New York Times bestselling author of The Wordy Shipmates and contributor to NPR's This American Life Sarah Vowell embarks on a road trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation's ever-evolving political system and history.
Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination...

"The nearly eight years of Harry Truman's presidency--among the most turbulent in American history--were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic weapon; the beginning of the Cold War; creation of the NATO alliance; the founding of the United Nations; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight in Korea. Historians have tended...

Examines how the educations of America's first four presidents, and in particular their scholarly devotion to ancient Greek and Roman classics, informed the beliefs and ideals that shaped the nation's constitution and government.

For the 2012 presidential race, the author of the acclaimed biography of President James Polk offers a fresh, playful, and challenging way of playing "Rating the Presidents" - America's favorite game - by pitching historians' views and subsequent experts' polls against the judgment and votes of the presidents' own contemporaries. This voyage through all our history provides a sometimes surprising analysis of how presidential politics works.

"For as long as he has served at the highest levels of business and government, Vice President Dick Cheney has also been one of the world's most prominent heart patients. Now, for the first time ever, Cheney, together with his longtime cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, MD, shares the very personal story of his courageous thirty-five-year battle with heart disease, from his first heart attack in 1978 to the heart transplant he received in 2012. In 1978,...