In a world of more-better-faster, the challenges and stresses have never been greater: too much to do, not enough time. And in an economy where worker talent (know-how, energy, attention, commitment, and creativity) is at a premium, everyone is trying to maximize personal productivity. In The Simplicity Survival Handbook, Bill Jensen offers the antidote you’re seeking: […]
Americans often think of their nation’s history as a movement toward ever-greater democracy, equality, and freedom. Wars in this story are understood both as necessary to defend those values and as exceptions to the rule of peaceful progress. In The Dominion of War, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton boldly reinterpret the development of the United […]
In a book that Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, called “provocative and insightful…combining revealing details about specific people with thoughtful analysis of the trends that have shaped their lives,” Katherine S. Newman exposes a growing but largely invisible group of Americans: the aging urban underclass. While an increasing portion of the U.S. […]
Left at the Altar is a call for the Democrats to accept a helping hand from Catholics in order to reclaim their rightful place in American politics. While Democrats are tagged with not knowing what they believe, Catholics are distinguished among the voting public for knowing exactly what they believe. It is time that the Donkey […]
Carole Emberton is an award-winning author and Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she specializes in the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is the author of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War published by the University of Chicago Press. The book received […]
Anna Rubino is a scholar and a journalist with an extensive background in covering the international oil industry from New York and Brussels. She has reported for over two decades for international publications and news services such as <em>Business Week</em>, <em>McGraw-Hill World News</em>, <em>Petroleum Intelligence Weekly</em>, and the <em>International Herald Tribune</em>. She is the author of <em>Queen of the Oil Club</em>, published by Beacon Press. <em>The Financial Times</em> called it “an entertaining glimpse into a competitive, secretive world whose too little-known past still profoundly influences our lives.”
David Evans has intertwined careers as an academic, consultant, and entrepreneur. The founder of Market Platform Dynamics, a consulting company that provides strategic advice to platform-based entrepreneurs and investors, he is an economist, business advisor and a recognized global authority on the design and implementation of complex business strategies and business models. David has more […]
Elizabeth Fenn is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studies and writes about the early American West, focusing on epidemic disease, Native American, and environmental history. Her aim is to develop a continent-wide analysis that incorporates Native Americans as well as African, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Russian colonizers into a […]
As dramatic a story as it is, the massacre at on December 29, 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek is hardly even talked about today. It is dismissed as a fairly minor event, significant primarily to those who want the government to address America’s racist history. Known mainly from Dee Brown’s 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded […]
An article on the front page of the May 26, 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly reported that, “There was in Memphis on the first two days of May an excitement unequaled since the close of the war.” The riot that provoked that “excitement,” has been largely forgotten, even though, as Stephen Ash’s new book, A Massacre […]
Business renewal isn’t for the faint of heart, but when a mature business is facing margin and growth pressures, and business as usual no longer works, the choice is stark. Typically, the mature business or business line is cut loose, but decline and eventual failure isn’t the only option. The other choice to commit to […]
The picture of Mexico we most often see today, is the one of rampant drug violence and illegal immigration. While, unfortunately, there is truth to those images, they are far from the complete story. And the instinctive response – walling ourselves off – is counterproductive and even harmful to our national interests. Overlooked in today’s […]
Richard C. Francis is a freelance science writer and the author of Epigenetics, published by W. W. Norton & Co. Writing in the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz said, ““Mesmerizing stuff…Richard Francis provides an excellent non-technical introduction to the scientific underpinnings of this discomfiting new genetics.” His most recent book, Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, was also published […]
Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann is the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he teaches U.S. and international history. He previously taught at Cornell University. Tim is the author of The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, published by Harvard […]
Timothy Nelson is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology He is the author of numerous articles on low-income fathers and is the co-author, with Kathryn Edin, of the book Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, published by the University of California Press. Based on interviews with 110 low-income black and white […]
Martha Hanna is an professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During a research trip to Paris in June 2000 she unearthed a previously unknown collection of wartime letters written by a peasant couple, Paul and Marie Pireaud. Numbering well over a thousand letters, the Pireaud collection – perhaps the only extant collection of […]