Perhaps the best book is an empty one. This exquisite notebook is the perfect canvas for notes, jokes, addresses, quotations, transactions, and equations–or for use as your personal diary.

A Gift of Freedom shows how John M. Olin’s “venture capital fund for the conservative movement” helped develop one of the leading forces in American politics and culture.

Liberal capitalism enabled the many to improve their condition and form a robust middle class, but we are reverting to a more stratified society, with concentrated wealth and limited social mobility. A new, higher-tech feudalism is emerging.

Between 1920 and 1950 America saw an unprecedented expansion of wealth and power underwritten by technological innovation, cultural confidence, and victory in war. American elites won World War II, rebuilt the world order with America at its head, inaugurated the jet age and put a man on the moon. The boom led to a larger, richer middle that confirmed America’s best ideals. By the early 1970s that ended. Since then, American elites have captured a disproportionate share of the social and economic rewards over the last 50 years during which time the middle class has shrunk in size and become economically insecure.

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 is the sequel to the immensely influential and controversial Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America’s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals.

If people, communities, or even nations lose their memory, they lose their character. That is why cultures throughout the world work at maintaining their identity and passing traditions along to future generations. But what if a nation purposely decides it no longer wants to remember its history? Helen Krieble writes that America cannot be preserved as “the last best hope of Earth” if its own people no longer understand why that is true and are no longer willing to do what it takes to preserve it.

America has always been committed to the idea that citizens can work together to build a common world.  Today, three afflictions keep us from pursuing that noble ideal.  The first and most obvious affliction is identity politics, which seeks to transform America by turning politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering.