A book salon on Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America by Joseph A. McCartin. What's the plural of Texas? Frank Jacobs wants to know. The dangers of a “culture of honor”: Why are Texan men more likely to be aggressive risk takers, prone to accidental death? A review of Henry Clay: The Essential American by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. Timothy Snyder on the Great Plains as the Land of No News: So long as a large swath of the country only exists in retrospect, the people who live there will understandably vote for the party that they regard as conservative. America needs more powerful bureaucrats: No one wants another Hoover, but we should remember that career public servants built this nation's infrastructure. The introduction to The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality by Thomas Borstelmann. Do conservatives who attack the New Deal actually know what America gained from it? An excerpt from Michael Hiltzik’s The New Deal: A Modern History. A review of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America by Maureen Stanton. An excerpt from American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard (and more and more and more). The spread of start-up America: Why are areas like the South and cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor turning into mini-Silicon Valleys? The inventor of our politics: Jack Rakove reviews James Madison by Richard Brookhiser (and more).
