Books like The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore

A compelling overview of American history through the eyes and experiences of its women, workers, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working poor.

Jill Lepore’s sweeping single‑volume history charts how the United States has wrestled with the ideals of equality, natural rights, and sovereignty from 1492 to today, weaving together politics, law, journalism and technology.

Jill Lepore uncovers how Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, pioneered data‑driven political and consumer targeting—serving Kennedy’s campaign, the New York Times, and the Department of Defense—laying groundwork for today’s digital manipulation tools.

"How should historians speak truth to power--and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history--especially long-term history--so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated. This provocative and thoughtful book makes an important intervention in the debate about the role of history and the humanities in a digital age. It will provoke discussion among policymakers, activists and entrepreneurs as well as ordinary listeners, viewers, readers, students and teachers."--

"Woodrow Wilson, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male, and Protestant." "That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views, and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed on it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Joseph Ellis." "This is their story, set against the wider narrative of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize, and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history."--BOOK JACKET.

"Of all the 'liberation movements' of the twentieth century, the one that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams did not liberate a class or a gender or a race. It liberated an element: carbon. Today, the 'carbon liberation front' threatens to crash the entire climate system. In Molecular Red, Wark looks for a way to understand, and perhaps even combat, this implacable force. He revisits the work of Alexander Bogdanov--Lenin's rival--and the great proletkult writer and engineer Andrei Platonov. In this reading, the Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for our time. Moving toward the present, Wark reads Donna Haraway's cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian utopia as powerful resources for thinking what the carbon liberation front has wrought"--