrats orchestrated a sophisticated retaliatory plot, which began when a Special Operations general fraudulently accused Moyar of divulging classified information, and ended with the termination of Moyar's employment. 

The bureau that Moyar had been on track to lead, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, fell into the hands of one of his bureaucratic assassins. The leading perpetrator of the corruption exposed by Moyar subsequently escaped punishment by transferring to another federal agency.

A multi-agency cover-up followed. Moyar sought help from three Offices of the Inspector General—the government’s main bulwarks against whistleblower retaliation—but all three conducted flimsy investigations that absolved the bureaucracy. When Senator Charles Grassley demanded that agency officials fill the gaps in the government’s story, he was met with lies and evasions.

This suspense-filled drama provides an insider’s view of the federal bureaucracy’s corruption, its weaponization of bureaucratic procedures, and its failures to protect employees from retaliation. In telling his story, Moyar reveals how future administrations can drain the swamp and draws a roadmap for the restoration of integrity to the United States government.

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. 

"Paul has provided a vital piece to our understanding of modern liberalism’s origins."

—Ronald J. Pestritto, Author of America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism

Today’s political and cultural divisions leave many wondering how America could have arrived at its present state. This book traces the source to an unlikely historical accident.

The founding principles of the American Revolution—that all individuals have unalienable natural rights to life, liberty, and the fruits of their labor, and that governments should exist only to protect these rights—were a singularity in human history. The nation’s failure to secure the slaves’ equal rights to self-ownership led to a civil war and the constitutional recognition of this vital principle. And yet, scarcely four decades later, social science faculties at the country’s top colleges and universities repudiated the country’s founding principles.

The cause of this startling change was the education that hundreds of American college students and graduates received in German universities in the late 19^th century. Germany’s professoriate was dominated by state socialists who taught that individuals had no natural rights, only privileges granted to them by the government. American students absorbed these beliefs and after their return, established this country’s first graduate-level programs, seeding the first generation of PhDs. Inventing the name “progressives” for themselves, their goal was to recast America’s governmental and economic institutions in the image of Germany’s authoritarian government and oligarchical society. Higher education was transformed with disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences. Generation after generation of students, including those who went on to teach, abandoned this country’s traditional relationship of the individual to the state.  

Over the next several decades, American politics, journalism, law, and education evolved in directions inimical to the nation’s founding principles, leaving the country increasingly fractured—not unlike the decades leading up to the first Civil War. This book traces those changes, offering ways to alter the trajectory of today’s political and educational culture. It includes a proposal to eliminate personal and corporate income and payroll taxes and raise today’s government revenues with a low (1%) universal sales tax. 

‘Michael Barone is the perfect person to write this important and thought-provoking book.'

Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny  

The 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, they contributed in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways to the expansion of a young republic on the seaboard edge of a continent of whose vast expanses they were largely ignorant.

Mental Maps of the Founders explores the geographic orientation—the mental maps—of six of the Founders. Three were Virginians, who vied to expand their new nation toward different points of the compass. One, a refugee from Puritan Boston to more tolerant Philadelphia, built a commercial and journalistic empire spanning seaboard colonies and the West Indies. Two came from buzzing commercial entrepots of glaringly different character, the sugar-and-slave island of St. Croix in the Caribbean and the stern Swiss Calvinistic city-state of Geneva. These disparate origins informed their foundation and management of a financial and taxation system that enabled the new republic’s commerce to thrive.

Inspired by the many wonderful books about the Founding Fathers, the journalist, map lover, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Michael Barone set out to explore the geographical orientation—the mental maps—of the Founders. In a series of reflective essays, Barone shows how the Founders’ mental maps helped develop the contours and character of a young republic whose geographical features and political boundaries were yet unknown.

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. 

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 Hardback 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. 

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.

In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins.

This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume’s inductive skepticism to Karl Popper’s outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend’s summation that “anything goes” when it comes to defining or describing science. 

With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought. 

Stove’s views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove’s insider-outsider perspective, the train wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and “science studies” is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study.

Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is—and what it is not. 

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.

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.

On October 7, 2023, Israel was ambushed by the Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas. The attack, underwritten by the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed unspeakable terrors on the Israeli population. Most of the world reacted with horror to Hamas’s actions. But many commentators labeled the Jewish people, and Israel as a nation, as oppressors. The Palestinians, according to their Marxist calculus, were the oppressed.

A legion of figures in academia, the media, and the United States then declared support for Palestine, the perpetrator of the atrocities. Many American institutions have been indoctrinated and transformed into puppets who propagate the hateful antisemitism that has returned to the West.

Why does Israel exist? Why is it worthy of remaining a critical ally of the United States?  Why have critical race theorists identified Israel and the US as the most pernicious examples of “settler colonialism”?

Answers to these questions were developing during the first term of President Trump. But they were promptly abandoned by the Biden-Harris Administration, imperiling both Israel and the United States. In The Battle for the Jewish State, Victoria Coates shows how the current conflict in Israel is not a regional issue to be resolved through an interminable diplomatic peace process. Rather, it is a broader military and cultural war that must be won for the sake not only of Israel, but also of the United States.

The Western Tradition from Antiquity to 1500

Where do the threads that form the Western tradition originate, and how were they woven together over the two and a half millennia before 1500? What are the sources of our modern ideas about science, freedom, equality, law, good government, and virtue? These are the questions explored in The Golden Thread, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom, written by James Hankins.

The story begins with the seminal culture of the classical Greeks and moves through the Hellenization of the east following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hankins then narrates the rise and dominance of Rome and the fusion of Greco-Roman and Judea-Christian cultures in the Christian empire of the fourth century AD. The volume follows the history of Christendom from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, charts its centuries-long rivalry with the Islamic world, and culminates in the emergence of European civilization in the Middle Age and Renaissance. 

Volume I Examines how the foundations were laid for the West's political and economic dominance in the modern era, illuminating the deep roots of the ideas, arts, and institutions that continue to shape our world.

The Golden Thread is a two-volume history of the Western tradition. Volume I is authored by James Hankins; Volume II, covering the modern and contemporary West, is authored by Allen C. Guelzo.

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 

 You shall thank Alan Dershowitz for writing this [valuable] book.

—Stephen Breyer, Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

If reliable but uncertain intelligence predicted a mass casualty terrorist attack and indicated likely suspects,

what preventive actions would be constitutionally authorized? Detention? Interrogation? Torture? What if the attack involved a weaponized virus? Should the government compel widespread inoculation that might kill hundreds of people while saving millions? What if an article describing how to circumvent the inoculation mandate was about to be published? Should censorship of the article be authorized?

These are the sorts of questions Alan Dershowitz has been asking for more than 60 years, in his teaching, writing, and litigation. Now, at age 86, he has written his magnum opus. In it, he suggests an overarching jurisprudential framework that would set limits to the ballooning power of what he calls “the preventive state.”

This important book offers unprecedented insights into one of the most underexamined developments of our age: the growing magnitude and frequency of cataclysmic threats, coupled with the increasingly effective—but increasingly intrusive—tools intended to predict and prevent them.

Dershowitz responds to the urgent need for a jurisprudence that provides balance and accountability as both dangers and preventive capabilities increase, threatening our security and our liberties. This masterful analysis should be read by everyone who cares about security, liberty, and democracy.

This spirited book traces the roots of liberalism through the noblest traditions, virtues, institutions and longings embedded in Western culture.

Liberalism is under attack from both left and right, but anti-liberals have failed to understand how the tradition defines our idea of civic virtue. Liberalism is not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, an inheritance of virtues, institutions, customs, and longings embedded in our culture and passed on through our memories and stories of moral heroes.

In this book, Buckley explains how we learned magnanimity from the Code of Chivalry and to avoid brutishness from the Code of the Gentleman; how, through the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the novels of Charles Dickens, kindness became a liberal virtue; how the republican virtue of the Founders can be traced back to fourteenth century Sienese merchants. From the stories that comprise the Western Tradition of liberalism, we learned the civic virtues that are the efficient secret of American constitutional government.

The anti-liberal cult of wokeness has attempted to cancel this tradition, but it will not long survive. It offers a creed of sin without absolution, of guilt without soul-easing joys, of frowns without laughter. It rejects the West’s high culture and offers nothing in its place. Without learning, art, industry, or anything that might attract a person, its emptiness will soon be seen by all, and liberalism will continue to inspire the civic virtues of our culture.

A deep dive into the strategies and tactics used by the radical left in recent years to undermine the institutions of the United States, along with suggestions for how to counter their advances.

"Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Gorka document the Left’s metamorphosis into a bastardized, racialized Marxism that is a threat to everything Americans hold dear. In this deeply insightful book, readers will understand the nature of the beast—and how to fight it in their communities."

— Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Many Americans believe that the United States is in decline. They see a country that has become unrecognizable: where individuals are reduced to their race, ethnicity, or sexual identity; where children are indoctrinated into radical ideologies; where anti-semitism has become widespread. This book explains how all of these ills are rooted in Marxism. To be sure, it is not Soviet Marxism, but a Marxism that was shaped by European intellectuals, adapted and refined by America’s student radicals of the 1960s, and diffused throughout the culture as those student radicals became professors, community organizers, and leaders.

The end goal of these NextGen Marxists is expropriation, redistribution, central planning, and collectivism. They are working toward nothing less than the cultural transformation of the United States—and they have partially succeeded.

But NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It is infused with optimism. It reveals the dark inner workings of the radical left’s destructive agenda in the United States in order to teach Americans how to fight back.

The authors share their conviction that the best days for the United States are still ahead of us if every day Americans can work together to restore sanity and make America the great beacon of freedom once again.

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.

It has great seeds of wisdom. —Sen. J.D. Vance

The Conservative Establishment’s consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. Conservatism was unable to stop or even slow the Left’s rolling revolutions in nearly every sector of American society—from classrooms to boardrooms, from the military to the culture at large. The Left has successfully transformed the nation over the past few generations, racking up victory after victory, with no clear end in sight. This is not sustainable for the country or the constituency represented by the Republican Party. For the Right to have a serious future, it needs to rethink its positions and think more deeply about the essential policy questions which will define the future of the country: race, men and women, sexuality, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This collection of essays, written by some of the Right’s most interesting thinkers and practitioners, seeks to reframe the ideological and policy direction of the American Right.

With essays by Michael Anton, Richard Hanania, Carson Holloway, John Fonte, David Azerrad, Helen Andrews, Scott Yenor, Joshua Mitchell, Aaron Renn, Arthur Milikh, David P. Goldman, Matthew Peterson, James Poulos, Theo Wold, Robert Delahunty, Jesse Merriam, Jeremy Carl, Eric Kaufmann, and Roger Kimball.

This searing account of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine reveals that, contrary to popular media narratives, Western hawks are culpable in triggering a war that has cost many thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives.

In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself, and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme.

But in the ruins of the last war lie the seeds for the next great conflict. Floating just beneath the surface of post-Cold War international relations was the question of what was to become of NATO with the loss of the Soviet Union as a threat. Western leaders believed expansion into the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe was the natural next step. But the Russians opposed this.

For 30 years, a succession of Russian leaders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin—warned the West that NATO’s expansion into territories bordering Russia, notably into Ukraine, would trigger a violent response from Moscow. Yet, the West did not listen. Contrary to the popular narrative in the West, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine will show readers how Westerners created our current crisis with Russia and why innocent Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era. Thanks to their hubris, the world now teeters on the brink of a potential nuclear world war over the status of Ukraine.

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?

Ever since Plato’s Republic, the study of statecraft has been a staple of Western discourse, and so has the study of particular leaders. Although Jewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders—that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people—in particular. 

And yet there has been no lack of such outstanding figures, from the biblical period of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness in the Diaspora. This book, devoted to ten of the most colorful, fascinating, and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia, fills the gap. 

Among the ten, men and women alike, some were firmly bound to Judaic religious teachings and others less so, but guiding all of them was the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity. By the mid-20th century, the legacy of past generations would inspire modern successors bent on the re-founding of the sovereign Jewish state, one of the greatest political feats in human history. 

In delving into the unique circumstances and predicaments faced by these ten, and into the characteristics that mark them and their statesmanship as specifically Jewish, readers will also become familiar with what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statesmanship and, by inference, with the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow.    

Curiosity is the instinct that prompts us to act, and a book about curiosity should tell us how to live. This is the first to do so, with its twelve rules for life.

While a fatal sin in Eden, curiosity is a necessary virtue in our world. It asks us to search for new experiences, to create, to invent. It tells us to look inward, to be curious about the needs of other people and about our own motives. It tells us not to be a stick in the mud or a bore. In particular, curiosity asks us to examine the most fundamental questions of our existence. When you put all this together, curiosity tells you how to live a life in full.

While there's a natural desire to explore, there's also a natural desire to stay home. We have a dark side that wants to hide from the world. We've also been made incurious by the rise of bitter partisanships and narrow ideologies that have sent things and people we should care about to our mental trash folders. That’s why this book is needed today.

Drawing on the model of John Quincy Adams’s career as statesman, Angelo Codevilla explores the foundations of America’s foreign policy, identifies where it went disastrously wrong in the last century, and asks what a truly ‘America First’ approach to statecraft would look like today.

"In his final work, Codevilla has left us a chilling analysis of how the radically egalitarian impulse of the elite does not just erode human freedom at home, but when nation building abroad ensures tragedies for almost everyone involved" —Victor Davis Hanson

Minding our own business, while leaving other peoples to mind theirs, was the basis of the United States’ successful foreign policy from 1815 to 1910. Best described in the works of John Quincy Adams and carried out by his successors throughout the nineteenth century, this is the foreign policy by which America grew prosperous and in peace. This policy also remains the commonsense philosophy of most Americans today. 

America’s Rise and Fall among Nations contrasts this original “America First” foreign policy with the principles and results of the following hundred years of “progressive” foreign policy which suddenly arrived with the election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912. The author explains why the many fruitless American wars—large and small—that followed Wilson's handling of World War I resulted in not only a failed peace, but also more conflicts abroad and at home. 

Finally, America’s Rise and Fall among Nations examines how John Quincy Adams’s insights are applicable to our current domestic and international environments and exemplify what “America First” can mean in our time. They chart a clear path to escape America’s previous eleven disastrous decades of so-called “progressive” international relations.

In his newest book, Daniel J. Mahoney offers refreshing historical antidotes to the displays of despotism in today's political arena.

"A brilliantly written and researched tribute to the pantheon of classically trained and thinking men of action." —Victor Davis Hanson

In The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace.

Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism.

A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another—to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa.

Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa’s at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. The author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism and Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, Kesler also co-edited (with William F. Buckley Jr.) Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edited volume of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition version in the country.

In this volume, Kesler’s students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. 

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 Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry V. Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, Edward J. Erler presents the lesser-known, late-life scholarship of renowned Lincoln scholar, Harry Victor Jaffa. Through a deep reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Erler considers some of Jaffa’s startling discoveries about Lincoln, Aquinas, Aristotle, and America’s political founding—discoveries that sometimes seem to contradict Jaffa’s own prior writing and often contradict the existing scholarly consensus. 

In 1959, Jaffa established himself as a foremost Lincoln scholar when he published Crisis of the House Divided, a revolutionary breakthrough in the understanding of Lincoln’s political philosophy. But by the time Jaffa published A New Birth of Freedom (2000), he had developed a deeper understanding of what is known as the “theological-political question,” the conflict between theology and politics in philosophical thought. Jaffa referred to this development as his “second sailing.” 

Jaffa was never able to flesh out his evolving ideas about the “theological-political question,” as it concerns Abraham Lincoln, while he was alive. At the behest of Jaffa, his student Edward Erler wrote this book to do just that.

With his own scholarly aplomb Erler explores Jaffa’s scholarship on Aristotle’s presence in the American founding; Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Aquinas’s surprising, shared—albeit concealed—vision of participatory government; the union of divine law and natural law in the American founding; and the primacy of prudence as supreme political virtue; among other topics. 

This is a book for anyone interested in the past and future of American political thought. 

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.

In his newest book, Charles Murray fearlessly states two controversial truths about the American population: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. If we aim to navigate public policy with wisdom and realism, these realities must be brought into the light.

“Facing Reality provides a powerful overview of one perspective that those who allege sweeping forms of systemic or institutional racism find it all to convenient to ignore―or cancel without due consideration.”―Wilfred Reilly, Commentary

“Facing Reality is a bold, important book which should be widely read and discussed.” ―Amy L. Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for the Claremont Review of Books

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.

We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

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 rigorous defense of free markets and open enterprise in the tradition of Adam Smith.

During the 20th century, Vietnam and Poland were both victims not only of devastating wars, but also of socialist planned economies that destroyed whatever war hadn't already. In 1990, Vietnam was still one of the poorest countries in the world, while Poland was one of the poorest in Europe. But in the three decades since then, both countries have drastically improved their citizens' standards of living and escaped the vicious cycle of national poverty. 

In this book Rainer Zitelmann identifies the reasons behind the sensational growth of both nations' economies, drawing out the lessons that other countries can learn from these two success stories. To explain the source of their success, he returns to Adam Smith's 1776 treatise, The Wealth of Nations: the only way to overcome poverty is through economic growth, Smith wrote, and economic freedom is the crucial prerequisite from such growth. 

Developments over the past 250 years have proved Smith right. The market economy has led to a global decline in poverty unparalleled in human history. Compare this to the fifty years of "development aid" in Africa that have only entrenched the status quo, and it is clear which approach yields superior results. Despite these strides, almost ten percent of the world's population still lives in extreme poverty. So, what measures actually help to alleviate poverty today? Through a wealth of data and stories from the everyday lives of Polish and Vietnamese people who experienced reforms, Zitelmann demonstrates the persistent relevance of Smith's ideas to economic flourishing in the 21st century. 

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. 

After the Democratic Party divided Americans along gender and racial lines, F.H. Buckley argues that the Republican Party can become the natural governing party again by uniting Americans around a return to their roots—championing the common good, liberty, and equality.

"Frank Buckley shakes conservatives by their lapels in this sharp-edged vision for a Republican Party. Progressivism Conservatism does what’s needed—disrupt received wisdom with pragmatic, innovative ideas."  —Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense

"F. H. Buckley shows us how a seeming contradiction can lead to the healing of a fractured country."  —Roger L. Simon, award-winning novelist and editor, Epoch Times

The Republican Party must return to its roots as a progressive conservative party that defends the American Dream, the idea that whoever you are, you can get ahead and know that your children will have it better than you did. It must show how the Democrats have become the party of inequality and immobility and that they created what structural racism exists through their unjust education, immigration, and job-killing policies.

Republicans must seek to drain the swamp by limiting the clout of lobbyists and interest groups. They must also be nationalists, and as American nationalism is defined by the liberal nationalism of our founders, the party must reject the illiberalism of extremists on the Left and Right. As progressives, Republicans must also recognize nationalism’s leftward gravitational force and the way in which it demands that the party serve the common good through policies that protect the less fortunate among our countrymen.

At a time when the Left asks us to scorn our country, Republicans must also be the conservative party that defends our families, the nobility of American ideals, and the founders’ republican virtues.

By championing these policies, the Republicans will retain the new voters Trump brought to the GOP as well as those who left the party because of him. And as progressive conservatives, the GOP will become America’s natural governing party.

At least since Oedipus met King Laius on the road from Delphi to Thebes, the image of a crossroads has signaled a dramatic and morally fraught turning point. It was with this cargo of significance in mind that The New Criterion published a special series of essays on “Western Civilization at the Crossroads” during its fortieth-anniversary season. Featuring contributions by Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Andrew Roberts, and other luminaries, this book collects the ten special essays to assess where Western civilization is now, and where it’s going.

Aryeh Lightstone, former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Special Envoy for the Abraham Accords, is uniquely poised to unravel the past, present, and, most importantly, the future of U.S. foreign policy with the Middle East.

"A powerful affirmation of humanity’s capacity to achieve the extraordinary." —Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President, 2017-2021

"Aryeh demonstrates that faithful adherence to one’s core beliefs—in both his faith and his nation—are not only possible but necessary. Read and enjoy." —Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State, 2018-2021

The Trump Administration's "Peace to Prosperity" vision for the Middle East was unveiled on January 28, 2020. What followed over the next eleven months, concluding with the signing of the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement was one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of U.S. foreign policy in a generation, leading to five normalization agreements between Israel and Muslim states. The Abraham Accords achieved what had seemed impossible for decades and set the Middle East on a trajectory toward a broad regional peace.

Aryeh Lightstone is uniquely positioned to tell the story. As the senior advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, he was in the room for nearly every major discussion and decision involving Middle East policy. He was tasked with the most complex and sensitive component of the Abraham Accords: turning them into practical action and doing it quickly—during a pandemic, no less. In addition, he led the Abraham Accords Business Summit and the Abraham Fund, and served as the key contact between Israel and the other Accords nations.

Let My People Know provides a behind-the-scenes account of the strategies that allowed the Abraham Accords to be struck, and an unvarnished look at the region's idiosyncrasies that factored into the process. A rabbi and an enthralling storyteller, Lightstone paints a vivid picture of the varied cultures and personalities involved. He also offers a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of an embassy.

Finally, he explains what the Biden administration must do better to advance America's interests abroad. We now have a paradigm for a forward-looking Middle East policy that ultimately benefits the United States. Lightstone makes the case for strategic action to maintain the momentum.

W.H. Auden famously wrote: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Journalism is a different matter. In a brilliant study that is, in part, a memoir of his 40 years as an essayist and critic at TIME magazine, Lance Morrow returns to the Age of Typewriters and to the 20th century’s extraordinary cast of characters—statesmen and dictators, saints and heroes, liars and monsters, and the reporters, editors, and publishers who interpreted their deeds. He shows how journalism has touched the history of the last 100 years, has shaped it, distorted it, and often proved decisive in its outcomes.

Lord Beaverbrook called journalism “the black art.” Morrow considers the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’  Moscow correspondent who published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series praising Stalin just at the moment when Stalin imposed mass starvation upon the people of Ukraine and the North Caucasus in order to enforce the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Millions died.

John Hersey’s Hiroshima, on the other hand, has been all but sanctified—called the 20th century’s greatest piece of journalism. Was it? Morrow examines the complex moral politics of Hersey’s reporting, which the New Yorker first published in 1946.

The Noise of Typewriters is, among other things, an intensely personal study of an age that has all but vanished. Morrow is the son of two journalists who got their start covering Roosevelt and Truman. When Morrow and Carl Bernstein were young, they worked together as dictation typists at the Washington Star (a newspaper now extinct). Bernstein had dedicated Chasing History, his memoir of those days, to Morrow. It was Morrow’s friend and editor Walter Isaacson—biographer of Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs—who taught Morrow how to use a computer when the machines were first introduced at TIME.

Here are striking profiles of Henry Luce, TIME’s founder, and of Dorothy Thompson, Claud Cockburn, Edgar Snow, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Otto Friedrich, Michael Herr, and other notable figures in a golden age of print journalism that ended with the coming of television, computers, and social media. The Noise of Typewriters is the vivid portrait of an era.

Frank Meyer devised the blueprint for American conservatism—fusionism—championed by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and so many to this day. Yet long before and far away, Communists in London chanted “Free Frank Meyer!” to block the deportation of a comrade who was their cause célèbre. Those fervent Marxists could never have predicted that their hero would one day provide the intellectual energy necessary to propel conservatives to political power.

The Man Who Invented Conservatism unveils one of the twentieth century’s great untold stories: a Communist turned conservative, an antiwar activist turned soldier, and a free-love enthusiast turned family man whose big idea captured the American Right. This intellectual migration coincided with a clandestine affair inside 10 Downing Street, service as a lieutenant to the man who later constructed the Berlin Wall, and neighborly chats with the pop-star and poet celebrity next door. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer helped launch Joan Didion’s writing career. From H. G. Wells to Henry Kissinger to Milton Friedman, he rubbed shoulders with everyone who mattered.

Having discovered Meyer’s previously unexamined correspondence in an old soda warehouse, Daniel J. Flynn documents this saga in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, exposing the rivalries, jealousies, friendships, and fights that shaped the movement and what it means to be a conservative today.

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.

Dennis Unkovic asserts that China is, contrary to popular belief, not poised to take over from the United States as the world's pre-eminent superpower.

Chinese President Xi Jinping believes his country is destined to displace the United States as the world’s top military and economic power. Every policy that Xi has put forth since assuming power in 2013 has been carefully crafted with this end goal in mind. 

 Nearly four decades of meteoric economic growth have convinced many in the West that modern China is indeed an invincible regime, and that Xi’s grand plan will come to fruition. Closer examination reveals that China is not invulnerable, but in fact is far more fragile than it outwardly appears.

 In this book, Dennis Unkovic coins the term MaxTrends® to identify critical factors and developments that have the potential to derail Xi’s aggressive ambitions for China. These MaxTrends® include alarming demographic shifts, cracks in the global supply chain, an accelerating global arms race, and the Taiwan conundrum, all of which indicate that China’s strength may be more illusion than reality. Unkovic warns that the world’s democracies must take increasingly aggressive steps to exploit China’s vulnerabilities if they hope to blunt Xi’s ambitions. 

 Right now China and the United States find themselves competing in a tight race to the top. In today’s unprecedented arena of economic, military, and political challenges, the nation that acts more quickly and prudently will win.

In Sparta’s Third Attic War, Paul Rahe examines the armed conflict that followed, attending to the impact on its outcome of the internal struggles that took place at Athens, at Sparta, and at the court of the Great King; describing the maneuvers of the wily, flexible, seductive Athenian turncoat Alcibiades, who dominated in turn the counsels of the Spartans, the Persians, and his fellow Athenians; and charting the eventual emergence at Lacedaemon of a commanding figure of helot ancestry named Lysander, who formed a close relationship with the younger son of the Great King and, in battle, outwitted the Athenians at every turn. This is a story of grit, determination, and brilliance on both sides. It examines the ambivalence of the Spartans, it relates the folly that brought the Athenians down, and it traces their ultimate defeat to defects in the policy and vision of Pericles.

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. 

"To the superficial observer there would seem never to have been an age less propitious for the birth of a new nation. The tendency of the times was altogether for the aggrandizement of big states and the consolidation of their territory at the expense of the little ones, for the extinction of the weaker nations and governments rather than for the creation of new ones. Nevertheless it was this bitter cut-throat international rivalry which was to make American independence possible."

On April 15th, 1783, the Articles of Peace between the United States and Great Britain went into effect proclaiming that “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States…to be free Sovereign and independent States.” That recognition, the origins of which began almost seven years earlier in Philadelphia, the fate of which was uncertain at Valley Forge and ultimately vindicated at Yorktown, represented a monumental achievement for the new American nation. It also, as Samuel Flagg Bemis shows us, marked the end of a world war. 

This book explains the ambitions and interests of European powers during the American Revolution. France’s search for revenge against Britain after the French and Indian War, Spain’s attempt to retake Gibraltar, the complicated trade interests of the Netherlands and Russia, Austria’s fears of a two-front war – each of these saw America’s struggle for independence as an event that affected their own strategies. And, as Bemis shows us, it is through that prism that we should consider the actions of those who supported America and Great Britain. 

Black Americans have arguably arrived at the height of their cultural prominence. In politics, entertainment, academia, and nearly every sphere of influence, “black issues” dominate the national discussion. Yet many black Americans are suffering more than ever from the blight of poverty, physical and mental health struggles, lack of opportunity, and failing schools. How do these signs of success on the surface coexist with social stagnation on the ground in the black community?

This edited volume, sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and featuring contributions from W.B. Allen, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (ret.), Ian Rowe, Sally Pipes, Stephen Moore, and others, addresses this question in light of American values and the history of constitutional jurisprudence. In the 1860s, black America was promised emancipation but continued to experience subjugation. In the 1960s, black America was promised equality but was frequently exploited. Racial discrimination played a role, but in the intervening decades misguided progressive policies and the normalization of victimhood rhetoric has proven even more disastrous. By failing to live up to American ideals, our nation denied many black Americans their chance at the American Dream.

The scholars and luminaries who contributed to this volume believe that what has been lost can be recovered. If our nation recognizes the history of our current predicament, embraces the founding principles that made America an economic powerhouse, and commits to an agenda of empowering fiscal, educational, and faith and family-affirming policies, then black Americans can overcome the obstacles that most hamper progress in their communities.

Americans across the political spectrum have turned away from free market capitalism, calling for more government intervention into the economy. This optimistic book explains how a dynamic, Commercial Republic that benefits all Americans is still possible.

"Will someone intent on changing the direction of America’s economy seize on this text and send it far and wide?”
—Hugh Hewitt, author, attorney, and national host of The Hugh Hewitt Show

“Markets grounded in a commercial republic are what America needs. Gregg shows why.” 
—Vernon L. Smith, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor of Business Economics and Law at Chapman University

One of America’s greatest success stories is its economy. For over a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American.

Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Many have lost confidence in the country’s commitment to economic liberty. Across the political spectrum, many want the government to play an even greater role in the economy via protectionism, industrial policy, stakeholder capitalism, or even quasi-socialist policies. Numerous American political and business leaders are embracing these ideas, and traditional defenders of markets have struggled to respond to these challenges in fresh ways. Then there is a resurgent China bent on eclipsing the United States’s place in the world. At stake is not only the future of the world’s biggest economy, but the economic liberty that remains central to America’s identity as a nation.

But managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices, let alone its destiny. For this book insists that there is an alternative. And that is a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness, but embedded in what America’s founding generation envisaged as the United States’s future: a dynamic Commercial Republic that takes freedom, commerce, and the common good of all Americans seriously, and allows America as a sovereign-nation to pursue and defend its interests in a dangerous world without compromising its belief in the power of economic freedom.

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. 

This book combines a critique of more than a century of housing reform policies, including public and other subsidized housing as well as exclusionary zoning, with the idea that simple low-cost housing—a poor side of town—helps those of modest means build financial assets and join in the local democratic process. It is more of a historical narrative than a straight policy book, however—telling stories of Jacob Riis, zoning reformer Lawrence Veiller, anti-reformer Jane Jacobs, housing developer William Levitt, and African American small homes advocate Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, as well as first-person accounts of onetime residents of neighborhoods such as Detroit’s Black Bottom who lost their homes and businesses to housing reform and urban renewal. This is a book with important policy implications—built on powerful, personal stories.

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.

The George Floyd riots that have precipitated great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded but that all the structures, institutions, and systems of the United States—all supposedly racist—be overhauled.

The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 633 related riots that followed Floyd’s death took organizational muscle. The movement’s grip on institutions from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by the various Black Lives Matter organizations.

This book examines who the BLM leaders are, delving into their backgrounds and exposing their agendas—something the media has so far refused to do. These people are shown to be avowed Marxists who say they want to dismantle our way of life. Along with their fellow activists, they make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize marches, sit-ins, statue tumblings, and riots. In 2020 they seized upon the video showing George Floyd’s suffering as a pretext to unleash a nationwide insurgency.

Certainly, no person of good will could object to the proposition that “black lives matter” as much as any other human life. But Americans need to understand how their laudable moral concern is being exploited for purposes that a great many of them would not approve.

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.

"Paul Tice delivers a body-blow to the predations of the ESG-industrial-complex."

—Mark P. Mills, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Over the past few years, so-called “sustainable investing”—a new practice based on the theory that environmental, social, and governance (or “ESG”) factors should drive corporate policy and investment decisions—has swept across Wall Street. Spurred on by the United Nations, national governments, and financial regulators, and cheered on by academics, environmental activists, and the media, the ESG orthodoxy has received little public resistance as it has integrated itself into almost every corner of the financial sector. By 2030, the iron curtain of sustainability will have fully cast its shadow across Wall Street.

The Race to Zero provides a detailed rebuttal to the case for sustainable investing from the perspective of a long-time Wall Street analyst, investor, and latter-day finance professor. Sustainable investing does not aim to generate excess returns for investors or to further ethical goals such as improving society or saving the planet; rather, it seeks to seize control of the world’s financial system in order to ensure that the allocation of capital and investments across markets is politically favorable to establishment interests.

By limiting financial market access, ESG is designed to create a compliant corporate sector to serve as both Greek chorus and funding source for the environmental and social causes championed by government and the elite class. Climate change is its driving force and priority goal, and its main targets are fossil fuel companies operating in the industrialized Western world. This book is designed to expose these truths in plain-spoken language—free of financial jargon—to reach the widest possible audience, including the silent majority on Wall Street that is now afraid to speak up about ESG.