Today’s raging partisan battles over climate policy and the Keystone XL pipeline are just the latest examples of a deeper debate about our future: Are we headed for a world of scarce resources and environmental catastrophe as environmentalists believe, or will market forces and technological innovation yield greater prosperity? In
Olivia Gall— A few weeks ago, I visited a restaurant where an employee acted very rudely towards me. Fuming, I went home and wrote a scathing Yelp review about the establishment. Satisfied that justice had been served and that the entire online community could be made aware of the horrible
When Americans come upon a social arrangement they want to preserve, they do not alter their behavior to fit their values; they alter their values to fit their behavior. They change what it means to be an American… With intensely divisive issues like voting rights, immigration policy, and the war
In Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century Patrick Smith explores America’s need for a new perspective and self-image. Smith argues that while old myths and stories once motivated and defined America and what it meant to be American, that these myths cannot drive the nation forward any longer. Instead
Arcadian America, written by Aaron Sachs, takes a look back at nineteenth-century garden cemeteries and relates them to our current moment of environmental crisis. Throughout, Arcadian America presents the reader with a great deal of historical facts and context, which Sachs effortlessly blends with cultural criticism and personal memoir to
As the world became embroiled in the fight against the Nazis, America gathered to decide on the president who would lead them through it. Susan Dunn’s book, 1940: FDR, Wilkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election amid the Storm, documents this incredible moment in history when the US broke with tradition and elected
An abstract and mysterious structure, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis conveys wonder, but leaves many visitors questioning the “why” behind the monument. Its history is surprisingly sordid. In The Gateway Arch: A Biography, a new addition to the Icons of America series, author Tracy Campbell documents the series of
Now available in North America, Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy‘s unique account of the American Revolution in The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire, told from the perspectives of King George III, Lord North, General Burgoyne, and other British leaders, brings to light the
For the May 13 centennial of Joseph Pulitzer Jr.’s birth, Marjorie B. Cohn, author of Classic Modern, the first biography of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. to focus on his art collecting—arguably his greatest passion—and his role in bringing modernism to the American Midwest, writes here about one of the pleasures of writing the biography of a
Read William Casey King’s “Three Things All Ambitious People Should Know” on the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” blog! In credo of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” there seems an implicit acknowledgement of ambition–should one’s desires take you so far. This picture in American life is particularly central to