Department of State Suggested FSOT Reading List
Below is a list of reading material suggested by the Department of State to help you pass the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) and become a diplomat.
This page is a great resource, and I recommend you review the suggestions and consider purchasing a publication in the area(s) you believe you need to improve your knowledge.
Not sure the area(s) of the FSOT to improve? Take a practice test to find out!
From the U.S. Department of State Information Guide to the Foreign Service Officer Selection Process:
The Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) measures broad knowledge in world and national affairs, usually gathered over an extended period of time through education, reading, and life experiences. The best preparation is a good education, ideally one that includes courses in U.S. and world history, U.S. government and politics, international relations, political science, international economics and trade, geography, literature, English, management, and public administration. Familiarity with American society and culture is important.
Because the test covers such a broad range of topics, it is difficult to provide a formal, comprehensive reading list that will prepare someone to pass the test. Below, we suggest an illustrative list of the types of books and other readings that could prove useful.
Table of Contents
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English Usage
Technologies may change, but the need for clear and accurate communication never goes out of style. That is why for more than one hundred years The Chicago Manual of Style has remained the definitive guide for anyone who works with words.
In the seven years since the previous edition debuted, we have seen an extraordinary evolution in the way we create and share knowledge. This seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has been prepared with an eye toward how we find, create, and cite information that readers are as likely to access from their pockets as from a bookshelf. It offers updated guidelines on electronic workflows and publication formats, tools for PDF annotation and citation management, web accessibility standards, and effective use of metadata, abstracts, and keywords. It recognizes the needs of those who are self-publishing or following open access or Creative Commons publishing models. The citation chapters reflect the ever-expanding universe of electronic sources—including social media posts and comments, private messages, and app content—and also offer updated guidelines on such issues as DOIs, time stamps, and e-book locators.
Other improvements are independent of technological change. The chapter on grammar and usage includes an expanded glossary of problematic words and phrases and a new section on syntax as well as updated guidance on gender-neutral pronouns and bias-free language. Key sections on punctuation and basic citation style have been reorganized and clarified. To facilitate navigation, headings and paragraph titles have been revised and clarified throughout. And the bibliography has been updated and expanded to include the latest and best resources available.
This edition continues to reflect expert insights gathered from Chicago’s own staff and from an advisory board of publishing experts from across the profession. It also includes suggestions inspired by emails, calls, and even tweets from readers. No matter how much the means of communication change, The Chicago Manual of Style remains the ultimate resource for those who care about getting the details right.
You know the authors’ names. You recognize the title. You’ve probably used this book yourself. This is The Elements of Style, the classic style manual, now in a fourth edition. A new Foreword by Roger Angell reminds readers that the advice of Strunk & White is as valuable today as when it was first offered. This book’s unique tone, wit and charm have conveyed the principles of English style to millions of readers. Use the fourth edition of “the little book” to make a big impact with writing.
The Foreign Service and U.S. Foreign Policy
ADST has the world’s largest collection of U.S. diplomatic oral history. We have over 2,500 oral histories at ADST.org – and it’s growing every day! But that’s not all we do.
Our Mission: “Capturing, preserving, and sharing the experiences of America’s diplomats.”
ADST is committed to strengthening public appreciation of diplomacy’s contribution to America’s national interests, and enriching the professional knowledge of diplomatic practitioners. We do this by:
- Recording the oral histories of diplomats, family members, and others
- Facilitating the preparation and publication of books and memoirs
- Contributing to diplomatic case studies and educational materials
- Supporting the work of the Foreign Service Institute
The Office of Public Liaison’s academic-focused Foreign Policy Classroom creates an opportunity for students to attend a relevant foreign policy briefing with a Department official at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC.
The Bureau of Global Public Affairs launched the Foreign Policy Classroom as one of its signature domestic outreach tools in 2012. The Classroom is in session year-round for all students and faculty members interested in elevating their knowledge of foreign policy priorities. As you continue in your future academic pursuits, we encourage you to expand your campus to include the U.S. Department of State by attending the Foreign Policy Classroom.
The National Museum of American Diplomacy tells the story of the history, practice, and challenges of American diplomacy. Through exhibitions and programs, we inspire the American public to discover diplomacy and how it impacts their lives every day.
Since it first appeared in 1971, Rise to Globalism has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The ninth edition of this classic survey, now updated through the administration of George W. Bush, offers a concise and informative overview of the evolution of American foreign policy from 1938 to the present, focusing on such pivotal events as World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and 9/11. Examining everything from the Iran-Contra scandal to the rise of international terrorism, the authors analyze-in light of the enormous global power of the United States-how American economic aggressiveness, racism, and fear of Communism have shaped the nation’s evolving foreign policy.
Over the course of more than three decades as an American diplomat, William J. Burns played a central role in the most consequential diplomatic episodes of his time—from the bloodless end of the Cold War to the collapse of post–Cold War relations with Putin’s Russia, from post–9/11 tumult in the Middle East to the secret nuclear talks with Iran.
In The Back Channel, Burns recounts, with novelistic detail and incisive analysis, some of the seminal moments of his career. Drawing on a trove of newly declassified cables and memos, he gives readers a rare inside look at American diplomacy in action. His dispatches from war-torn Chechnya and Qaddafi’s bizarre camp in the Libyan desert and his warnings of the “Perfect Storm” that would be unleashed by the Iraq War will reshape our understanding of history—and inform the policy debates of the future. Burns sketches the contours of effective American leadership in a world that resembles neither the zero-sum Cold War contest of his early years as a diplomat nor the “unipolar moment” of American primacy that followed.
Ultimately, The Back Channel is an eloquent, deeply informed, and timely story of a life spent in service of American interests abroad. It is also a powerful reminder, in a time of great turmoil, of the enduring importance of diplomacy.
Inside a U.S. Embassy: Diplomacy at Work, All-New Third Edition of the Essential Guide to the Foreign Service
By Dorman
Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action.
In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world—from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist—is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on the job. Personal reports from the field give a sense of the extraordinary challenges—the coups, the natural disasters, the civil wars—and rewards of representing America to the world.
Inside a U.S. Embassy includes new chapters on the highly competitive Foreign Service entrance process, Foreign Service life outside the embassy, and briefings on topics such as handling high-level visits and service in war zones.
Filling a gap in the U.S. foreign policy textbook market, this innovative introduction shows students how real American foreign policy makers make real decisions. Drawing on and summarizing a vast amount of literature, author David Patrick Houghton introduces students to three basic theories of decision-making. He then applies each of these perspectives to six well-known historical cases that range from classic to contemporary: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Kosovo War, and the Iraq War. Houghton uses the crucial “decision points” of these events to give students a sense of what it is actually like to make high-level decisions. He also shows how the theories discussed in the book can be applied to these case studies.
Featuring a direct, accessible writing style, coverage of recent advances in the field–including new psychological models like prospect theory and poliheuristic theory–and an affordable price, The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy Decision Making serves as a perfect text or
supplement for courses in U.S. Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Decision-Making.
This textbook, the first comprehensive comparative study ever undertaken, surveys and compares the world’s ten largest diplomatic services: those of Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Chapters cover the distinctive histories and cultures of the services, their changing role in foreign policy making, and their preparations for the new challenges of the twenty-first century.
American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century, 4th Edition
By Jentleson
Addressing both foreign policy strategy and foreign policy politics, Bruce Jentleson―respected scholar, award-winning teacher, and foreign policy practitioner―offers students the theoretical framework, historical context, and policy analysis essential for understanding American foreign policy in the twenty-first century.
Professor Jentleson focuses on foreign policy strategy and foreign policy politics and employs a four-part framework (the four Ps: Power, Peace, Prosperity, and Principles) through which students can begin to appreciate the problems and choices faced by the United States as it tries to steer a course through world events.
The Fourth Edition of American Foreign Policy has been thoroughly updated with relevant political developments, including foreign policy changes instituted by the Obama administration.
Now in a fully updated edition that goes through the Trump administration and the election and formative period of the Biden administration, this compact and accessible introduction offers a historical perspective on the evolution of U.S. foreign policy from the founding of the country to the present. Joyce P. Kaufman provides students and general readers with a clear and concise understanding of key foreign-policy decisions and why they were made. She identifies the major themes that have guided foreign policy and the reasons that the United States pursued certain policies in the context of specific periods in the nation’s history. Kaufman focuses on the major actors involved in the making of foreign policy and the changing relationships among them. She also explains the major theoretical perspectives within international relations and contextualizes key foreign policy decisions as they fit these frameworks. This edition puts a particular focus on the creation of Cold War foreign policy, and why the end of the Cold War has continued to be such a challenge to the United States. Kaufman concludes with a look at the challenges the United States will continue to face, including existential threats such as climate change and disease, and how Americans can be prepared to address them.
Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the US Foreign Service, Third Edition
By Kopp and Naland
Career Diplomacy is an insider’s guide to the Foreign Service as an institution, a profession, and a career. In this thoroughly revised third edition, Kopp and Naland provide an up-to-date, authoritative, and candid account of the life and work of professional US diplomats, who advance and protect this country’s national security interests around the globe. The authors explore the five career tracks ― consular, political, economic, management, and public diplomacy ― through their own experience and through interviews with more than a hundred current and former members of the Foreign Service. They lay out what to expect in a Foreign Service career, from the entrance exam through midcareer and into the senior service ― how to get in, get around, and get ahead.
New in the third edition:
- A discussion of the relationship of the Foreign Service and the Department of State to other agencies, and to the combatant commands
- An expanded analysis of hiring procedures
- Commentary on challenging management issues in the Department of State, including the proliferation of political appointments in high-level positions and the difficulties of running an agency with employees in two personnel systems (Civil Service and Foreign Service)
- A fresh examination of the changing nature and demographics of the Foreign Service
This text covers integration of the State Department after 1945 and the subsequent appointments of Black ambassadors to Third World and African nations. Other topics include: the setbacks during the Eisenhower years and the gains achieved during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
American Foreign Relations: A History, Volume 2: Since 1895, 7th Edition
By Paterson, Clifford, Brigham, Donoqhue, and Hagan
The Politics of United States Foreign Policy helps students consider the players, processes, and politics that drive U.S. decisions and involvement in foreign policy. James Scott and Jerel Rosati emphasize that society, government, and global forces have a role to play in the struggle over competing values when it comes to foreign policymaking. The book discusses historical patterns, the president’s ability to influence both at home and abroad, and the tension between democracy and national security.
Now at CQ Press, the Seventh Edition has been updated to cover developments since the end of the Obama administration, the transition to the Trump administration, the challenges of changing international and domestic contexts, and the increasingly partisan political environment. The authors provide a comprehensive text that blends substance, theory, and stimulating analysis.
America has a long history of diplomacy–ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker–now is your chance to see the impact these Americans have had on the world.
Recounting the actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Zoellick identifies five traditions that have emerged from America’s encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future.
Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation.
U.S. Government and Politics
In the first comprehensive accounting of the US Supreme Court’s race-related jurisprudence, a distinguished historian and renowned civil rights lawyer scrutinize a legacy too often blighted by racial injustice.
The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.
From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record―a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.
Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America’s racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.
This stunningly persuasive book examines the persistent, radical gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. Samuel P. Huntington shows how Americans, throughout their history as a nation, have been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority. At the same time he reveals how, inevitably, these ideals have been perennially frustrated through the institutions and hierarchies required to carry on the essential functions of governing a democratic society.
From this antagonism between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power have risen four great political upheavals in American history. Every third generation, Huntington argues, Americans have tried to reconstruct their institutions to make them more truly reflect deeply rooted national ideals. Moving from the clenched fists and mass demonstrations of the 1960s, to the moral outrage of the Progressive and Jacksonian Eras, back to the creative ideological fervor of the American Revolution, he incisively analyzes the dissenters’ objectives. All, he pungently writes, sought to remove the fundamental disharmony between the reality of government in America and the ideals on which the American nation was founded.
Huntington predicts that the tension between ideals and institutions is likely to increase in this country in the future. And he reminds us that the fate of liberty and democracy abroad is intrinsically linked to the strength of our power in world affairs. This brilliant and controversial analysis deserves to rank alongside the works of Tocqueville, Bryce, and Hofstadter and will become a classic commentary on the meaning of America.
The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War
By Murray, Sinnreich, and Lacey
Within a variety of historical contexts, The Shaping of Grand Strategy addresses the most important tasks states have confronted: namely, how to protect their citizens against the short-range as well as long-range dangers their polities confront in the present and may confront in the future. To be successful, grand strategy demands that governments and leaders chart a course that involves more than simply reacting to immediate events. Above all, it demands they adapt to sudden and major changes in the international environment, which more often than not involves the outbreak of great conflicts but at times demands recognition of major economic, political, or diplomatic changes. This collection of essays explores the successes as well as failures of great states attempting to create grand strategies that work and aims at achieving an understanding of some of the extraordinary difficulties involved in casting, evolving, and adapting grand strategy to the realities of the world.
Public Policy in the United States: Challenges, Opportunities, and Changes, 6th Edition
By Rushefsky
Offering the widest breadth of policy issue coverage on the market, the sixth edition of this well-regarded text covers events through the 2016 elections and beyond. Though the content has been extensively and thoughtfully revised and updated, the sixth edition maintains its clear approach, without an overreliance on policy theory, and popular threefold structure: First, it introduces readers to the American approach to public policy making as it has been shaped by our political institutions, changing circumstances, and ideology. Second, it surveys all of the major policy areas from foreign policy to health care policy to environmental policy, and does so with well-selected illustrations, case studies, terms, and study questions. Third, it provides readers with analytical tools and frameworks to examine current problems and be able to understand and critique proposed public policy solutions. New to the sixth edition is an exploration of:
- The Affordable Care Act and its implementation, controversies, and impact
- The American economy since the end of the Great Recession, trade policy, and economic equality issues
- Foreign policy including relations with Russia, China, and Iran, as well as the civil war in Syria, the continuing conflicts in Iraq, and the challenge of ISIS
- The US Criminal Justice system and its incarceration challenges as well as issues of minorities, police, and crime.
This new edition includes, for the first time, a test bank with multiple choice, short answer, and discussion/essay questions as well as an instructor’s manual. Public Policy in the United States, 6e is an ideal undergraduate text for introductory courses on American Public Policy and Politics, and can be used as supplementary reading in undergraduate courses on policy process, policy analysis, and American government.
The Supremes' Greatest Hits, 2nd Revised & Updated Edition: The 44 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life
By Trachtman
Can the government seize your house to build a shopping mall? Can it determine what control you have over your own body? Can police search your cellphone? The answers to those questions come from the Supreme Court, whose rulings have shaped American life and justice and allowed Americans to retain basic freedoms such as privacy, free speech, and the right to a fair trial. Especially relevant in light of Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing, as President Obama gears for a fight over nominating his successor, and as we prepare to elect a new president who may get to appoint other justices, the revised and updated edition of Michael G. Trachtman’s page-turner includes ten important new cases from 2010 to 2015. In addition, a special section features analyses of the new term rulings planned for June 2016.
The new cases include:
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which restricts the right of governments to limit campaign contributions by corporations and unions; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which allows a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act requirement that corporations pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees; Riley v. California (2014), which ruled that police need warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest; and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.
U.S. History, Society, Customs, and Culture
Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, 6th Edition
By Davidson, DeLay, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
Known for its friendly narrative style and careful blending of political and social history, Nation of Nations offers a balanced approach to teaching the American history survey course. The story presented by the authors reflects their belief that the American past can only be fully understood when linked to events worldwide. As a result of this view, Nation of Nations has become the leader in the integration of global material, done in a sensible and thoughtful way. This sixth edition features expanded coverage of environmental and pre-colonial history by new coauthor Brian DeLay, as well as a completely redesigned map program, additional After the Fact content, and a new online version of the popular Primary Source Investigator.
We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories―the islands, atolls, and archipelagos―this country has governed and inhabited?
In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress.
In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
The danger of deportation hangs over the head of virtually every noncitizen in the United States. In the complexities and inconsistencies of immigration law, one can find a reason to deport almost any noncitizen at almost any time. In recent years, the system has been used with unprecedented vigor against millions of deportees.
We are a nation of immigrants–but which ones do we want, and what do we do with those that we don’t? These questions have troubled American law and politics since colonial times.
Deportation Nation is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. The post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Laws, the Fugitive Slave laws, the Indian “removals,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese Americans–all sought to remove those whose origins suggested they could never become “true” Americans. And for more than a century, millions of Mexicans have conveniently served as cheap labor, crossing a border that was not official until the early twentieth century and being sent back across it when they became a burden.
By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Daniel Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants’ lives and is used with increasing crudeness in a globalized but xenophobic world.
In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation.
Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself―a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas―“these truths,” Jefferson called them―political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Immigration Stories brings together highly readable accounts, written by distinguished legal scholars, of 13 canonical cases that illustrate how immigration law is actually made. The authors illuminate the law’s development by emphasizing the choices made (and foregone) before and during each of the litigations, including choices by immigrants and advocacy groups, private and government lawyers, Congress, the executive branch, and judges. These accounts are concerned less with legal doctrine than with the human dramas and tactical decisions that surround and give shape to that doctrine. Designed to bring the law to vivid life, this book is highly recommended as a supplement to the traditional immigration law casebook.
From Trump’s proposed border wall and travel ban to the marching of white supremacists in Charlottesville, America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as “lively and vital,” editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack.
- Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria.
- Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in.
- Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir.
- Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage.
These writers, and the many others in this urgent collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.
Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation’s past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounted the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States–Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others–groups who helped create this country’s rich mosaic culture.
Now, Ronald Takaki has revised his landmark work and made it even more relevant and important. Among the new additions to the book are:
- The role of black soldiers in preserving the Union
- The history of Chinese Americans from 1900-1941
- An investigation into the hot-button issue of “illegal” immigrants from Mexico
- A look at the sudden visibility of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.
This new edition of A Different Mirror is a remarkable achievement that grapples with the raw truth of American history and examines the ultimate question of what it means to be an American.
From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
World History and Geography
Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities.
The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories.
Born in Blood and Fire, Fourth Edition has been extensively revised to heighten emphasis on current cultural analyses of Latin American society and facilitate meaningful connections between the Encounter and the present. Throughout the Fourth Edition, a new full-color design highlights an enriched and expanded map and illustration program. This, along with new quizzing and assessment options and a new edition of the companion reader, offers students and instructors more support than ever before.
The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World
By Diamond
In 1974, nearly three-quarters of all countries were dictatorships; today, more than half are democracies. Yet recent efforts to promote democracy have stumbled, and many democratic governments are faltering.
In this sweeping vision for advancing freedom around the world, renowned social scientist Larry Diamond examines how and why democracy progresses. He demonstrates that the desire for democracy runs deep, even in very poor countries, and that seemingly entrenched regimes like Iran and China could become democracies within a generation. He also dissects the causes of the “democratic recession” in critical states, including the crime-infested oligarchy in Russia and the strong-armed populism of Venezuela.
To spur a renewed democratic boom Diamond urges the United States to vigorously support good governance and free civic organizations. Only then will the spirit of democracy be secured.
Less than a decade ago, China did not have a single high-speed train in service. Today, it owns a network of 14,000 miles of high-speed rail, far more than the rest of the world combined. Now, China is pushing its tracks into Southeast Asia, reviving a century-old colonial fantasy of an imperial railroad stretching to Singapore; and kicking off a key piece of the One Belt One Road initiative, which has a price tag of $1 trillion and, reaches inside the borders of more than 60 countries.
The Pan-Asia Railway portion of One Belt One Road could transform Southeast Asia, bringing shiny Chinese cities, entire economies, and waves of migrants where none existed before. But if it doesn’t succeed, that would be a cautionary tale about whether a new superpower, with levels of global authority unimaginable just a decade ago, can pull entire regions into its orbit simply with tracks, sweat, and lots of money. Journalist Will Doig traveled to Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore to chronicle the dramatic transformations taking place―and to find out whether ordinary people have a voice in this moment of economic, political, and cultural collision.
Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.
How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors.
Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.
Employing an engaging question-and-answer format, The Arab Uprisings explores the revolutionary protests that have rocked the Arab world since late 2010.
In this updated and revised second edition, James L. Gelvin explores the varied paths taken by the uprisings and assesses their historical and global significance. Gelvin begins with an overview-What were the conditions in the Arab world that led to the uprisings? Where did the demands for human and democratic rights and social and economic justice come from?-before turning to specific countries in the region. He examines how the long history of state-building in Tunisia and Egypt ultimately determined the paths taken by uprisings there. He explains why the weakness of state institutions in Libya and Yemen led to violence and chaos. He explores the commonalities of the “coup-proofed” states Bahrain and Syria and the tragic course of their uprisings.
In the final chapter, he discusses the implications of the uprisings. What do they mean for the United States, al-Qaeda, and the balance of power in the region? What do they say about the viability of the Arab state system? What effects have they had on the Israel-Palestine conflict? What conclusions might we draw from the uprisings so far? When will we know their historical meaning?
The sixth edition of Understanding Contemporary Africa, and the first under the editorship of Peter Schraeder, combines the historic strengths of the previous editions with coverage of new topics suggested over the years by the many instructors who regularly assign the text in their classes.
Entirely new chapters on the politics of public health, the changing roles of women, LGBTIQ rights, environmental challenges, and population and urbanization, along with new treatments of such classic topics as geography, history, politics, economics, international relations, and more, make for an unparalleled introduction to the complexities of Africa today.
By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783
By Green
Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation’s political philosophy and material realities.
Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history’s major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America’s stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Hochschild
In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area’s population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold’s Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century’s first great human rights movement.
A little more than a century ago, independent thinkers across Asia sought to frame a distinct intellectual tradition that would inspire the continent’s rise to dominance. Yet this did not come to pass, and today those thinkers―Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empire―are seen as outsiders within the main anticolonial tradition. But as Pankaj Mishra demonstrates in this enthralling portrait of like minds, Asia’s revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants; rather, it is rooted in the ideas of these once renowned intellectuals. Now, when the ascendency of Asia seems possible as never before, From the Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely―a book indispensable to our understanding of the world and our place in it.
The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present
By Pomfret
From the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China’s growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee missionaries who brought Christianity and education to China, to the Chinese who built the American West, the United States and China have always been dramatically intertwined. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America’s ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns―rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment―were set in motion hundreds of years earlier.
Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important―and often the most perplexing―relationship between any two countries in the world.
As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.
By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.
A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them.
The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas. He explains how climate change became a great issue and leads readers through the rebirth of renewable energies, energy independence, and the return of the electric car. Epic in scope and never more timely, The Quest vividly reveals the decisions, technologies, and individuals that are shaping our future.
“This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s blockbuster on the United States in the twenty-first century, and the trends he identifies have proceeded faster than anyone anticipated. How might the nation continue to thrive in a truly global era? In this fully updated 2.0 edition, Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.
Economics
Macroeconomics: Economic Growth, Fluctuations, and Policy, 6th Edition
Not surprisingly, regular people suddenly are paying a lot closer attention to the economy than ever before. But economics, with its weird technical jargon and knotty concepts and formulas can be a very difficult subject to get to grips with on your own. Enter Greg Ip and his Little Book of Economics. Like a patient, good-natured tutor, Greg, one of today’s most respected economics journalists, walks you through everything you need to know about how the economy works. Short on technical jargon and long on clear, concise, plain-English explanations of important terms, concepts, events, historical figures and major players, this revised and updated edition of Greg’s bestselling guide clues you in on what’s really going on, what it means to you and what we should be demanding our policymakers do about the economy going forward.
- From inflation to the Federal Reserve, taxes to the budget deficit, you get indispensible insights into everything that really matters about economics and its impact on everyday life
- Special sections featuring additional resources of every subject discussed and where to find additional information to help you learn more about an issue and keep track of ongoing developments
- Offers priceless insights into the roots of America’s economic crisis and its aftermath, especially the role played by excessive greed and risk-taking, and what can be done to avoid another economic cataclysm
- Digs into globalization, the roots of the Euro crisis, the sources of China’s spectacular growth, and why the gap between the economy’s winners and losers keeps widening
Stephanie Kelton’s brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country.
Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis.
MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.
Now you can master the principles of economics with the help of the most popular economics textbook trusted by students worldwide — Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, 9E. Using a clear, inviting writing style, this book emphasizes only the material that helps you better understand the world and economy in which you live. You learn to become a more astute participant in today’s economy with a strong understanding of both the potential and limits of economic policy. The latest relevant examples bring economic principles to life. Acclaimed author Gregory Mankiw explains, “I tried to put myself in the position of someone seeing economics for the first time. My goal is to emphasize the material that students should and do find interesting about the study of the economy.” To help you further master the key principles of economics in this edition, powerful student-focused digital resources are available in the leading MindTap digital learning and homework solution.
Mathematics and Statistics
Business intelligence (BI) used to be so simple – in theory anyway. Integrate and copy data from your transactional systems into a specialized relational database, apply BI reporting and query tools and add business users. Job done.
No longer. Analytics, big data and an array of diverse technologies have changed everything. More importantly, business is insisting on ever more value, ever faster from information and from IT in general. An emerging biz-tech ecosystem demands that business and IT work together.
Business unIntelligence reflects the new reality that in today’s socially complex and rapidly changing world, business decisions must be based on a combination of rational and intuitive thinking. Integrating cues from diverse information sources and tacit knowledge, decision makers create unique meaning to innovate heuristically at the speed of thought. This book provides a wealth of new models that business and IT can use together to design support systems for tomorrow’s successful organizations.
Dr. Barry Devlin, one of the earliest proponents of data warehousing, goes back to basics to explore how the modern trinity of information, process and people must be reinvented and restructured to deliver the value, insight and innovation required by modern businesses. From here, he develops a series of novel architectural models that provide a new foundation for holistic information use across the entire business. From discovery to analysis and from decision making to action taking, he defines a fully integrated, closed-loop business environment. Covering every aspect of business analytics, big data, collaborative working and more, this book takes over where BI ends to deliver the definitive framework for information use in the coming years.
From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren’t enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models—from linear regression to random walks and far beyond—that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page’s “many-model paradigm,” which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.
For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.
And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal―and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
Management and Leadership
Everyone knows that high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, but until Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman’s brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our “two minds”—the rational and the emotional—and how they together shape our destiny.
Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors, which include self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart—and they aren’t fixed at birth. Although shaped by childhood experiences, emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened throughout our adulthood—with immediate benefits to our health, our relationships, and our work.
The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Emotional Intelligence could not come at a better time—we spend so much of our time online, more and more jobs are becoming automated and digitized, and our children are picking up new technology faster than we ever imagined. With a new introduction from the author, the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition prepares readers, now more than ever, to reach their fullest potential and stand out from the pack with the help of EI.
Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations, 12th Edition
The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers
By Tett
The Silo Effect asks a basic question: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as Daniel Kahnemann, the psychologist put it, are we sometimes so “blind to our own blindness”?
Gillian Tett, “a first-rate journalist and a good storyteller” (The New York Times), answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg’s City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead.
Congratulations, you’re a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don’t really know what you’re doing.
That’s exactly how Julie Zhuo felt when she became a rookie manager at the age of 25. She stared at a long list of logistics–from hiring to firing, from meeting to messaging, from planning to pitching–and faced a thousand questions and uncertainties.
- How was she supposed to spin teamwork into value
- How could she be a good steward of her reports’ careers
- What was the secret to leading with confidence in new and unexpected situations
Now, having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie knows the most important lesson of all: great managers are made, not born. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.
The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed everyday examples and transformative insights, including:
- How to tell a great manager from an average manager (illustrations included)
- When you should look past an awkward interview and hire someone anyway
- How to build trust with your reports through not being a boss
- Where to look when you lose faith and lack the answers
Whether you’re new to the job, a veteran leader, or looking to be promoted, this is the handbook you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.
Communications
How Highly Effective People Speak: How High Performers Use Psychology to Influence With Ease
By Andrei
Why do we think what we think? Think we know what we think we know? Believe what we believe? Like what we like? Do what we do?
Why do others trust or distrust us? Respect or disrespect us? Listen to or ignore us? Reach out to or neglect us? Like or dislike us? Praise or slander us? Believe or doubt us? That’s not all…
Why do others follow our lead or stand in our way? Give us opportunities or send them elsewhere? Support our striving for success and appreciate our message or toss it – and us – aside? Decades of cutting-edge (but unheard-of) scientific research presents an answer…
Because hidden, little-known secrets of psychology influence everything about us…
Neglecting them is swimming upstream. You can’t change minds, win friends, or influence people. You can’t earn undivided attention or get the respect you deserve. You undermine your professional image, stagnate your career, and destroy your confidence until communication makes you anxious.
You don’t deserve this. Neither did I. I remember wondering, “Why do people never support my ideas? Why am I drowning in a sea of ‘sorry, maybe later’ (AKA never)? Why have I stopped succeeding?” Luckily, everything changed when I answered one question…
What are the communication habits of highly effective people?
It comes down to one secret: Highly effective people speak how the human mind evolved to interpret information. The result? They easily persuade and instantly influence, turning communication from an obstacle into an opportunity. They enrich their careers, get more done, and advance with stunning speed.
They impact and inspire others, rising to positions of leadership. They quickly succeed, excel with ease, and shape the world. They attract support, feel confident, and smash goal after goal. Who are they? Presidents and CEOs; top-performers and respected professionals; leaders and visionaries.
And here’s my question to you:
Will you be one of them?
In How Highly Effective People Speak, you’ll discover 194 communication habits of highly effective people (proven by 57 scientific studies) including:
- How to get more done with less effort by influencing others to support you
- How to attract others (instead of turning them away and seeming unfriendly) with the correct type of body language
- How to make people systematically, predictably, and reliably overweigh your opinion by activating the availability bias
- How to charge more or pay less (for the same product) and win every negotiation with the anchoring effect
- How to effortlessly make others want something by activating one little-known cognitive bias (called “essential” by billionaire investor Charlie Munger, partner to Warren Buffet)
- How to lead with ease and reliably influence teams by using the contrast effect
- How to effortlessly speak with memorable eloquence by applying 2,000-year-old secrets of powerful language
- How to ace every interview, meeting, and presentation with ease by activating agent detection bias
- How to quickly diffuse all objections by activating the little-known (but extremely powerful) zero-risk bias
- How to make people believe something even if they think the exact opposite with the illusory truth effect
- How to appear authoritative, trustworthy, and capable in 10 seconds by activating the halo effect
- How to combine the science of psychology with the art of communication and create a critical competitive advantage in life
Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy since 9/11
By DiMaggio
The blurring of entertainment, information, and persuasion is reshaping work, life, and citizenship. As a result, our relationship to media has never been so important nor so complex. By asking critical questions about what they watch, listen to, read, and use, students can be better prepared to be responsible communicators who can use a variety of formats and genres for self-expression and advocacy.
Covering a wide range of topics including the rise of news partisanship, algorithmic personalization and social media, stereotypes and media addiction, advertising and media economics, and media influence on personal and social identity, Renee Hobbs helps students develop the lifelong learning competencies and habits of mind needed to navigate an increasingly complex media environment.
Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases, and Techniques, 5th Edition
This updated third edition presents a wide-scale, interdisciplinary guide to social media. Examining platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube, the book analyzes social media’s use in journalism, broadcasting, public relations, advertising and marketing.
Lipschultz focuses on key concepts, best practices, data analyses, law and ethics – all promoting the critical thinking that is needed to use new, evolving and maturing networking tools effectively within social and mobile media spaces. Featuring historical markers and contemporary case studies, essays from some of the industry’s leading social media innovators and a comprehensive glossary, this practical, multipurpose textbook gives readers the resources they will need to both evaluate and utilize current and future forms of social media communication.
Among other changes, updates to the third edition include a deep dive into new approaches to analytics, as well as greater discussion of law and ethics in light of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, the roll-out of GDPR and new case law relating to social media. Social Media Communication is the perfect social media primer for students and professionals, and, with a dedicated teaching guide, ideal for instructors, too.
Public Speaking: Finding Your Voice, 10th Edition
The author with over five decades of professional and academic experience has considerably revised and updated every chapter of the book to present, contemporary diverse public relations and media practices. As a result, the new edition contains the best of previous editions and at the same time replaces all the dated material with new figures and advanced information. Subjects like Mass Communication, Public Relations, Journalism, Advertising, Media Studies, Event Management, PR 2.0 New Model and eight case studies including Mahatma Gandhi World’s Greatest Communicator – all in one make this edition truly unique and the only textbook of this type in India. The other key topics that have been given attention in the book include PR as a Strategic Management Function; Communication Models: History of Indian PR; Standards and Ethics in PR; Corporate Communications; PR in Government, Public Sector and NGOs; Global PR; Internet and Social Media; Multimedia PR Campaign and PR into the Future. Learning Tools Students learning tools such as Chapter Opening Preview, Relevant Case Problems in the Text, End of the Chapter Summary for quick understanding, Review Questions for practice, the Glossary and traits needed for success in PR career are added value to this edition. The text is a must read for every student, faculty and practitioners of Mass Communication, Media Relations, Journalism, PR & Advertising and all management disciplines.
It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance.
Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. Rider shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States utilized Olympic host cities as launching pads for hyping the American economic and political system. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. Rider also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.
Deeply researched and boldly argued, Cold War Games recovers an essential chapter in Olympic and postwar history.
Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 14th Edition
Understanding Intercultural Communication, 3rd Edition (UIC3) emphasizes a perspective that integrates intersectional identity complexity with a strong values orientation in shaping intercultural contact. We address contemporary issues such as the important roles and effects of technology in our everyday intercultural lives. This is an introductory book designed for undergraduate students, teachers, and practitioners searching for a user-friendly textbook on the fundamentals of intercultural communication. With the lens of flexible intercultural communication, we thread through an abundance of intercultural material with a very practical theme. By integrating current empirical research with lively intercultural examples, the authors ask thought-provoking questions and pose ethical dilemmas for students to ponder.
Consular and Immigration
A proposal that immigrants in the United States should be offered a path to legalized status.
The Obama administration promises to take on comprehensive immigration reform in 2010, setting policymakers to work on legislation that might give the approximately eleven million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States a path to legalization of status. Commentators have been quick to observe that any such proposal will face intense opposition. Few issues have so divided the country in recent years as immigration. Immigrants and the Right to Stay brings the debate into the realm of public reason. Political theorist Joseph Carens argues that although states have a right to control their borders, the right to deport those who violate immigration laws is not absolute. With time, immigrants develop a moral claim to stay. Emphasizing the moral importance of social membership, and drawing on principles widely recognized in liberal democracies, Carens calls for a rolling amnesty that gives unauthorized migrants a path to regularize their status once they have been settled for a significant period of time. After Carens makes his case, six experts from across the political spectrum respond. Some protest that he goes too far; others say he does not go far enough in protecting the rights of migrants. Several raise competing moral claims and others help us understand how the immigration problem became so large. Carens agrees that no moral claim is absolute, and that, on any complex public issue, principled debate involves weighing competing concerns. But for him the balance falls clearly on the side of amnesty.
This incisive book provides a succinct overview of the new academic field of citizenship and immigration, as well as presenting a fresh and original argument about changing citizenship in our contemporary human rights era.
Instead of being nationally resilient or in “postnational” decline, citizenship in Western states has continued to evolve, converging on a liberal model of inclusive citizenship with diminished rights implications and increasingly universalistic identities. This convergence is demonstrated through a sustained comparison of developments in North America, Western Europe and Australia. Topics covered in the book include: recent trends in nationality laws; what ethnic diversity does to the welfare state; the decline of multiculturalism accompanied by the continuing rise of antidiscrimination policies; and the new state campaigns to “upgrade” citizenship in the post-2001 period.
Sophisticated and informative, and written in a lively and accessible style, this book will appeal to upper-level students and scholars in sociology, political science, and immigration and citizenship studies.
Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
By Motomura
In Americans in Waiting, Motomura discovers in our national past a simple yet powerful approach to immigration and citizenship. Rewriting the conventional story, Motomura uncovers how for over 150 years, many immigrants were immediately put on track to U.S. citizenship. They were entitled to overseas diplomatic protection and eligible to homestead land on the western frontier. Citizens-to-be were even allowed to vote. In sum, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, and immigrants were future citizens–Americans in waiting. Once central to law and policy, this view has all but vanished. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the United States began to treat its immigrants in one of two ways: as signatories to a contract that sets the terms of their stay in this country, or as affiliates who can earn rights only as they become, over time, enmeshed in the nation’s life. Immigration is now seen too often as a problem to be solved, rather than a pillar of our nation’s strength.
A panoramic history of the past 200 years of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers a clear lesson: only by recovering this lost history of immigration can we ensure that both current and future citizens share in the sense of belonging that is crucial to full participation in American life.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965
By Yang
A sweeping history of the twentieth-century battle to reform American immigration laws that set the stage for today’s roiling debates.
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.
In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before―and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined.
Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.
Great resource. I would note that Inside a U.S. Embassy: Diplomacy at Work is also recommended by the State Department: http://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/suggested-reading . Another recommendation from that primary State list is the monthly Foreign Service Journal — for insights into the career and to foreign affairs through a Foreign Service lens. Keep up the good work.
Shawn Dorman, IUSE and FSJ Editor
PS If you might be interested in writing something for the Foreign Service Journal relating to your ambassador backgrounds study, please be in touch. [email protected]
Fantastic. oh and by the way… Happy New Year!
Thank you for the wonderful information. I have put together an order of a good selection from this list. I hope you have set up an affiliate link and are getting something for your hard work. Might be something to think about. Anyway, great stuff.
Hi Brett, all the books are connected to an affiliate link with Amazon. Glad to hear you enjoyed the resource and it was helpful. I truly appreciate the support. Best, Jack
I would add : http://www.afsa.org/inside
Inside a U.S. Embassy: Diplomacy at Work
Hi Travelingcat, I completely agree with you! Great book and one I have read myself. The books listed above are ones specifically suggested by the State Department, which is why ‘Diplomacy at Work’ is not mentioned. I do plan on promoting that book further as this blog grows.
Glad to see you are a fellow blogger and love your tagline! I also definitely agree with your post, ‘expect the unexpected’. I was a FSO dependent growing up and the experience was amazing! Hope you and your kids are enjoying it!