American Government: Books/eBooks

All you need to know about elections, politics, and government!

Putting the three branches into historical context is important for understanding them, but equally important is illuminating the testing ground for their formation and solidification as current rules and regulations. Governments are fluid entities, and even written documents can be amended and changed out of careful consideration, observation, and sometimes necessity. More closely than the rest of the books in this series, this text shines a light on previous, documented changes to the written record underpinning the U.S. government, the U.S. Constitution, and how they came to be made.

Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process covers all elements of parties and the electoral process, including local, state, and national party organizations; American party history and party systems; state and local nominations; state and local elections; presidential nominations; and presidential elections. Separate chapters are devoted to the important subjects of the media in the electoral process and campaign finance. The role of political parties in representative democracy--and their contributions to it--are examined critically. The sixth edition incorporates the results of the 2010 midterm elections.

The United States Congress has been described as dysfunctional, gridlocked, polarized, hyperpartisan, chaotic, and do-nothing. In Changing Cultures in Congress, Donald R. Wolfensberger explains the institutional dynamics behind Congress's devolution to a body plagued by a win-at-any-cost mentality and a culture of perpetual campaigning.

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals—some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America's unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

Presidents shape not only the course of history but also how Americans remember and retell that history. From the Oval Office they instruct us what to respect and what to reject in our past. They regale us with stories about who we are as a people, and tell us whom in the pantheon of greats we should revere and whom we should revile. The president of the United States, in short, is not just the nation's chief legislator, the head of a political party, or the commander in chief of the armed forces, but also, crucially, the nation's historian in chief. In this engaging and insightful volume, Seth Cotlar and Richard Ellis bring together top historians and political scientists to explore how eleven American presidents deployed their power to shape the nation's collective memory and its political future. Contending that the nation's historians in chief should be evaluated not only on the basis of how effective they are in persuading others, Historian in Chief argues they should also be judged on the veracity of the history they tell.