Published

Three of the nation’s top researchers known for taking on key mysteries about poverty deliver a new, multi-dimensional way of measuring deep disadvantage in every county in the nation as well as in its 500 most-populated cities. By turning the lens of disadvantage from the individual to the community, the authors uncover a surprising picture. Among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the U.S., the majority are rural, many of them rarely if ever researched; only 12 are cities.

In The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, the authors paint portraits of places within the three regions of America whose residents are living—and dying—with homicide rates as high as anywhere else in the nation. What these regions have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation, has made them into what the authors describe as “internal colonies.”

This history and its reverberations are facts, these acclaimed and engaged public scholars argue, that must shape a new War on Poverty, 60 years after LBJ’s unfinished first one.

The untold saga of John Randolph’s 383 slaves, freed in his much-contested will of 1821, finally comes to light.

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this groundbreaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph’s wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves—and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen’s dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman’s Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

An authoritative account of the second president of the United States that shows how John Adams’s leadership and legacy defined the office for those who followed and ensured the survival of the American republic.

The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges, provoked by enemies foreign and domestic. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm.

Making the Presidency is an authoritative exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic. Through meticulous research and engaging prose, Lindsay Chervinsky illustrates the unique challenges faced by Adams and shows how he shaped the office for his successors. One of the most qualified presidents in American history, he had been a legislator, political theorist, diplomat, minister, and vice president–but he had never held an executive position. Instead, the quixiotic and stubborn Adams would rely on his ideas about executive power, the Constitution, politics, and the state of the world to navigate the hurdles of the position. He defended the presidency from his own often obstructionist cabinet, protected the nation from foreign attacks, and forged trust and dedication to election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power between parties, even though it cost him his political future.

Offering a portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential periods in US history, Making the Presidency is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of the presidency and the creation of political norms and customs at the heart of the American republic.

It is easy to imagine that our constant state of distractedness is peculiar to the digital age, but distraction has been a concern in every era—perhaps never more so than for Christian monks living in Ireland, Iran, and the places in between, from 300 to 900 CE. Though they quit the world for lives of seclusion, monks still struggled to concentrate, and they came to perceive distraction as a fundamental problem.

As Jamie Kreiner argues in The Wandering Mind, we are obsessed with distraction today in large part because they were. Exploring the sophisticated techniques they developed in their endless quest to concentrate—from unforgiving sleep regimens to massive meditational construction projects—Kreiner demonstrates that their insights, remarkably, can still be useful to us now.

Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty account of human fallibility that bridges a distant era and our own.

There are all kinds of successful life forms – animals, plants, even genes – whose success was delayed for millions of years. The first ants, for example, go back 140 million years, but ants did not begin to branch into today’s more than 11,000 species until forty million years later. Mammals with various lifestyles – ground-dwelling, tree-climbing, flying or swimming – originated more than 100 million years before they became successful. And a family of saltwater clams had to wait for 350 million years before it became well enough established to diversify into the many species that thrive today.

These life forms are the sleeping beauties of biological evolution. They cast in doubt truths about success and failure that we hold dear. And they lead us to question the role that the quality of a new life form – or of any other innovation – plays in its success.

In Sleeping Beauties, evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner explores findings about evolution that molecular biology has recently revealed, and applies them to understanding how biological evolution creates new solutions to life’s problems. New work in the biological sciences ­– some of it no more than a decade old – is turning much of what we think is fundamental to evolutionary innovation on its head. By exploring a four-billion-year-long record of innovation in biological evolution, Wagner discovers the often-surprising rules that govern which innovations succeed and which fail.