New Wednesday Paperbacks

America, Empire of Liberty, David Reynolds (Penguin)
This one-volume history of the United States brings to life presidents from Washington to Obama, whilst also drawing on the voices of ordinary men and women. It reveals the grandeur and paradoxes of a country that offered liberty on a scale unmatched in Europe, but founded its prosperity on the labour of black slaves and the dispossession of the Native Americans.


Mobilizing Youth, Susan B. Whitney (Duke University Press)
An account of the formative years of the Young Communists and Young Christian Workers in France in the two decades following the First World War when they moved to the forefront of French politics, which also examines the ideologies of the movements, their major campaigns, their styles of political and religious engagement, and their male and female branches.


Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War, Marc Egnal (Hill and Wang)
A reinterpretation of the American Civil War from the 1820s through Reconstruction, which moves beyond the reigning orthodoxy that the American Civil War was waged over moral principles, to argue that economics was instead the main factor that moved the country to war.


The Church of England in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Chandler (Boydell)
This study of the evolution of the Church of England in the second half of the 20th century examines the work of its archbishops and bishops, but also considers the Church’s relationship with the State, the changes within its central institutions, and the responses of the wider community to those changes.