Governing America: The Revival of Political History

Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton University). Governing America: The Revival of Political History (Princeton University Press, 2012).

“In recent years, the study of American political history has experienced a remarkable renaissance ….Governing America addresses issues of wide interest, including the rise of the welfare state, the development of modern conservatism, the history of Congress, the struggle over campaign finance, changing views about presidential power, and national security.”
—Governing America Book Jacket

Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History

John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School). Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (Free Press, 2012).

“In this pathbreaking and deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the hidden story of the laws of war in the first century in the United States –and of the extraordinary code that emerged from it to change the course of world history. Lincoln’s Code is the haunting and inspiring story of an idea in American history: the idea that conduct in war can be regulated by law.”
—Lincoln’s Code Book Jacket

How to Fix Copyright

William Patry. How to Fix Copyright (Oxford University Press, 2011).

“…offers solid, evidence-based guidance that will reshape our understanding of what real copyright problems are—and how to navigate the complex dilemmas surrounding authorship and rights in the digital age. Among the topics covered are why we don’t have effective copyright laws, whether incentives and deterrence work, abandoning our obsession with exclusive rights in favor of ensuring that authors get paid, figuring out the proper length of copyright and the role of formalities, and encouraging socially useful but unauthorized uses.”

—How to Fix Copyright Book Jacket

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Gilbert King. Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (HarperCollins, 2012).

“Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as ‘one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.’”
—Devil in the Grove Book Jacket

*Pulitzer Prize winner

Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam

Fredrik Logevall (Cornell University). Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012).

“Fredrik Logevall’s excellent book Choosing War (1999) chronicled the American escalation of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. With Embers of War, he has written an even more impressive book about the French conflict in Vietnam and the beginning of the American one…. It is the most comprehensive history of that time. Logevall, a professor of history at Cornell University, has drawn from many years of previous scholarship as well as his own. And he has produced a powerful portrait of the terrible and futile French war from which Americans learned little as they moved toward their own engagement in Vietnam.”
—Alan Brinkley, The New York Times Book Review

*Pulitzer Prize winner