Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Elections & Political Process

Superheroes, Movies, and the State sets a new standard for exploring the government-Hollywood relationship as it persuasively documents the critical role different government agencies have played in shaping characters, stories, and even the ideas behind the hottest entertainment products.

Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.

Fateful Decisions: Inside the National Security Council provides students with valuable insights into the origins, workings, strengths, and weaknesses of the National Security Council.

The presidential election of 1968 forever changed American politics. In this character-driven narrative history, Aram Goudsouzian portrays the key transformations that played out over that dramatic year. It was the last "Old Politics" campaign, where political machines and party bosses determined the major nominees, even as the "New Politics" of grassroots participation powered primary elections. It was an election that showed how candidates from both the Left and Right could seize on "hot-button" issues to alter the larger political dynamic.

Sara Azari breaks down the investigations, evidence, criminal charges, and defenses involving an ever-expanding rogues' gallery of Trump associates and campaign members, as well as the president's own criminal conduct. Her docket also includes a comprehensive summary and expert analysis of the Mueller Report. Azari addresses the consequences of President Trump's conduct and considers whether the president of the United States is ever above the law.

The Propagandists' Playbook peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies.

Increasingly, political parties have adopted not only different policies, but different sets of facts. As E. J. Fagan argues, partisan think tanks have helped create these alternate realities in their capacity as de facto formal party organizations. Through the analyses generated by aligned think tanks, political elites on both the left and right frequently offer radically different assessments of a policy's consequences.

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions were embedded in tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members and their families and neighbors. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats.

Lindsey Cormack's book, How to Raise a Citizen (And Why It's Up to You to Do It), speaks directly to an America in which civic knowledge is alarmingly sparse and many people dread politics. It's a tool for parents, educators, and anyone eager to fill this gap. In the book, Cormack offers an engaging and practical approach to discussing political issues and the inner workings of the US government with children.

Barack Obama famously said that the purpose of social movements is to get a seat at the table. However, as Deva Woodly argues in Reckoning—a sweeping account of the meaning and purpose of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)—the value of such movements is something much more profound: they are necessary for the health and survival of democracy. Drawing from on-the-ground interviews with activists in the movement, Woodly analyzes the emergence of the M4BL, its organizational structure and culture, and its strategies and tactics.

American Political Parties is a core textbook on political parties in the United States that places the US party system into a framework designed around the disagreements between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. White and Kerbel argue that the two-party system in the United States began with a common agreement on the key values of freedom, individual rights, and equality of opportunity, but that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed—often vehemently—over how to translate these ideals into an acceptable form of governance.

Long before Wikileaks and social media, the journalist Drew Pearson exposed to public view information that public officials tried to keep hidden. Pearson devoted himself to revealing what politicians were doing behind closed doors. From 1932 to 1969, his daily "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column and weekly radio and TV commentary broke secrets, revealed classified information, and passed along rumors based on sources high and low in the federal government, while intelligence agents searched fruitlessly for his sources.

Bloody Crossroads 2020 takes a deep dive into the role that mass-appeal movies, television, videos, and music played in America's political culture in the year of Donald Trump's failed reelection campaign. The book also explores the impact of entertainment celebrities in communications, fundraising, and campaigning to support the election of Joe Biden.

In the 1960s and 1970s, an insurgent attack on traditional liberalism took shape in America. It was built on new ideals of citizen advocacy and the public interest. Drawing energy from civil rights protests and opposition to the Vietnam War, the new citizens' movement drew legions of followers and scored major victories. And yet, in the process, citizen advocates also helped to undermine big government liberalism - the powerful alliance between government, business, and labor that dominated the United States politically in the decades following the New Deal and World War II.

In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power.

The brilliant, amoral, and spectacularly bold Bessie Tyler and Edward Young Clarke - together, the Southern Publicity Association - met the fervent William Joseph Simmons (founder of the second KKK), saw an opportunity, and played on his many weaknesses. Tyler and Clarke took Simmons' dying and broken KKK, with its 2,000-3,000 associates in Georgia and Alabama, and in a few short years swelled its membership to nearly five million.

A close look at the contest of 1880 reveals that Garfield's victory could have been the start of a period of greater civil rights legislation, a continuation of Lincoln's vision. This was the choice made by the American people - and, as The Last Lincoln Republican makes poignantly clear, the great opportunity forever lost when Garfield was assassinated just a few months into his term.

At a time of political tribalism and ideological purity tests, it can be hard to remember that cross-party hatred isn't an inherent feature of partisan politics. But, as this book reminds us, a backward glance - or a quick survey of so many retiring members of Congress - tells us that even in the past decade partisan rancor has grown exponentially. In Angry Politics, Stacy G. Ulbig asks why. Even more to the point, she traces the trend to the place where it all might begin - the college campus, among the youngest segment of the electorate.

Hard White explains how the mainstreaming of white nationalism occurred, pointing to two major shifts in the movement. While the book argues that white extremism will have enduring effects on American electoral politics for some time to come, it suggests that the way forward is to refocus the conversation on social solidarity, concluding with ideas for how to build this solidarity.

The Radio Right tells the story of the 1960s far right, who were frustrated by what they perceived to be liberal bias in the national media, particularly the media's sycophantic relationship with the John F. Kennedy administration. By the early 1960s, millions of Americans listened each week to conservative broadcasters, the most prominent of which were clergy or lay broadcasters from across the religious spectrum, including Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, and Clarence Manion.