Security State

Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage details the impact of the blinding of Sergeant Woodard on the racial awakening of President Truman and Judge Waring and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America’s civil rights history.

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing - creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.

In his famous farewell address in 1961, President Eisenhower urgently warned Americans to guard against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" in the leviathan he dubbed the military-industrial complex. As Eugene Jarecki powerfully portrays in this piercing and necessary book, Eisenhower's worst fears have been realized.

The two most important words in the lives of the American people for the past 60 years have been national security. The term has transformed American society for the worse. It has warped the morals and values of the American people. It has stultified conscience. It has altered the constitutional order. It has produced a democratically elected government that wields totalitarian powers.

By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had slaughtered more than 700,000 Americans. After a morning of rain-drenched fury, tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term. As the sun emerged, Lincoln rose to give perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history, stunning the nation by arguing, in a brief 701 words, that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors - every drop of blood spilled - might well have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery.

In 1765, 11 years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur'an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America.

Inspired by a colleague's involvement in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, Wall Street attorney Donald A. Jelinek traveled to the Deep South to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer during his three-week summer vacation in 1965. He stayed for three years. In White Lawyer, Black Power, Jelinek recounts the battles he fought in defense of militant civil rights activists and rural African Americans, risking his career and his life to further the struggle for racial equality.

Mitchell Welles spent thirteen years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Exonerated, he returns to a world he no longer fully understands and the absence of the friends and family who once were the bedrock of his existence. For the first year, he is focused on the lawsuit he and his lawyers take out against the city and police department that put him in jail in the first place, but once that is settled, there is little to fill his days. Feeling lost without some kind of purpose, he allows his friend, Alyxis, to talk him into taking a job with new security firm, Two Bears Security.

New York Times best-selling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations - denunciations by the press, rejection from the president, dismissal by the country's Black middle class and militants, assaults on his character, ideology, and political tactics, to name a few - all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty, and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Lena Curtis’s life is going pretty well. She’s thirty-four, has a successful career, her own house, and enjoys her time alone. She’s an independent woman who knows she doesn’t need a man to complete her life. In fact, finding a boyfriend is the last thing she’s really looking to do. All that changes when she meets Shep Parkington, an amateur MMA fighter who is trying to make it pro, all the while escaping the clutches of his ruthless and dangerous family. He isn’t really looking for a relationship either, but neither he nor Lena can deny that there is certainly some serious ...

During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history, Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death - by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. "Inoculation" led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history.

Brandon Walsh has a complicated relationship with his father. They’re close, closer than a traditional father and son. They essentially grew up together, rescuing each other from their bad choices on a regular basis. Unfortunately, rescuing his father became such a habit for Brandon that he managed to destroy his career and his reputation in one fell swoop by attempting to bribe a sitting judge as an assistant district attorney. Four years later, Brandon is still dusting himself off, trying to put his life back together, when he finds himself working security for Two Bears Security. ...

G. Gordon Liddy's wit, wisdom, and no-holds-barred approach brought legions of devoted listeners to his daily radio program, and made his autobiography, Will, a monumental best seller. Now he brings the same inimitable style to When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. Listeners will be alternately infuriated and amused - but always enthralled - as "The G-Man" reveals what has been wrought by liberal politicians, government bureaucrats, "enviro-radicals", "fulminating feminists", and many others.

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history, a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

Memoirs of a Diplomatic Security Special Agent and his assignment and travels around the world. Read what it's like to live overseas for years and run security operations that protect our diplomatic facilities around the world.

Prejudential is a concise, authoritative exploration of America’s relationship with race and Black Americans through the lens of the presidents who have been elected to represent all of its people.

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

Thatcher Stibler lived on the wild side in his younger days, drinking and partying every chance he got. But when a woman dies as a direct result of Thatcher’s irresponsible behavior, he puts himself on a path to the straight and narrow. But sometimes the past has a way of coming back. A few days after the funeral for his adoptive mother, Thatcher takes on a case for Two Bears Security that reunites him with the younger sister of a woman he once dated. Amused by her disapproval, he finds himself in a complicated situation when he learns that his past behavior had more consequences than ...

In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s 100-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in - Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona - need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now.