Challenge your students to ENGAGE in the conversation and process; THINK about the ideas, history, structure, and function; and DEBATE the merits of American government and politics in the 21st century. In a storytelling approach that weaves contemporary examples together with historical context, By the People: Debating American Government, Brief Second Edition, explores the themes and ideas that drive the great debates in American government and politics. It introduces students to big questions like Who governs? How does our system of government work? What does government do? and Who are we? By challenging students with these questions, the text gets them to think about, engage with, and debate the merits of U.S. government and politics. Ideal for professors who prefer a shorter text, By the People, Brief Second Edition, condenses the content of the comprehensive edition while also preserving its essential insights, organization, and approach. Approximately 20% shorter and less expensive than its parent text, the full-color Brief Second Edition features a more streamlined narrative and is enhanced by its own unique supplements package. ENGAGE * -By the Numbers- boxes containing fun facts help frame the quizzical reality of American politics and government * -See For Yourself- features enable students to connect with the click of a smart phone to videos and other interactive online content THINK * Chapter One introduces students to seven key American ideas, which are revisited throughout the text * -The Bottom Line- summaries conclude each chapter section, underscoring the most important aspects of the discussion DEBATE * -What Do You Think?- boxes encourage students to use their critical-thinking skills and debate issues in American government * Four major themes, in the form of questions to spark debate, are presented to students in Chapter One and appear throughout the text

Introduces citizens to solutions for reforming the American campaign finance system.

Unless the economy is of the people and by the people it will never be for the people. This book is for people who want to know what a desirable alternative to capitalism might look like. It is for people who want more than rosy rhetoric and Pollyannaish descriptions of people working in harmony. It is for people want to dig into what economic justice and economic democracy mean. It is a book for optimists-who believe the human species must be capable of something better than succumbing to competition and greed or authoritarianism, and would like to know how we can do it. It is also a book for skeptics-who demand to be shown, explicitly and concretely, how a modern economy can dispense with markets and authoritarian planning, and how hundreds of millions of people can manage their own division of labor efficiently and equitably.

-- Thomas F. Schwartz, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Lincoln Herald

Between 1898 and 1918, many American states introduced the initiative, referendum, and recall--known collectively as direct democracy. Most interpreters have seen the motives for these reform measures as purely political, but Goebel demonstrates that the call for direct democracy was deeply rooted in antimonopoly sentiment. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of direct democracy, particularly in California, and Goebel's analysis of direct democracy's history, evolution, and ultimate unsuitability as a grassroots tool is particularly timely.

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

View our feature on Geraldine Books’s People of the Book. From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March, the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript through centuries of exile and war In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she begins to unlock the book’s mysteries. The reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation. In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city’s rising anti-Semitism. In inquisition-era Venice, a Catholic priest saves it from burning. In Barcelona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of enforced exile. And in Seville in 1480, the reason for the Haggadah’s extraordinary illuminations is finally disclosed. Hanna’s investigation unexpectedly plunges her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. Her experiences will test her belief in herself and the man she has come to love. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is at once a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity, an ambitious, electrifying work by an acclaimed and beloved author.