The Right Answer


Book Description

The first declared candidate for president in 2020 delivers a passionate call for bipartisan action, entrepreneurial innovation, and a renewed commitment to the American idea The son of a union electrician and grandson of an immigrant, John K. Delaney grew up believing that anything was possible in America. Before he was fifty, he founded, built and then sold two companies worth billions of dollars. Driven by a deep desire to serve, in 2012 he stepped away from his businesses, ran for Congress, and won. Now he has a new mission: unifying our terribly divided nation and guiding it to a brighter future. As a boy, Delaney learned the importance of working hard, telling the truth and embracing compromise. As an entrepreneur, he succeeded because he understood the need to ensure opportunity for all, focus on the future, and think creatively about problem-solving. In these pages, he illustrates the potency of these principles with vivid stories from his childhood, his career in business, his family, and his new life as a politician. He also writes candidly about the often frustrating experience of working on Capitol Hill, where many of his colleagues care more about scoring political points than improving the lives of their fellow Americans. With a clear eye and an open heart, he explains that only by seeing both sides of anargument and releasing our inner entrepreneur can we get back to constructive, enlightened governing. Seventy years ago, John F. Kennedy appealed to our best instincts when he said, “Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer.” In this inspiring book, John K. Delaney asks all of us to cast aside destructive, partisan thinking and join him in an urgent endeavor: working together to forge a new era of American greatness.




To Unify a Nation


Book Description

Exploring the issues of the separation between religion and state in Israel, this book by Knesset parliament member Rabbi Dov Lipman lays out his vision for the future. Lipman was elected to the Yesh Atid party, which, though largely secular, calls for a more moderate and open form of Judaism. His is a voice of reason in the religious debates and battles that have threatened to undermine Jewish unity in Israel and around the world. Lipman has observed firsthand the polarization, extremism, and discrimination that have been on the upswing in Israel, and his book examines specific practical issues rather than general theological questions in the Israeli political scene. As the only ultra-Orthodox member of the current coalition, he offers a unique insight into the internal societal struggles of the Jewish community as well as the hope for a better future for both Israel and Jews around the world.




How to Educate a Citizen


Book Description

Why a dumbed-down curriculum is bad for our democracy: “A persuasive, scientifically sound case for an education revolution.” — Shelf Awareness In How to Educate a Citizen, E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America’s public schools, particularly at the elementary level, to educate our children more effectively to help heal and preserve the nation. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on “child-centered learning.” History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge have been dumbed down by vacuous learning “techniques” and “values-based” curricula; indoctrinated by graduate schools of education, administrators and educators have believed they are teaching reading and critical thinking skills. Yet these cannot be taught in the absence of strong content, Hirsch argues. The consequence is a loss of shared knowledge that would enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions. A broken approach to school not only leaves our children underprepared and erodes the American dream but also loosens the bonds that hold the nation together. Drawing on early schoolmasters and educational reformers such as Noah Webster and Horace Mann, Hirsch charts the rise and fall of the American early education system and provides a blueprint for closing the national gap in knowledge, communications, and allegiance. Critical and compelling, How to Educate a Citizen galvanizes our schools to equip children with the power of shared knowledge. “Concerned citizens , teachers, and parents take note! We ignore this book at our peril.” —Joel Klein, former Chancellor of New York City Public Schools




Unified


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller In a divided country desperate for unity, two sons of South Carolina show how different races, life experiences, and pathways can lead to a deep friendship—even in a state that was rocked to its core by the 2015 Charleston church shooting. Tim Scott, an African-American US senator, and Trey Gowdy, a white US congressman, won’t allow racial lines to divide them. They work together, eat meals together, campaign together, and make decisions together. Yet in the fall of 2010—as two brand-new members of the US House of Representatives—they did not even know each other. Their story as politicians and friends began the moment they met and is a model for others seeking true reconciliation. In Unified, Senator Scott and Congressman Gowdy, through honesty and vulnerability, inspire others to evaluate their own stories, clean the slate, and extend a hand of friendship that can change your churches, communities, and the world.




Information and Power in History


Book Description

The relationship between information and power is a relevant subject for all times. Today’s perceived ‘information revolution’ has caused information to become a separate object of study during the last two decades for several disciplines. As the contemporary perspective is dominant, information history as a discipline of its own has not yet crystallized. In bringing together studies around a new research agenda on the relationship between information and power across time and space, presenting various governance regimes, media, materials, and modes of communication, this book forces us to rethink the prospects and challenges for such a new discipline.




Nations Divided


Book Description

At the same time, Doyle negotiates the conceptual slipperiness of nationalism by discussing it as both constructed and real, unifying and divisive, inspiration for good and excuse for atrocity."--BOOK JACKET.




What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings


Book Description

Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.




Germany's Two Unifications


Book Description

Germany's unique historical experience of undergoing national unification twice in a little over a century makes it a fascinating object of study. In this volume the processes of unification are analysed from the point of view of historians, political scientists and literary historians. Because each event had quite different historical pre-conditions (the first having been long anticipated and pursued, whereas the second took virtually all participants by surprise), the processes of adjustment to it have differed in many ways. Yet in each case the idea of national unity has held sway powerfully as a norm guiding the responses of those involved.




Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Throughout history, humanity has borne witness to the political and moral challenges that arise when people place national identity above allegiance to geo-political states or international communities. This book discusses the concept of nations and nationalism from social, philosophical, geological, theological and anthropological perspectives. It examines the subject through conflicts past and present, including recent conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, rather than exclusively focusing on theory. Above all, this fascinating and comprehensive work clearly shows how feelings of nationalism are an inescapable part of being human.




The Goddess and the Nation


Book Description

Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unifying symbol for the country’s diverse communities. Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present. By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.