San Antonio College Library

Returning from France, Jefferson strives to preserve the fragile new U.S. government and helps create the first political party, in bitter struggles with the Federalists. He becomes vice president in 1797, and the third U.S. president in 1801. His Louisiana Purchase doubles the nation's size, but he faces controversy and scandal, finally retiring to his beloved Monticello in 1809. His last years are spent founding the University of Virginia.

Beginning with the absolutely critical first moments of the outbreak in China, and ending with an epilogue on the vaccine rollout and the unprecedented events between the election of Joseph Biden and his inauguration, Lawrence Wright's The Plague Year surges forward with essential information -- and fascinating historical parallels -- examining the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"From Washington Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize, shocking new reporting on Donald Trump's unique presidency and its implications. Rucker and Leonnig have deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., and for the past three years have chronicled in depth the ways President Donald Trump has reinvented the presidency in his own image, shaken foreign...

"When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Vice-President Andrew Johnson became 'the Accidental President,' it was a dangerous time in America. Congress was divided over how the Union should be reunited: when and how the secessionist South should regain full status, whether former Confederates should be punished, and when and whether black men should be given the vote. Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore...

Why the Right Went Wrong offers a historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater's worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. The radicalism of today's conservatism is not the product of the Tea Party, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes. The Tea Partiers are the true heirs to Goldwater ideology. The purity movement...

America's political system isn't broken: it's working exactly as designed. But Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us--and how we are polarizing it--with disastrous results. In examining the structural and psychological forces behind America's descent into division and dysfunction, he shows that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Now our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural...

"For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration, first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Briefing, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moments of the presidency....

"Impeaching the President is lucid, balanced, and deeply informed. Anyone in search of a reasoned guide to the unreason of our current situation should read it."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction "Ousting a president is a complicated and uncertain endeavor, according to this perceptive study of impeachments. ... [This book] shrewdly assesses the impeachability of President Trump based on his alleged offenses...

"A lively, behind-the-scenes look at the historic cohort of diverse, young, and groundbreaking women newly elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 as they arrive in Washington, DC, and start working for change, written by a news reporter with sharp insight and deep knowledge of the Hill"--

"In 2015, lauded journalist Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as the bestselling book The View from Flyover Country. Now, for the first time ever, The View from Flyover Country is in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on how the Trump presidency was the inevitable result of the realities first captured in Kendzior's writing. A piercing critique of labor exploitation, race relations,...