David

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 States, arguing instead that war has played a leading role in shaping North America from the sixteenth century to the present.

Anderson and Cayton bring their sweeping narrative to life by structuring it around the lives of eight men—Samuel de Champlain, William Penn, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Colin Powell. The result is a provocative, highly readable account of the ways in which republic and empire have coexisted in American history as two faces of the same coin. The Dominion of War recasts familiar triumphs as tragedies, proposes an unconventional set of turning points, and depicts imperialism and republicanism as inseparable influences in a pattern of development in which war and freedom have long been intertwined. It offers a new perspective on America’s attempts to define its role in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Winner of the William J. Goode Award

Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them?

Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.

In Work 2.0, Bill Jensen introduces us to a new breed of managers and organizations that are maximizing productivity, developing leaders at all levels, constantly innovating, attracting exceptional talent, and winning in the marketplace.

The key to their success is recognizing that the most valuable assets in the company are the time, attention, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks of the frontline workers. As Jensen convincingly argues, building a corporate infrastructure that gives people what they need to “get stuff done”—and then get out of their way—yields surprising results: greater alignment of personal and corporate goals, more satisfied employees and customers, and a competitive edge that keeps everyone moving forward together.

For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance—in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.

In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea, historian James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem—why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world—and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually in the 1800s, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than 18,000 people. The city of Memphis was particularly unprepared and hard hit, of the approximately 20,000 who didn’t flee the city, 17,000 contracted the fever and more than 5,000 of its citizens died.

Fever Season isn’t the typical tale of an epidemic. It is a far more interesting story of how a catastrophe reversed a society’s expectations of its people, showing the designated good and brave as neither. As reporters wired stories of the horrors of the epidemic to an appalled world, Memphis’s street-corner discussions became part of the national conversation. The behavior of many raised uncomfortable questions at the time, as it still does in reading about it now. What kind of moral order produced ministers who deserted their congregations in their hour of need, while prostitutes and gamblers risked their lives to nurse the sick? When fathers ran away, leaving their families to die, what did that say about the accepted notions of manhood?

For a brief time, the crisis in Memphis required that the normal social order of 19th century America be suspended. The greater story of 1878 is what happened to lead the survivors in Memphis to question the conventional verities about gender, race, and more existentially, good, evil, the nature of duty and of faith.

Expertly researched, using the accounts and diaries of those who chose to stay and those who were left behind, Fever Season unfolds the events of that summer and fall. In it we meet people of great courage and compassion, many of whom died for having those virtues. It also tells the story of how a disease can shape the future of a city, as yellow fever did to Memphis.