Public History

Physician, researcher, and ethics professor Matt McCarthy is on the front lines of a groundbreaking clinical trial testing a new antibiotic to fight lethal superbugs, bacteria that have built up resistance to the life-saving drugs in our rapidly dwindling arsenal. This trial serves as the backdrop for the compulsively listenable Superbugs, and the results will impact nothing less than the future of humanity.

In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States.

The Pentagon's Wars is a dramatic account of the deep and divisive debates between America's civilian leaders and its military officers. Renowned military expert Mark Perry investigates these internal wars and sheds new light on the US military - the most powerful and influential lobby in Washington.

The United States has two separate banking systems today - one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessities - all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s.

This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people - specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism) - and invites listeners to "build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability".

Through economics, our politicians have the power to transform people's lives for better or worse. Think Deng Xiaoping who lifted millions out of poverty by opening up China; Franklin D Roosevelt whose 'New Deal' helped the USA break free of the Great Depression; or Peron and his successors in Argentina who brought the country to the brink of ruin. In this magisterial history, economist and politician Vince Cable examines the legacy of 16 world leaders who transformed their countries' economic fortunes and who also challenged economic convention.

In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis offers an encompassing account of highway development in the United States. In the early twentieth century Congress created the Bureau of Public Roads to improve roads and the lives of rural Americans. The Bureau was the forerunner of the Interstate Highway System of 1956, which promoted a technocratic approach to modern road building sometimes at the expense of individual lives, regional characteristics, and the landscape.

The time has come to acknowledge that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation's history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the southern border, starting on Inauguration Day in 2021, and millions more will cross over by the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. This event is historic by all measures, exceeding even the storied chronicles of Ellis Island, and portends the same permanent change for the nation. Unfortunately, a fog of a fierce partisan information war obscures that it is even happening.

Political leaders, diplomats, and business executives around the world - including every president from John F. Kennedy to Donald J. Trump - have sought the counsel of Henry Kissinger, a brilliant diplomat and political scientist whose unprecedented achievements as a negotiator have been universally acknowledged. Now, Kissinger the Negotiator provides a groundbreaking analysis of Kissinger’s overall approach to making deals and his skill in resolving conflicts - expertise that holds powerful and enduring lessons.

In 2018, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson came together to reflect on the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis 10 years on. Recognizing that, as Ben put it, "the enemy is forgetting," they examine the causes of the crisis, why it was so damaging, and what it ultimately took to prevent a second Great Depression. And they provide to their successors in the United States and the finance ministers and central bank governors of other countries a valuable playbook for reducing the damage from future financial crises.

What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community's fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States.

NPR’s launch of the multi-platform series Turning the Tables in 2017, suddenly pushed more women onto “Best of” lists and into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. With How Women Made Music, acclaimed critic and TtT co-founder Ann Powers and contributor Alison Fensterstock draw from every Turning the Tables season and the full 50-years of NPR archives, to bring a vibrant, entertaining history of women in folk, rock, rap, hip hop, salsa, bubblegum pop, and much more.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the US dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history.

Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined into a living whole the private Burke and the public Burke. He gives us a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time. He lucidly unfolds Burke's philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations in the 18th century and how Burke, through his philosophy, "speaks to our age".

This comprehensive military biography of George Washington entertainingly examines Washington's capacity as a military leader. Acclaimed historian Edward G. Lengel, an associate editor of the University of Virginia's Papers of George Washington project, bases this engrossing work on the most extensive collection of Washington's personal correspondence.

The definitive biography of the most important economic statesman of our time, from the best-selling author of The Power Law and More Money Than God. Sebastian Mallaby's magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research based on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, brings into vivid focus the mysterious point where the government and the economy meet. To understand Greenspan's story is to see the economic and political landscape of our time in a whole new light.

In the years after World War II, Georgetown's leafy streets were home to an unlikely group of cold warriors: a coterie of affluent, well-educated, and well-connected civilians who helped steer American strategy from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the endgame of Watergate.

Unimpeachably sourced, Cobra II describes how the American rush to Baghdad provided the opportunity for the virulent insurgency that followed. The brutal aftermath in Iraq was not inevitable and was a surprise to the generals on both sides; Cobra II provides the first authoritative account as to why. It is a book of enduring importance and incisive analysis, a comprehensive account of the most reported yet least understood war in American history.

Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate United States authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA, Mikkael Sekeres—a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee—tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world.