Resources By Department: New Books: Social Sciences

A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021 by Alan S. Blinder
Focusing on the most significant developments and long-term changes over the past six decades, the author traces the highs and lows of American monetary and fiscal policy, which have by turns cooperated and clashed through many recessions and several long booms. From the fiscal policy of Kennedy's New Frontier to Biden's responses to the pandemic, the book takes readers through the stagflation of the 1970s, the conquest of inflation under Jimmy Carter, the rise of Reaganomics, and the bubbles of the 2000s before bringing the story up through more recent events.
Career and Family by Claudia Goldin
2023 Nobel Prize in Economics winner. A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. Drawing on decades of Goldin's own groundbreaking research, this book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.
How to Interpret the Constitution by Cass R. Sunstein
Some Supreme Court justices are committed to 'originalism,' arguing that the meaning of the Constitution is settled by how it was publicly understood when it was ratified. Originalists insist that their approach is dictated by the Constitution. Here, Harvard Law School professor Sunstein argues that the only way to choose a method to interpreting the Constitution is to ask whether it would change American life for the better or worse. If a method of interpretation would eliminate the right of privacy, allow racial segregation, or obliterate free speech, it would be unacceptable.
Shock Values by Carola Binder
In this sweeping history of American economy and democracy, the author shows that American price-stability is no accident. From its colonial origins to the twenty-first century, the American state has been designed for, and continues to be shaped by, an unlimited effort to insulate the economy from the dangers of price fluctuations. The author narrates an American history in which inflationary anxiety has informed everything from the reluctant establishment of paper money to the rise of the modern Federal Reserve as an omniscient actor in public policy. At every step, the U.S. has been reinvented as a response to its most recent failings.
The Way to Hell by Nathan Crick
Where catastrophe looms, Machiavelli inevitably follows. Drawing from the insights contained in Machiavelli's collected works, Crick interprets Machiavelli's political thought by first applying it to his own time and then our own, exploring the different paths we might choose when trying to avoid the hellish outcomes - environmental, economic, and political - that feel as if they are increasingly inevitable. Here Crick explores key questions in Machiavelli's writing with pragmatic sensibility and an open mind. In our effort to avoid the way to Hell, we must confront difficult questions and make hard choices.

American Afterlives by Shannon Lee Dawdy
Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution, and Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. In American Afterlives, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life.
The Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlozman; Sam Rosenfeld
The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through today. Today's parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Schlozman and Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s.
Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu; Simon Johnson
2024 Nobel Prize in Economics winner. Two MIT economists explore historical instances of new technology failing to pay off for workers: improved agricultural practices and equipment in medieval Europe conferred few benefits on peasants while lords and churchmen expropriated the increased output; the first century of the Industrial Revolution brought no income gain to laborers; and twenty-first century advances in digital technology, such as AI, have yielded stagnant working-class wages while tech moguls make fortunes.
The Significance Impulse by Joshua Glasgow
Why should we strive to be important? Does it make our lives go better if we are especially significant? This book argues that the common impulse to seek exceptionally high levels of significance is misguided. One reason why is that we cannot reach cosmic-grade significance. We do not have the size, duration, or power that would allow us to be that important. What is more, being exceptionally significant would not be to our personal benefit: it does not advance our well-being, our meaning in life, or any other of our interests. We should thus feel good about our unexceptional lives.
When the Hood Comes Off by Rob Eschmann
Online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off, Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance. Drawing on a wealth of data, including interviews with students of Color around the country and analyses of millions of social media posts over the past decade, Eschmann investigates the influence of online communication on face-to-face interactions.

New Books: Social Sciences

Renfro Library Home | MHU Home