Records of Our National Life: American History at the National Archives

Published by The National Archives

In honor of its 75th anniversary in 2009, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), with the Foundation for the National Archives, has produced this handsome coffee table-sized volume, published in the UK, displaying selected materials from its collection to showcase U.S. history up to the present. The book also includes essays by Michael Beschloss, Tom Brokaw, Ken Burns, Cokie Roberts, and David McCullough, among others. Archivists at NARA can preserve only one to three percent of any year's government records; it's staggering to think how such choices continue to be made. Here, selected items are displayed with descriptions in chronological order within themes: territorial expansion and exploration, immigration and migration, political life, rights of women and minorities, and the growth of industry and technology. The notable documents are here, such as the Constitution of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) agreement, but there are plenty of less predictable gems, like the contents of Eleanor Roosevelt's wallet at the time of her death in 1962, the first 1040 tax form from 1913, and an 1877 picture of Little Bighorn with the bones of the horses still on the ground where Custer took cover.

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American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People

By T. H. Breen

A noted historian tells the overlooked "people's story" of the American Revolution.Casting a new light on the origins of the struggle for independence, Breen (American History/Northwestern Univ.; The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, 2004, etc.) mines letters, sermons and diaries to create a lively, nuanced account of ordinary farmers' growing resistance to the British government in the two years before the Declaration of Independence. Angry at oppressive parliamentary acts that abrogated their God-given rights, tens of thousands of rebellious insurgents laid the groundwork for a successful revolution. Their anger was every bit as important to the revolutionary story as the learned debates of the Founding Fathers. Breen describes the unfolding of the popular revolt in the countryside, from spontaneous individual crackdowns on loyalist supporters to the well-organized boycotts and other actions of local committees of safety that became "schools for revolution." Enraged by Britain's closing of Boston harbor in the wake of the Tea Party, more and more people from throughout the colonies joined "the American cause," forming vigilante groups, driving Crown officials from their homes and sending food and cash to Boston's unemployed laborers. Colonists elsewhere identified with Bostonian victims of British oppression. One Connecticut town said, "We know you suffer and feel for you," and sent a flock of sheep; another held a public burning of the Boston Port Act, calling the Crown's advisers "Pimps and Parasites." In Maine, tavern owner Samuel Thompson's vigilantes enforced a boycott of British imported goods, beat suspected loyalists and launched a guerrilla attack against the British navy. Through such acts, ordinary people from Georgia to New Hampshire joined the resistance and began creating a colonies-wide political network that proved vital in the conflict to come. "For absent these patriots in the wings," writes Breen, "there would quite possibly be no revolutionary history to celebrate."An important new view of a revolution in the making.

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Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis

By Rosalynn Carter with Susan K. Golant & Kathryn E. Cade

In Within Our Reach, former first lady Rosalynn Carter and coauthor Susan Golant render an insightful, unsparing assessment of the state of mental health. Mrs. Carter has been deeply invested in this issue since her husband’s gubernatorial campaign when she saw firsthand the horrific, dehumanizing treatment of people with mental illnesses. Using stories from her 35 years of advocacy to springboard into a discussion of the larger issues at hand, Carter crafts an intimate and powerful account of a subject previously shrouded in stigma and shadow, surveying the dimensions of an issue that has affected us all in one way or another. She describes a system that continues to fail those in need, even though recent scientific breakthroughs in the origins of and treatments for mental illnesses have potential to help most people lead more normal lives. Within Our Reach is a seminal, searing, and ultimately optimistic look at how far we’ve come since Carter’s days on the campaign trail and how far we have yet to go. Check Catalog

Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage

By Dino A. Brugioni

Drawing on his years as a CIA expert on aerial reconnaissance, Brugioni tells the story of Cold War intelligence gathering by airplane and satellite. His firsthand knowledge of dozens of once-classified programs will be invaluable to students of the field who have a high tolerance for a dense, detailed narrative. A valuable source, not only on well-known programs (e.g., U-2 flights) but many lesser-known ones that changed the course of the Cold War.

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After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy

By Murray Milgate & Shannon C. Stimson

This is an important, sound analysis of the interrelation between political and economic theory in the century after Adam Smith. It examines Smith, changes made to Smith's conclusions, the political-economic conclusions and implications of classical political economy (e.g., David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill), major dissidents (e.g., Robert Owen, Thomas Hodgskin, Karl Marx), and, briefly, marginalist/neoclassical theory (e.g., William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras). Throughout, Milgate (Queens College, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) and Stimson (Univ. of California, Berkeley) analyze theoretical continuities and discontinuities that remain important, including development of the politically charged "invisible hand." This book exemplifies the best contemporary work on the nexus of political and economic theory. This reviewer has only two caveats on this otherwise excellent book. First, the interpretation of Mill's On Liberty is unusual. Second, examination of the political in political economy could be deepened. Chapters 9 and 11 are especially thorough in analyzing the interrelation of economic and political theory, but still more explication and analysis of the moral, philosophical, and political assumptions and claims in economic theories, including human motivation, normal relations, the nature of order, and rival meanings of both economics and politics is desirable.

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The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000

By Thomas A. Stapleford

Stapleford (Univ. of Norte Dame) treats a particularly timely topic, given that "data driven" decision making has become best practice in many fields. In a reworking of his 2003 Harvard University PhD thesis, he has produced a work accessible to a broad readership that offers a "focused lens," trained on "state-created, quantitative knowledge about the cost-of-living" (CPI), a statistic that has occupied a key role in US policy making in the US since its creation after WW I. The book is organized in three parts. The first deals with the establishment of statistics for labor-management purposes in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It is followed by a section on the politics of statistics in the New Deal era and a third section on the transformation of data gathering in the age of the "welfare" state. The epilogue, "Governance and Economic Statistics," sums up the volume. This book is a worthwhile text for all students of politics and economics at any level. Given the dizzying array of statistics that are published and referenced every day, questions about their validity warrant due consideration. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of undergraduate and graduate students; researchers and professionals.

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The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880-2000

By Thomas A. Stapleford

Stapleford (Univ. of Norte Dame) treats a particularly timely topic, given that "data driven" decision making has become best practice in many fields. In a reworking of his 2003 Harvard University PhD thesis, he has produced a work accessible to a broad readership that offers a "focused lens," trained on "state-created, quantitative knowledge about the cost-of-living" (CPI), a statistic that has occupied a key role in US policy making in the US since its creation after WW I. The book is organized in three parts. The first deals with the establishment of statistics for labor-management purposes in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It is followed by a section on the politics of statistics in the New Deal era and a third section on the transformation of data gathering in the age of the "welfare" state. The epilogue, "Governance and Economic Statistics," sums up the volume. This book is a worthwhile text for all students of politics and economics at any level. Given the dizzying array of statistics that are published and referenced every day, questions about their validity warrant due consideration. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of undergraduate and graduate students; researchers and professionals.

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Hopes and Prospects

By  Noam Chomsky

This selection of Chomsky's essays and lectures comes divided into geographical areas, but the issues are global in scope and import. In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of American empire and class domination, at home and abroad, Chomsky continues a longstanding and crucial work of elucidation and activism. His latest updates elaborate upon his signature themes: the double standards applied by the centers of U.S. power, including the mainstream media and intellectual culture, and the pervasive disconnect between American policies and public opinion in what Chomsky dubs a "dysfunctional democracy." But this book flags another major interest of Chomsky's, signaled in the title: global avenues of resistance, in particular the democratic and independent course being forged across Latin America (where several of these lectures were originally delivered). There are significant redundancies and polemical flourishes, but the writing remains unswervingly rational and principled throughout, and lends bracing impetus to the real alternatives before us.
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Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate

By Gregory Koger

In the modern Congress, one of the highest hurdles for major bills or nominations is gaining the sixty votes necessary to shut off a filibuster in the Senate.  But this wasn’t always the case. Both citizens and scholars tend to think of the legislative process as a game played by the rules in which votes are the critical commodity—the side that has the most votes wins. In this comprehensive volume, Gregory Koger shows, on the contrary, that filibustering is a game with slippery rules in which legislators who think fast and try hard can triumph over superior numbers.

Filibustering explains how and why obstruction has been institutionalized in the U.S. Senate over the last fifty years, and how this transformation affects politics and policymaking. Koger also traces the lively history of filibustering in the U.S. House during the nineteenth century and measures the effects of filibustering—bills killed, compromises struck, and new issues raised by obstruction. Unparalleled in the depth of its theory and its combination of historical and political analysis, Filibustering will be the definitive study of its subject for years to come.

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The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

By William Rosen

The Industrial Revolution inspires more academic theories than absorbing narratives. Rosen, however, crafts one from subplots that connect with primitive industrialism's premier symbol: the steam engine. Ardent about historical technology, Rosen modulates his mechanical zeal with contexts underscoring that Thomas Newcomen and James Watt did not operate in a social vacuum. Fixing on patents as one prerequisite to their inventions, Rosen describes intellectual property's English legal and philosophical origins as he segues to Newcomen's and Watt's backgrounds. A degree of social mobility in eighteenth-century Britain enabled their rise, but it was the specific economic situations in mining and textiles to which they responded that ensured it. These business matters provide Rosen with storytelling opportunities that feature capital investors, scientists studying heat, and over time, innovators who improved the steam engine from a stationary to a mobile power source: Rocket, the famous railroad engine built in 1829. Readers who like enthused authors will like Rosen, and fans of his Roman history Justinian's Flea (2007) augment their number.


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At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union

By Robert V. Remini

he author of such definitive histories as Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (1991) here turns in a case study of the Compromise of 1850. It was not the first deflection of civil war by Clay, who engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the resolution to the nullification crisis of 1832. But it may have been the Kentucky senator's most consequential compromise if, as Remini argues, it postponed for a decade a war the North could not have won in 1850. Describing Clay's view of compromise as victory for both parties and detailing the deadlock over slavery's status in the territories, which needed to be broken to quash secession, Remini recounts the strategy Clay devised to placate the South's grievances. Inaugurated with Clay's speech, soaring oratory by Daniel Webster, and a bitter rebuttal from the dying John Calhoun, the debate over Clay's compromise boiled until the death of President Taylor and the tactical talents of Stephen Douglas cooled down sectional acrimony and produced Clay's compromise. Condensed with well-dramatized brevity, Remini's account will captivate the American-history audience.

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