A National Bestseller • A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Lunch, and Christian Science Monitor • One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks • Named a Notable Book by New York Times and Washington Post • Nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction“What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is sure to take its place as one of the definitive accounts of the U.S. and Central American immigration puzzle. . . . Hopefully, those with the power to change things will listen.” —Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington PostAn epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan BlitzerEveryone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey much farther away. Some flee persecution, others crime or hunger. They may have already been deported, but the United States remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. They will take their chances.As Jonathan Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, this crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture of this vast and unremitting conflict.Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here tells the epic story of the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, delving into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future. Read more

White Fear has shaped our democracy and society from the beginning—and today, it’s more intense and visible than ever. To neutralize it, we must first understand it.For two centuries, the deep-seated fear that many White people feel—of losing power, of losing economic standing, of losing a particular “way of life”—has been the driving force behind American politics and culture. White Fear enabled the rise of Donald Trump. It’s behind the recent flood of restrictive voting laws disproportionately impacting people of color. It’s why reactions to movements like Black Lives Matter and football players taking a knee have been so negative and so strong.As we approach a future where White people will become a racial the minority in the US, something estimated to occur as early as 2043, that fear is only intensifying, festering, and becoming more visible. Are we destined for a violent clash? What can we do to step into our country’s inevitable future, without tearing ourselves apart in the process?Nationally renowned journalist and award-winning author Roland Martin has been sounding this alarm for more than a decade. In White Fear, he provides a primer on how White Fear has shaped, and continues to shape, our democracy and our culture. He connects the separate puzzle pieces, from the Tea Party Movement to the decline of White American optimism to the diminishing blue-collar workforce, to illuminate the larger picture of what will unfold in America over the next decade-plus, and offers a better way forward.If we want to create the kind of country that we’re all welcome in and proud to live in, we can no longer ignore White Fear. We must learn to recognize, understand, and dismantle it.And as the last few years have shown, we don’t have any time to lose. Read more

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A dramatic history of how American Jews reckoned with slavery―and fought the Civil War.Since ancient times, the Jewish people have recalled the story of Exodus and reflected on the implications of having been slaves. Did the tradition teach that Jews should speak out against slavery and oppression everywhere, or act cautiously to protect themselves in a hostile world?In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis―the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in “Bleeding Kansas” and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America―and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day. Read more

A sweeping history of the Latino experience in the United States. The first new edition in ten years of this important study of Latinos in U.S. history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries—from the European colonization of the Americas to through the 2020 election. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American culture and politics is greater than ever. With family portraits of real-life immigrant Latino pioneers, as well as accounts of the events and conditions that compelled them to leave their homelands, Gonzalez highlights the complexity of a segment of the American population that is often discussed but frequently misrepresented. This landmark history is required reading for anyone wishing to understand the history and legacy of this influential and diverse group. Read more

A “comprehensive…fascinating” (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian Americans.In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. “In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States” (Huffington Post). The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country. Published fifty years after the passage of the United States’ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these “powerful Asian American stories…are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue” (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an “epic and eye-opening” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today. Read more

Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous―larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride. Read more

In this New York Times bestseller, Stephen Ambrose brings to life the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, from the men who financed it to the engineers and surveyors who risked their lives to the workers who signed on for the dangerous job. Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad—the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks. The U.S. government pitted two companies—the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads—against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life. Read more

What happens when the leaders sworn to protect America’s borders choose to dismantle them instead?In TREASON, J.J. Carrell delivers a gripping exposé of the Biden Administration’s deliberate and systematic unraveling of U.S. sovereignty. This is not speculation—it’s a searing account from someone who witnessed the betrayal firsthand.For 24 years, Carrell served in the U.S. Border Patrol, rising to the rank of Deputy Patrol Agent in Charge. He fought on the frontlines of America’s border security, safeguarding a system designed to protect the nation. But in January 2021, everything changed.The most secure border in U.S. history was destroyed overnight.Construction of the border wall halted.Long-standing immigration laws were replaced with unconstitutional directives.Millions of illegal aliens flooded into the country, enabled by a web of corrupt partnerships between the government and NGOs.Carrell watched his life’s work disintegrate in an instant. The policies he was forced to implement as an agent weren’t just ineffective—they were a direct assault on the very sovereignty of the United States. Unable to stand by any longer, he made the painful decision to retire and speak out.What This Book Reveals Will Leave You StunnedCarrell connects the dots to reveal an orchestrated plan designed to open America’s borders, unravel its security, and transform its future. With evidence laid out like a prosecutor building a criminal case, he exposes:The staggering surge in illegal entries: Daily arrests skyrocketed to over 20,000, overwhelming border security systems and personnel.The betrayal of unaccompanied children: Over 320,000 children were “lost” by federal agencies, with many falling prey to exploitation.The manipulation of immigration laws: Executive orders stripped the system of its protections, leaving border agents powerless.The profiteering partnerships with NGOs: Millions of taxpayer dollars flowed into the hands of organizations that facilitated the invasion, operating with impunity and zero accountability.This Is More Than a Crisis—It’s a Catastrophe by DesignCarrell argues that these policies were not the result of incompetence but a calculated effort to reshape America through chaos and division. From child trafficking to the dismantling of immigration law, this administration has created a border crisis that threatens the nation’s very fabric.But don’t take his word for it. Every fact, every claim, every statistic in this book is backed by firsthand accounts, documented evidence, and years of expertise from someone who lived it.⚠ A Call to Every Patriot ⚠This book is a wake-up call to every American who values the nation’s sovereignty and security. Carrell doesn’t mince words:"Do not look away. Ignorance is no longer an alibi. To remain silent is to be complicit."In TREASON, he dares you to confront the truth. To see the full picture of betrayal, corruption, and calculated destruction.✓ What happens when the border is no longer secure?✓ What happens when laws are rewritten to serve political agendas?✓ What happens when a government turns on its people?The evidence is laid bare. The truth is undeniable. The question is—what will you do with it?TREASON is a rallying cry for those who refuse to let America’s sovereignty be sold off piece by piece. It’s for those who believe in truth, accountability, and the power of exposing corruption, no matter how difficult it is to face.Prepare to be shocked. Prepare to be outraged. Prepare to be moved.Because once you see the full picture, there’s no going back. Read more

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • The incredible saga of the German-Jewish immigrants—with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman—who profoundly influenced the rise of modern finance (and so much more), from the New York Times best-selling author of Sons of WichitaJoseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world—Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century’s quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman’s paternal grandparents. In The Money Kings, Schulman unspools a sweeping narrative that traces the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties. He chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as they navigated the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age, and the complexities of the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews. Read more

“Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul’s detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast.”—Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman    Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.   Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground—when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.  The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories—like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.   “Exciting and revealing . . . a stirring panorama of the land and the peoples who made their mark on it from the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries . . . This is a rich tableau that both excites and informs about the forging of early American society.”—Booklist “Weidensaul’s delightful storytelling brings to life the terrors and hopes of the earliest days of America.”—Publishers Weekly Read more

A riveting history of the Mafia's first one hundred years, from 1860's Sicily to 1960's America—narrated by a former high-ranking crew leader.The culmination Louis Ferrante's exhaustive research delving deep into Sicily's socio-economic-political roots, Borgata: Rise of Empire will finally reveal exactly how and why this infamous secret society formed inside Sicilian culture. Ferrante then engages in the art of storytelling by carefully selecting stories about the mafia in Sicily that allow him to follow the main characters to America, where most arrive as fugitives from Italian justice.Across the Atlantic, the storyline picks up in places like New York and New Orleans, where the clannish Sicilians quickly realize the importance of diversity as they forge new alliances with other recently arrived ethnic groups as the borgata becomes the premier organized criminal network in the country. After planting their flags in cities across America, the adolescent American mafia realizes how to corrupt America's police and political establishment, and they become experts at bribing public officials, allowing them to extend their tentacles into every level of American society.In this first volume, Ferrante traces the mafia's phenomenal "rise of empire" through larger-than-life characters such as Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Seigel, Albert Anastasia, and other legendary mobsters as they provide alcohol to the American public during Prohibition, penetrate industrial labor unions, practically take over the island of Cuba and, with extraordinary vision, create the gambling mecca of Las Vegas. Read more

This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist) The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America. Forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens America. Now updated with an afterword reflecting on how the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged xenophobia, America for Americans is an urgent spur to action for any concerned citizen. Read more

Travel along the Oregon Trail with the pioneers who dared to "face the elephant" as they moved west in search of a new life. Compiled from the trail diaries and memoirs that document this momentous period in American history, Oregon Trail Stories is a fascinating look at the great American migration of the 19th century. Read more

Severo Guerra was working in the fields when a shot rang out. Struck by a bullet, he fell, and before he could recover, he was beaten with the butt of the very rifle that ended his life. That day, I lost the grandfather I never knew. Severo and his family were in Mexico because they had been deported during the Mexican Repatriation of the 19305. Nearly a century later, echoes of that same narrative persist: Remove the Latinos, and there will be enough jobs for Americans. This book tells the story of the Guerra family through the eyes of Teresa—my mother and the second oldest of Severo's children. It is a story of acceptance in the face of deportation, of persistence in rebuilding a life in Mexico, and of hope reborn after tragedy, when Teresa's uncle stepped in to help the family return to California. Throughout this journey, the family's Christian faith was their anchor, guiding them as they sought to come home. My mother, Teresa, was a meticulous archivist and historian in her own right. The journals she wrote and the documents she saved made it possible to piece together this legacy. Now, together with our granddaughter Annabella, we've brought this dream to life in the form of a children's book. It is our hope and prayer that as you read, you will be both blessed and inspired by the strength, faith, and enduring spirit of our family. Read more

"Thoroughly researched and beautifully written history."—New York Times Book Review“Absorbing . . . a David-and-Goliath tale of the industrial age.”—Wall Street JournalA propulsive human drama that chronicles the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to America in the early years of the twentieth century, and the men who made it possible.Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern Europe, arrived in the United States. Many sailed on steamships from Hamburg.This mass exodus was facilitated by three businessmen whose involvement in the Jewish-American narrative has been largely forgotten: Jacob Schiff, the managing partner of the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who used his immense wealth to help Jews to leave Europe; Albert Ballin, managing director of the Hamburg-American Line, who created a transportation network of trains and steamships to carry them across continents and an ocean; and J. P. Morgan, mastermind of the International Mercantile Marine (I.M.M.) trust, who tried to monopolize the lucrative steamship business. Though their goals were often contradictory, together they made possible a migration that spared millions from persecution. Descendants of these immigrants included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Estée Lauder, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Lauren Bacall, the Marx Brothers, David Sarnoff, Al Jolson, Sam Goldwyn, Ben Shahn, Hank Greenberg, Moses Annenberg, and many more—including Ujifusa’s great grandparents. That is their legacy.Moving from the shtetls of Russia and the ports of Hamburg to the mansions of New York’s Upper East Side and the picket lines outside of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, The Last Ships from Hamburg is a history that unfolds on both an intimate and epic scale. Meticulously researched, masterfully told, Ujifusa’s story offers original insight into the American experience, connecting banking, shipping, politics, immigration, nativism, and war—and delivers crucial insight into the burgeoning refugee crisis of our own time. Read more

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United StatesWhether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States. Read more

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“A perfect representation of Latino diversity” (The Washington Post), LatinoLand draws from hundreds of interviews and prodigious research to give us both a vibrant portrait and the little-known history of our largest and fastest-growing minority, in “a work of prophecy, sympathy, and courage” (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author).LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana’s life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise twenty percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage. But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest groups are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners. As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US—some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse—a random infusion of white, Black, indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as culturally varied as any immigrants from Europe or Asia. Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. “Thorough, accessible, and necessary” (Ms. magazine), LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America. Read more

Connect the dots between America's pivotal historical events and today's political climate, even if you're new to American history.Are you curious about how America's past shapes the present?Are you eager for a comprehensive perspective that goes beyond traditional textbooks and biased tales?In Political Climate and American History,you'll find a detailed yet readable approach that enriches you understanding of America's evolution, casting light on the influences guiding today's political scene.Inside, you'll discover: The transformative impact of the American Civil War and how it sculpted today's politics.The critical catalysts behind the Declaration of Independence and how they marked a new era.Methods to identify biases in historical accounts and obtain a clearer understanding of facts.The pivotal roles of marginalized (excluded) groups, whose contributions are often overlooked.Fascinating lesser-known facts about the Founding Fathers that challenge common myths.How post-World War II foreign policy decisions elevated America's global standing.The evolution of social justice movements over the decades and their current influence.Timeless lessons from historical leaders offering insights for today's decision-makers.And much more.Concerned that this book might cover familiar ground without fresh insights? Fear not. With its unbiased approach and comprehensive analysis, it offers a wealth of new perspectives and illuminating stories from America's storied past, and makes for a groundbreaking reading experience.Worried about political bias? Rest assured, this book is crafted with a steadfast commitment to balanced viewpoints, allowing you to form your conclusions from a well-rounded array of facts and perspectives.This isn't a dense textbook, or politically charged account. It's a meticulously crafted exploration designed to encourage reflection and provide clarity, whether you're a history enthusiast or you're just getting on board with your knowledge excursion.Ready to get a deeper understanding of the factors shaping America's political climate today? Scroll up and click "Add to Cart" to get on board this excursion through American history!Timeless lessons from historic leaders offering insights for today's decision-makers. Read more