Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of  Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion of “paradoxical ebullience,” by which author Lessie B. Branch means the optimism expressed by African Americans during the presidency of Barack Obama despite...

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Is there a case for the impeachment of Donald Trump? Constitutional attorney Ron Fein says not only is there a case, but also that the case exists regardless of what happens with the special counsel investigation. The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump (Melville House,...

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President Donald Trump is not sui generis. Populist impulses and political actors have been pulsating in the American soul since the nation’s founding. Timothy J.  Lombardo’s excellent book, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) recounts one such example. Starting in the mid-1960s, Rizzo dominated...

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How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She...

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The Marginalized Majority: Claiming Our Power in a Post-Truth America (Melville House, 2018) offers a roadmap to reeling progressives, delivers a searing critique of cynical pragmatism and defends identity politics as a galvanizing force for positive social change. Journalist Onnesha Roychoudhuri shares personal stories of how her identity shaped her...

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Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago in 1983 sent a shockwave through the politics of America’s third largest city, one that reverberated for decades afterward. Yet as Roger Biles describes in his book Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Washington’s...

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How can art change the world? In Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018), Paula Serafini, a Research Associate at the University of Leicester’s CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, explores art activism, looking at the power, potential, and problematics of art for political and social change....

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The office of the president in the United States is one of the most visible institutions not just in its own country, but around the world as well. The expectations that the office and officeholder carries are considerable, as are the power that goes with the office. And yet, Americans...

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In American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division (Oxford University Press, 2016), Michael A. Cohen shows how the 1968 American presidential election proved to be an “inflection point” of history that shattered the long-standing “liberal consensus,” and unleashed a conservative populism that continues to reverberate today. Cohen delivers...

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In 1962 Richard Nixon suffered a humiliating defeat in the California gubernatorial election, one that led him to declare an end to his career in politics. What followed was one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history, one chronicled by Victor Li in his book Nixon in New...

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