This vibrant, illustrated guide to the ins and outs of United States politics provides a clearer understanding of the current events and regular processes that shape this nation and the world. Decipher the American political system with this clear, easy-to-understand guide to the basics of the United States political system, from the founding of the thirteen colonies, to the foundations of the constitution, to how elections work. You’ll also find information about the history and context of current issues, like how Supreme Court justices are appointed; the electoral college and the popular vote; and how to get involved in the political process. Perfect for anyone looking for information on basic political processes, The Infographic Guide to American Government includes graphics that help simplify a range of topics from the Revolutionary War to all about a free press.

Updated to reflect our rapidly changing world.

An exploration of infographics and data visualization as a cultural phenomenon, from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. Infographics and data visualization are ubiquitous in our everyday media diet, particularly in news—in print newspapers, on television news, and online. It has been argued that infographics are changing what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century—and even that they harmonize uniquely with human cognition. In this first serious exploration of the subject, Murray Dick traces the cultural evolution of the infographic, examining its use in news—and resistance to its use—from eighteenth-century print culture to today's data journalism. He identifies six historical phases of infographics in popular culture: the proto-infographic, the classical, the improving, the commercial, the ideological, and the professional. Dick describes the emergence of infographic forms within a wider history of journalism, culture, and communications, focusing his analysis on the UK. He considers their use in the partisan British journalism of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print media; their later deployment as a vehicle for reform and improvement; their mass-market debut in the twentieth century as a means of explanation (and sometimes propaganda); and their use for both ideological and professional purposes in the post–World War II marketized newspaper culture. Finally, he proposes best practices for news infographics and defends infographics and data visualization against a range of criticism. Dick offers not only a history of how the public has experienced and understood the infographic, but also an account of what data visualization can tell us about the past.

Year two of this fresh, timely, beautiful addition to the Best American series, introduced by Nate Silver The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media reveals patterns in our lives and worlds in fresh and surprising ways. As we find ourselves in the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge — to digest, tweet, share, go viral. Best American Infographics 2014 captures the finest examples, from the past year, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world. Guest introducer Nate Silver brings his unparalleled expertise and lively analysis to this visually compelling new volume.

Wrapping your head around centuries of American history can make you dizzy. You need to know about the land (828,000 acres from the Louisiana Purchase alone), the people (from the earliest American Indian peoples to the immigrants of the last few centuries), and the high stakes (from a risky revolution to an international space race). How can all these dates and details make more sense? Infographics! The charts, maps, and illustrations in this book tell a visual story to help you better understand key concepts about our country's history. Crack open this book to explore mind-boggling questions such as: • What can we learn about America's earliest peoples based on what they left behind? • Why did people come to the United States? • How did American inventions change the world? The answers will help you see straight!

“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

History in Infographics helps children to visualise facts and statistics using a clever and appealing mix of graphics and numbers. The colourful, high-impact design will appeal to a wide range of children, from visual learners to struggling readers, capturing and then holding their attention. Infographics are a really exciting, different way to learn about core historical topics, and are ideal for fact-hungry children, revision work, and to improve the quality of presentations. History in Infographics: The Mayans allows children to explore the Mayan civilisation like never before, finding out how people lived, what they ate, what they wore, how they were ruled, the games they played and how the civilisation died out. Children can discover that the Maya were the first people to make hot chocolate, and how they did it, that they went to war to capture prisoners they then sacrificed to their gods, and all about other South American civilisations, including the Aztecs and the Incas. Ideal for children of 9+, and fact and history lovers of all ages, the Mayans have never seemed more exciting!