Forthcoming

The Lincoln Miracle

The leadup to the presidential election of 1860 found America bitterly divided, as the dominant Democratic Party broke up over the intense pressure of slavery, and the six-year-old Republican Party sought a leader who could win. The story of the convention to name the Republican Party’s candidate – eight days that led to Abraham Lincoln’s nomination – makes clear that Lincoln’s extraordinary quest to lead the party might have collapsed, with fatal consequences for the United States of America.

The convention was held in Chicago, although Lincoln himself waited for news from Springfield, far from the heavy drinking, humor, jealousy, political animosities, and angling for power that were the stuff of political life of the times. The Lincoln Miracle: The Republican National Convention of 1860 and How It Shaped the Nation plunges the reader right into the convention, to experience the sights, sounds and smells of Chicago in 1860. The tension-filled maneuvering of the political players and the candidates’ managers echo the forces buffeting the nation — particularly over slavery and Lincoln’s vision for ending it.

With its secretive and sordid horse-trading, the convention allows us to see Lincoln’s strengths as a political strategist. His plan played out perfectly against long odds, thanks to the hard work of friends whose extraordinary loyalty he had the gift of cultivating. The Lincoln Miracle opens a window on the tremendous political forces tearing America apart as it lurched toward the bloody and catastrophic Civil War.

Access Rules

How do we legitimize – and limit – the power of knowledge?

Control over information in a data-driven world is shifting in favor of those who generate, store and analyze information flows on their digital platforms. This isn’t a new issue – since the days of Benjamin Franklin, information power has been turned upside down. But today, data colonialists in America and Asia rule the rest of the world.

To counter the power imbalances that are increasing as a result of these power shifts, we have to prise open access to data, information and knowledge. We need much more broadly-based access to data to advance scientific, social and economic progress in the service of sustainable development. Concentration of information power is good for a few, but bad for innovation, cooperation, and for each and every one of us.

In Access Rules, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge offer a clear, concise and compelling response, arguing that if we disrupt the monopoly power of superstar companies with open access to data, and create a level playing field, digital innovations can emerge to the benefit all. When everyone has access to the informational riches of the data age, the nature of digital power machines will change. Information technology will find its way back to its original purpose: empowering all of us to use information so we can thrive as individuals and as societies.

The Bald Eagle

The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction.

Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves―monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents―The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

Partisans

Lost between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, the 1990s has been set aside as a “holiday from history.” But we are past due for a serious reckoning with the meaning of the decade, as Nicole Hemmer argues in her bold new interpretation of American conservatism, Pitchfork Politics: The 1990s Conservative Revolt That Remade the Republican Party.

Niki Hemmer is a research scholar at Columbia University and a frequent writer and commentator on politics. She contends that it was Ronald Reagan’s widely touted revolution that was the interlude. Though it continues to have a hold on how we understand conservative ideology today, the Reagan Revolution was not only unfinished, it was completely undone. Today’s Republican Party looks more like the isolationist and pessimistic Republican Party of the ‘30s and ‘40s than the big-tent Republican Party of the ‘80s.

Central to that shift in philosophy were players—from Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh—who began as Reagan staffers and acolytes. During the 1990s, however, they pulled away from a commitment to the conservative values Reagan had championed. Using a powerful and growing conservative media ecosystem to advance their cause, forces on the right replaced the popular politics of the Reagan era with a focus on base politics and a conservative opposition to the egalitarian ideals of democracy.

In Pitchfork Politics, Hemmer makes a clear and compelling case that a new appreciation of the 1990s is both long overdue and a timely contribution toward understanding where American politics is today. In her sharp and lively telling, the 1990s are hardly a backwater. This is revelatory history, and will change the way we look at the present.

Forthcoming

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