A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Human beings have never had it better than we have it now in the West. So why are we on the verge of throwing it all away? In 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California–Berkeley. Hundreds of police officers were required to protect his speech. What was so frightening about Shapiro? He came to argue that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas; that we have let grievances replace our sense of community and political expediency limit our individual rights; that we are teaching our kids that their emotions matter more than rational debate; and that the only meaning in life is arbitrary and subjective. As a society, we are forgetting that almost everything great that has ever happened in history happened because of people who believed in both Judeo-Christian values and in the Greek-born power of reason. In The Right Side of History, Shapiro sprints through more than 3,500 years, dozens of philosophers, and the thicket of modern politics to show how our freedoms are built upon the twin notions that every human being is made in God’s image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God’s world. We can thank these values for the birth of science, the dream of progress, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions more spiritual purpose. Yet we are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. We believe we can satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, scientific materialism, progressive politics, authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity. We can’t. The West is special, and in The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro bravely explains how we have lost sight of the moral purpose that drives each of us to be better, the sacred duty to work together for the greater good,.

The Right Side of History tells the 100-year history of queer activism in a series of revealing close-ups, first-person accounts, and intimate snapshots of LGBT pioneers and radicals. This diverse cast stretches from the Edwardian period to today. Described by gay scholar Jonathan Katz as "willfully cacophonous, a chorus of voices untamed," The Right Side of History sets itself apart by starting with the turn-of-the-century bohemianism of Isadora Duncan and the 1924 establishment of the nation's first gay group, the Society for Human Rights; it also includes gay activism of labor unions in the 1920s and 1930s; the 1950s civil rights movement; the 1960s anti-war protests; the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s; and more contemporary issues such as marriage equality. The book shows how LGBT folk have always been in the forefront of progressive social evolution in the United States. It references heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Edie Windsor. Equally, the book honors names that aren't in history books, from participants in the Names Project, a national phenomenon memorializing 94,000 AIDS victims, to underground agitprop artists.

"A valuable primer on this moment where humans are deciding how much power over their lives they give to monopolies and algorithms." —DAVE EGGERS, bestselling author of The Circle Which Side of History? offers a collection of bold essays on how technology is affecting democracy, society, and our future. Featuring prominent national voices such as Sacha Baron Cohen, Marc Benioff, Ellen Pao, Ken Auletta, Chelsea Clinton, Tim Wu, Khaled Hosseini, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jaron Lanier, Willow Bay, Sal Khan, Sherry Turkle, Shoshana Zuboff, Vivek Murthy, Geoffrey Canada, and many more. The essays focus on the extraordinary impact of technology on our privacy, kids and families, race and gender roles, democracy, climate change, and mental health. This groundbreaking book challenges opinion leaders and the broader public to take action to improve technology's effects on our lives. • Featuring notable journalists, engineers, entrepreneurs, novelists, activists, filmmakers, business leaders, scholars, and researchers, including: Thomas Friedman, Kara Swisher, Michelle Alexander, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Jenna Wortham, Cameron Kasky, Howard Gardner, and Tristan Harris. • Explores the ethical behavior of Big Tech, or the lack thereof. • Offers roadmaps for constructive change and thought-provoking perspectives. With the rise of cyberbullying and hate speech online, issues around climate change and technology, and the "move fast and break things" mentality of tech culture, Which Side of History? will urge readers to draw the line. • This book will help shape the conversations we have around technology in our society and our future for years to come. • A smart book for anyone who approaches tech and the future with a healthy skepticism • Edited by James P. Steyer, the CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. • Add it to the shelf with books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff.

In the face of conflict and despair, we often console ourselves by saying that history will be the judge. Today’s oppressors may escape being held responsible for their crimes, but the future will condemn them. Those who stand up for progressive values are on the right side of history. As ideas once condemned to the dustbin of history—white supremacy, hypernationalism, even fascism—return to the world, threatening democratic institutions and values, can we still hold out hope that history will render its verdict? Joan Wallach Scott critically examines the belief that history will redeem us, revealing the implicit politics of appeals to the judgment of history. She argues that the notion of a linear, ever-improving direction of history hides the persistence of power structures and hinders the pursuit of alternative futures. This vision of necessary progress perpetuates the assumption that the nation-state is the culmination of history and the ultimate source for rectifying injustice. Scott considers the Nuremberg Tribunal and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which claimed to carry out history’s judgment on Nazism and apartheid, and contrasts them with the movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Advocates for reparations call into question a national history that has long ignored enslavement and its racist legacies. Only by this kind of critical questioning of the place of the nation-state as the final source of history’s judgment, this book shows, can we open up room for radically different conceptions of justice.

In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II: British officer Frank Thompson, brother of the great historian E.P. Thompson, and fourteen-year-old Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female member of the armed anti-fascist resistance. But these people were not merely anti-fascist; they were pro-communist, idealists moved by their socialist principles to fight and sometimes die for a cause they believed to be right. Victory brought forty years of communist dictatorship followed by unbridled capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today in democratic Eastern Europe there is ever-increasing despair, disenchantment with the post-communist present, and growing nostalgia for the communist past. These phenomena are difficult to understand in the West, where “communism” is a dirty word that is quickly equated with Stalin and Soviet labor camps. By starting with the stories of people like Thompson and Lagadinova, Ghodsee provides a more nuanced understanding of how communist ideals could inspire ordinary people to make extraordinary sacrifices.

"From the editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, a timely and compelling look at how liberals use bullying toward their opponents on today's top political issues"--

An eye-opening look at the history of national security fear-mongering in America and how it distracts citizens from the issues that really matter What most frightens the average American? Terrorism. North Korea. Iran. But what if none of these are probable or consequential threats to America? What if the world today is safer, freer, wealthier, healthier, and better educated than ever before? What if the real dangers to Americans are noncommunicable diseases, gun violence, drug overdoses--even hospital infections? In this compelling look at what they call the "Threat-Industrial Complex," Michael A. Cohen and Micah Zenko explain why politicians, policy analysts, academics, and journalists are misleading Americans about foreign threats and ignoring more serious national security challenges at home. Cohen and Zenko argue that we should ignore Washington's threat-mongering and focus instead on furthering extraordinary global advances in human development and economic and political cooperation. At home, we should focus on that which actually harms us and undermines our quality of life: substandard schools and healthcare, inadequate infrastructure, gun violence, income inequality, and political paralysis.