Politics & Democracy

Conspiracy theories are usually treated as bad thinking that more facts can cure. This thread argues they express something real: a feeling of lost agency and a future that seems foreclosed. Their spread says as much about the poverty of our political culture as about the people who believe them.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

The book opens with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, because it so dramatically illustrates the consequences of constitutional fundamentalism. In Charlottesville, we saw the collision of...

Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia...

My goal was to write a detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history that is much speculated about, but has never before been fully documented. Between 1958 and 1962, Mao...

Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...

This is a book about one American’s lifelong mission to explain the real Japan to the rest of the world. Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Japan in 1910 to Presbyterian...

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...

If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...

A “just browsing” feminist could turn to the chapter on female sovereigns to find out about how some countries, at some times, were ruled by women. I counted 27 examples....

To me the heart of the book is my argument (in chapter two) about the two major Egyptian movements that centered on Tahrir Square: The January 25 movement or revolution,...

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

I wrote this book for the reader—I wanted the reader to be able to participate in a good story, and for Albert Gallatin to come alive in the pages. But I...

Oddly, this book began with the history of New York City. In writing about the building of the United Nations headquarters site for my book on postwar urbanism in New...

What is your new book all about? It’s about the biggest political event of the second half of the twentieth century—the end of the Cold War. Linked to that was the...

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

Each chapter of Age of Fracture brings its readers into a different facet of the age’s great debates.The opening chapter shows how the social vocabulary of the Cold War slipped...

The Madhouse Effect is, by design, a book that readers can just pick up, skim through, and find a page that both engages and informs. If a reader were to...

Although the Enlightenment, at the dawn of Modernity, raised the beacon of Reason and thus raised humanity’s hopes for a right answer to complex issues, doubts about that promise emerged...

At the heart of the book are the data. A look at chapter 3 would be a good way to get a feel for my approach. The material in this...

Parallel Public examines experimental art from the final years of East Germany in relation to state power. In the book, I argue that these artists did not practice their art...

It is difficult to crack open this book to a particular page and get a strong sense of the whole. Individual chapters highlight the activism of varying groups of women...

In the course of presenting this narrative interpretation of the rise and demise of world communism, I address some of the key questions that animate debate among both advocates and...

One of the highlights of the book, I think, comes in the chapter on Jefferson and slavery. The Missouri crisis of 1819-21, which revolved around whether Missouri would be admitted...

Some readers will probably turn to the images first—and that is a good place to start. There are two inserts that tell the story in pictures. We see Kennedy on...

When I first endeavored to write this book, I was thinking about what I would tell an elected official who asked what they needed to know about disasters. Or if...

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

Protest Politics in Germany is about the interactions between protest groups, their allies, and their opponents. The settings are conflicts that have dominated German politics in the last quarter of...

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

Readers who seek a taste of Genomic Politics might want to read chapter 1 (which presents the controversies around each case and the typology for understanding the controversies) and chapter...

This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations...

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Over the past few years, I realized that I was taking some very important things for granted, and that was probably a mistake. Speak Freely is part of an effort to address that oversight and to speak out on some issues that need to be discussed. Most basically, I have been disturbed by how colleges

This is the first book to tell the fascinating story of American isolationism across the full arc of U.S. history. The United States that we know today has dominated global...

So much of the public discussion about China today concerns the question of where the nation is headed. What are China’s intentions in the world? Part of this debate draws...

An accomplished artist, Brooke VanDevelder, worked with me to create customized illustrations that serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s three sections. If a potential reader is just browsing,...

Chapter 1 of Life After Privacy is an ideal first look for the average reader. This chapter examines our curious, conflicted relationship to privacy. We may say that privacy is...

Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

I hope readers would start with the first few pages of the book. In the introduction, I recount the story of how the American Legion advocated for passage of the...

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

A Future in Ruins tells the story of UNESCO and its efforts to save the cultural wonders of the world, largely through its famous World Heritage program. I wanted to...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

My Rutgers-Newark colleague Frank Fischer sent me a couple of articles from the New York Times issue of November 14, 2011. They are about the bitterness of the current generation...

The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in...

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

I would urge the reader to look at the Reagan chapter first. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest the Reagan era was a low point for NAM. During the 1980s,...

By studying the history of the European Union, the book argues that the current crises are not as unique as we might think. Even Brexit is not as singular and...

Democracy’s Muse examines why it is that Thomas Jefferson has come to represent American ideals for all modern generations, why the most emotive figure of the founding era appeals to...

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Essentially this book was written in an attempt to explain to the interested lay reader why a curious phenomenon still called 'the Cuban Revolution' had managed to survive for so...

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

As I finished my last book, National Manhood, a historical look at how notions of middle-class manhood and citizenship developed in the early United States, two movies about fictional presidents...

We treat some outcomes as inevitable—of course the log-cabin boy became president at the nation's hour of crisis. But what if we took the sheer contingency of the past seriously? A case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance, and the sense that things could have gone very differently.

Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...

The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their...

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

This book examines how many policy research organizations, like think tanks, have transformed from non-partisan information producers into partisan allies pursuing ideological policy goals. Most policymaking today is structured by...

Different Backgrounds, Joint TakeAs co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks of climate change to the public. I am an...

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why...

I have tried to make this investigation extremely wide. The rarity of documented female rulers in large, well-organized states makes it necessary to find them wherever one can, and as...

Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...

As a novelist and historian, I craft stories in intimate ways that allow readers to feel events of the past: from the experience of the enslaved woman who hid in...

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

Much in our interior mental lives and in our exterior social structures presupposes that we, human beings, are conscious of social hierarchy, of differences in rank and status. This book,...

States of War examines an age-old conflict within constitutional legal states—to what extent can political authorities violate the law in times of crisis, emergency, or war? This question has haunted modern...

In more than thirty years of teaching politics, I have observed that students’ natural healthy cynicism is constantly criticized by the press and by their teachers. I want to assure...

What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

In her letter, with the audacity of a child, she tells him “You are unattractive. Your face, it's too thin, it's too narrow, you...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...

In order for countries to reconcile after terrible wars, must they apologize, pay reparations, and otherwise “come to terms with the past”?A powerful conventional wisdom, based on the postwar experiences...

In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries. Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...

Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...

I’ve been interested in education, and attending school board meetings, for more than half of my life. I began in high school when, as editor of my high school newspaper,...

This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

Our understanding of world politics in the “modern” world (i.e. the past couple of centuries) has been dominated by the “inside/outside distinction.” On the one hand, “domestic” politics, the inside, involves...

The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...

The book is about secession in America. There is a growing interest in secession, or what some refer to as a national divorce between Red and Blue America. There is...

In this book, I examine the awkward position that scientists find themselves in when they enter environmental policy debates. In such debates experts try to square their appeal as objective,...

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

The book criticizes an attitude I call “global legalism,” the faith or hope that international law can solve the word’s problems even though the world is a largely anarchical place,...

When American historical writing entered its Humpty Dumpty phase, sometime around 1970, political and social history flew off in separate directions. In No Right Turn I bring them back together....

Political Vocabularies is about how Americans can agree on general political principles such as freedom and equality and at the same time disagree so vehemently about how to put those...

First, it offers new historical perspectives on the 1970s, treating the bicentennial as one of the decade’s most significant events and arguing that the decade has been misrepresented as a mere interlude between the liberal 1960s and the conservative 1980s. Instead we see the bicentennial as a critical moment in a ...

This book examines the history of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood—the world’s most important Islamist movement—and the Western powers that have dominated the Middle East over the last century—the...

My intellectual trajectory in coming to this book stems from my longstanding interest in France. I’m an American who has studied France and its history for the past 30 years. I...

America’s poorest citizens are among its most patriotic. Their love of country – and indeed, their sense that the United States is superior to other countries in the world –...

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission...

Scholars of the presidency argue about whether what the president says matters. We wonder if anyone is listening; if they are, whether the president has the ability to persuade them;...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney explores the extraordinary depth of Cheney’s influence in the Bush administration – and how Cheney built that influence. Cheney’s role was so pervasive in policy...

Corruption has existed since the earliest civilizations but documenting and writing its history has not been easy. In the case of Peru, tackling through detailed research the challenges to writing...

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected...

Despite what TV dramas may suggest, the American trial has become an endangered species. In 2002, less than 2 percent of civil cases ended at trial, down from 12 percent...

The genesis of Voices in Stone lay in the realisation that this debate on the destruction of monuments is an unsatisfactory starting point to understand them. It recalls G. K. Chesterton's caution that before deciding to remove a fence, it would be well to ensure that you understand why it was put up in the first place.

The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis. This crisis, I argue, is rooted...

Juan Francisco Elso’s “Por América” is one of the many remarkable works that I write about. An effigy of José Martí, it is an exquisitely painful portrait, depicting the Cuban...

My book set out to answer one general and seemingly simple question: How did international relations function in East Asia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, before the arrival...

Constitutional Cliffhangers is about six situations in which the Constitution’s provisions for selecting, replacing, and punishing presidents are seriously vulnerable. Each chapter starts out with a fictional scenario that dramatizes one...

Security is often thought of as a topic for international relations or law and limited to topics such as policing, militarism or terrorism. Over the last decade, there has been...

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...

While I focus on individuals, The Victims Return has a wide angle or broad context. The book begins with a short overview of Stalin’s mass terror, from 1929 to 1953, and...

I want a reader to enter a truly bizarre world: America in 1979. It was a period of disco and disco demolition, cocaine and divorce, an Iranian revolution and oil...

The Justice Cascadeprovides an overview and an evaluation of one of the most important changes in global politics: the rise of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations. In it,...

Historically speaking, theorizing the nature of the political state from a feminist point of view is in its earliest stages. So my book offers a novel feminist account of the...

This is first a book about ideas and how they can have consequences in politics, if they are linked to powerful, well-financed movements. I excavate the ideas on race of the...

No matter where Americans live, their risk of being murdered is higher than it is in any other first-world democracy. From 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate in the United States...

This book is about how American politics affects the multilateral development banks—or “the banks,” for short. The best known of these is the World Bank, but several regional banks that...

We are constantly thinking about what it is that the state ought to do—what sorts of policies it should pursue. But policy implementation gives rise to another, equally important question: the question of how the state ought to interact with citizens when pursuing such policies.

A browser, who simply starts at the beginning and reads through the initial discussion of American exceptionalism, will see how our most familiar political practices and beliefs include a distinctive...

Privacy—I probably need convince no one—looms large in the United States today, sparked by concerns about NSA spying as well as social media profiling, facial recognition software as well as...

Most people who think about it, no doubt, consider the US Supreme Court to be the protector of minority and constitutional rights against majority oppression. But is that right? In The Will...

I have spent my entire adult life studying and writing about the United States in world affairs. Much of my work, especially the essays, but also many of the books,...

Illiberal Politics is a serious book on a serious topic. But it is also a lively book to read. The French story, which occupies the 140-page middle section of the book,...

The Conservative Turn began, alas, as a dissertation, which is one reason why it’s based on archival research. I had entered graduate school with an interest in the Russian Revolution...

This book is about Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, which is a quintessential 1975 film, but also relevant for the present moment of political cynicism, polarization, and violence. While the...

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations....

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century was conceived in 1987 when, upon moving from Berkeley to Harvard, I was invited to offer a course in Harvard’s undergraduate core curriculum. I...

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in...

These forces built the very foundations of the CIA’s operations. The first plot, Operation PBFORTUNE, was started by the dictators and backed by United Fruit..

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences. Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it...

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident...

Civil Passions is about how we deliberate about justice, and specifically about the role the passions play in this process. The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of...

During the recent Olympic Games a common cliché was to talk about China’s “coming out party,” meaning that China was finally opening out to the world. The key point of...

Distaste of parties and partisanship is palpable and widespread. While party activists battle one another each claiming they are on side of the angels, critics demonize them all and praise...

I begin with the fact that, along with the United States, no country was more important in the twentieth century than was the Soviet Union. And it may also be...

Composing the Citizen explores how and why music is deeply valuable to society, how music helps people fulfill their human potential as individuals and members of communities. The Third Republic in...

Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree...

The Russian Revolution seemed to promise human liberation and equality. But instead it produced a Stalinist dictatorship, with extreme interventionism and unprecedented state violence. Why did a government purportedly dedicated...

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope. While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within...

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush...

“Conservative” means different things in different times and places. This book describes and explains the different types of conservatism in American history, from the Constitution to the end of the...

Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...

This is not just a political story, because that only tells part of what is fascinating about France in this period. What are the images we have of France in...

It’s often said that biographies reveal as much about their biographers as their subject. I plead guilty, for I was born in Lincoln (Nebraska) and fell in love with the...

Philip II of Macedonia did not conquer on the scale Alexander did. And so Philip is not the household name that Alexander is. But Philip changed the course of Greek...

I’m challenging a way of thinking about politics common in fields like sociology and political science—the one in which people have interests based on their jobs, their levels of education,...

Thomas Jefferson spent seventeen days in a second-story loft at the Graff House in Philadelphia working on the draft. He gets all the credit, but a good chunk of the Declaration was removed or added largely by Ben Franklin...

Conspiracy theories are usually treated as bad thinking that more facts can cure. This thread argues they express something real: a feeling of lost agency and a future that seems foreclosed. Their spread says as much about the poverty of our political culture as about the people who believe them.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

Some book titles are mysterious or allegorical, providing no obvious clue of what the darn things are about. No danger of that here. I’ve written a book about the long...

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

The book opens with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, because it so dramatically illustrates the consequences of constitutional fundamentalism. In Charlottesville, we saw the collision of...

Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia...

My goal was to write a detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history that is much speculated about, but has never before been fully documented. Between 1958 and 1962, Mao...

Inventing the Enemy is about the period known as the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. At the height of the terror in 1937–38, the Soviet secret police under the...

This is a book about one American’s lifelong mission to explain the real Japan to the rest of the world. Edwin O. Reischauer, born in Japan in 1910 to Presbyterian...

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...

If the casual reader or bookshop-browser were to follow my grandfather’s advice, they would start at the end to see whether my book was worth reading. In this case, they...

A “just browsing” feminist could turn to the chapter on female sovereigns to find out about how some countries, at some times, were ruled by women. I counted 27 examples....

To me the heart of the book is my argument (in chapter two) about the two major Egyptian movements that centered on Tahrir Square: The January 25 movement or revolution,...

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

I wrote this book for the reader—I wanted the reader to be able to participate in a good story, and for Albert Gallatin to come alive in the pages. But I...

Oddly, this book began with the history of New York City. In writing about the building of the United Nations headquarters site for my book on postwar urbanism in New...

What is your new book all about? It’s about the biggest political event of the second half of the twentieth century—the end of the Cold War. Linked to that was the...

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500...

Each chapter of Age of Fracture brings its readers into a different facet of the age’s great debates.The opening chapter shows how the social vocabulary of the Cold War slipped...

The Madhouse Effect is, by design, a book that readers can just pick up, skim through, and find a page that both engages and informs. If a reader were to...

Although the Enlightenment, at the dawn of Modernity, raised the beacon of Reason and thus raised humanity’s hopes for a right answer to complex issues, doubts about that promise emerged...

At the heart of the book are the data. A look at chapter 3 would be a good way to get a feel for my approach. The material in this...

Parallel Public examines experimental art from the final years of East Germany in relation to state power. In the book, I argue that these artists did not practice their art...

It is difficult to crack open this book to a particular page and get a strong sense of the whole. Individual chapters highlight the activism of varying groups of women...

In the course of presenting this narrative interpretation of the rise and demise of world communism, I address some of the key questions that animate debate among both advocates and...

One of the highlights of the book, I think, comes in the chapter on Jefferson and slavery. The Missouri crisis of 1819-21, which revolved around whether Missouri would be admitted...

Some readers will probably turn to the images first—and that is a good place to start. There are two inserts that tell the story in pictures. We see Kennedy on...

When I first endeavored to write this book, I was thinking about what I would tell an elected official who asked what they needed to know about disasters. Or if...

Justice Stevens permitted me to include in the book an anecdote that illustrates how differently judges and legislators behave when dealing with politically controversial issues. While I was clerking for...

Protest Politics in Germany is about the interactions between protest groups, their allies, and their opponents. The settings are conflicts that have dominated German politics in the last quarter of...

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

Readers who seek a taste of Genomic Politics might want to read chapter 1 (which presents the controversies around each case and the typology for understanding the controversies) and chapter...

This book is about how surveillance functioned in communist Romania from 1973 to 1988, the period during which I was one of its subjects. The text contains many verbatim quotations...

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

Normalization of the right is the term that I develop to capture the twin phenomena of the electoral surge of the European right and the mainstreaming of nationalist ideas and...

Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews...

Over the past few years, I realized that I was taking some very important things for granted, and that was probably a mistake. Speak Freely is part of an effort to address that oversight and to speak out on some issues that need to be discussed. Most basically, I have been disturbed by how colleges

This is the first book to tell the fascinating story of American isolationism across the full arc of U.S. history. The United States that we know today has dominated global...

So much of the public discussion about China today concerns the question of where the nation is headed. What are China’s intentions in the world? Part of this debate draws...

An accomplished artist, Brooke VanDevelder, worked with me to create customized illustrations that serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s three sections. If a potential reader is just browsing,...

Chapter 1 of Life After Privacy is an ideal first look for the average reader. This chapter examines our curious, conflicted relationship to privacy. We may say that privacy is...

Socialist realism was arguably the 20th century’s most successful artistic phenomenon, especially if measured in terms of quantitative output and geographical reach. Yet socialist realism remains notoriously difficult to define....

This book examines the history of a set of transparency-related reforms that came to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. The term “transparency” was not in general use in politics...

I hope readers would start with the first few pages of the book. In the introduction, I recount the story of how the American Legion advocated for passage of the...

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

A Future in Ruins tells the story of UNESCO and its efforts to save the cultural wonders of the world, largely through its famous World Heritage program. I wanted to...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

My Rutgers-Newark colleague Frank Fischer sent me a couple of articles from the New York Times issue of November 14, 2011. They are about the bitterness of the current generation...

The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in...

What is this book all about? Tyrants on Twitter makes three main points. The first point is that we’ve been experiencing a period globally for about the last 15 years of...

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But...

I would urge the reader to look at the Reagan chapter first. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suggest the Reagan era was a low point for NAM. During the 1980s,...

By studying the history of the European Union, the book argues that the current crises are not as unique as we might think. Even Brexit is not as singular and...

Democracy’s Muse examines why it is that Thomas Jefferson has come to represent American ideals for all modern generations, why the most emotive figure of the founding era appeals to...

The world suddenly paid a lot of attention to Hong Kong during the uprising in 2019 and the subsequent crackdown in 2020 and after. My book offers a long historical...

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Essentially this book was written in an attempt to explain to the interested lay reader why a curious phenomenon still called 'the Cuban Revolution' had managed to survive for so...

Cuba in the American Imagination examines the emergence of the idea of Cuba in the United States from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. The book...

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

As I finished my last book, National Manhood, a historical look at how notions of middle-class manhood and citizenship developed in the early United States, two movies about fictional presidents...

We treat some outcomes as inevitable—of course the log-cabin boy became president at the nation's hour of crisis. But what if we took the sheer contingency of the past seriously? A case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance, and the sense that things could have gone very differently.

Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was an internationally celebrated event, and was also the occasion for numerous proclamations, across the political spectrum, of a dawning unbordered world. Yet,...

The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their...

In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...

This book examines how many policy research organizations, like think tanks, have transformed from non-partisan information producers into partisan allies pursuing ideological policy goals. Most policymaking today is structured by...

Different Backgrounds, Joint TakeAs co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks of climate change to the public. I am an...

One Nation Undecided (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a natural sequel to my last book, Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better (Princeton University Press, 2014). Why...

I have tried to make this investigation extremely wide. The rarity of documented female rulers in large, well-organized states makes it necessary to find them wherever one can, and as...

Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...

As a novelist and historian, I craft stories in intimate ways that allow readers to feel events of the past: from the experience of the enslaved woman who hid in...

Crossing Hitler is a biography of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who devoted his legal practice to fighting Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the late 1920s and 1930s, as...

Much in our interior mental lives and in our exterior social structures presupposes that we, human beings, are conscious of social hierarchy, of differences in rank and status. This book,...

States of War examines an age-old conflict within constitutional legal states—to what extent can political authorities violate the law in times of crisis, emergency, or war? This question has haunted modern...

In more than thirty years of teaching politics, I have observed that students’ natural healthy cynicism is constantly criticized by the press and by their teachers. I want to assure...

What’s unique about the Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant is that we don’t actually have a decent scholarly biography of Enver Hoxha. There is some work—Blendi Fefziu has a book, which is fairly standard, even in its title...

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

In her letter, with the audacity of a child, she tells him “You are unattractive. Your face, it's too thin, it's too narrow, you...

England’s Israel and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought explores how foundational ideas of modern politics that are usually considered secular were, in fact, born out of deep …

All too often scholars understand Islamism as a channel for material discontent, or else in terms of rational choice theory, which holds that most, if not all, forms of human...

In order for countries to reconcile after terrible wars, must they apologize, pay reparations, and otherwise “come to terms with the past”?A powerful conventional wisdom, based on the postwar experiences...

In a sense, Eurolegalism is a book about how the EU attempts to govern and what impact it has on its member countries. Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly...

Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican...

I’ve been interested in education, and attending school board meetings, for more than half of my life. I began in high school when, as editor of my high school newspaper,...

This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for...

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer...

Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by...

Our understanding of world politics in the “modern” world (i.e. the past couple of centuries) has been dominated by the “inside/outside distinction.” On the one hand, “domestic” politics, the inside, involves...

The financial crisis opened the door to massive public interventions in the Western economies. In many nations, governments responded to the threats of illiquidity and insolvency by making huge investments...

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

I would hope readers pay close attention to Chapter 5, An Epidemics of Mob Justice, pp. 167-191, especially the graphic cases, 170–177. Also, I would like readers to pay attention...