"The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary...

Released in conjunction with the 75th-anniversary DVD release of 'The Wizard of Oz', this book is the definitive story of how one of America's most beloved movies was made and a marvelous, unprecedented examination of how Hollywood used to make movies. This updated edition includes numerous photos and shares hundreds of interviews with cameramen, screenwriters, costume designers, directors, producers, light technicians, actors, and more to reveal...

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

"The conquest of indigenous land in the American East through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. Acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, son of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed...

"How did Burton Ritchie and DEA Special Agent Claude Cosey wind up in federal prison, convicted as drug kingpins, after being indicted years later in three states and taken to trial three times? The answer lies in the weirdest chapter of the War on Drugs, a synthetic saga that's unfolding to this day. It all stems from a little-known Reagan-era law called the Analogue Act. The 1986 law bans substances that are "substantially similar" to controlled...

An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought Surrealism to America, helping to shift the centre of the art world from Paris to New York and spark the movement that became Abstract Expressionism. In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: "I have only known two painting milieus well: the Parisian Surrealists, with whom I began painting seriously in New York in 1940, and the native movement...

"Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called "War on Terror" in Afghanistan, which to date has become the longest war fought by the USA and its allies, with thousands of deaths and injuries. For the first time, Emran Feroz describes this 20-year war from an inner Afghan perspective. From speaking to Hamid Karzai and Taliban officials to interviews with affected citizens who suffered the most from this war, this...