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A leading data visualization expert explores the negative—and positive—influences that charts have on our perception of truth.We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous—and easier to share than ever. While such v...
G. Elliott Morris
Mar 09, 2021Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." One need not deny ...

The Sum of the People
How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age
The fascinating three-thousand-year history of the census, revealing why the true boundaries of today's nations aren't lines on a map, but columns in a census tabulationIn April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called "the largest peacetime mobilization in American history": the decennial population census. It is part of a tradi...
G. Elliott Morris
Aug 15, 2020
Where Did You Get This Number?
A Pollster's Guide to Making Sense of the World
CBS News’ Elections and Surveys Director Anthony Salvanto takes you behind the scenes of polling to show you how to think about who we are and where we’re headed as a nation.As Elections and Surveys Director for CBS News, it’s Anthony Salvanto’s job to understand you—what you think and how you vote. He’s the person behind so many of the poll number...
G. Elliott Morris
Aug 12, 2018"America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy"--John Quincy Adams's famous words are often quoted to justify noninterference in other nations' affairs. Yet when he spoke them, Adams was not advocating neutrality or passivity but rather outlining a national policy that balanced democratic idealism with a pragmatic understanding of the y...
G. Elliott Morris
Dec 17, 2017
Dangerous Nation
America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Most Americans believe the United States had been an isolationist power until the twentieth century. This is wrong. In a riveting and brilliantly revisionist work of history, Robert Kagan, bestselling author of Of Paradise and Power, shows how Americans have in fact steadily been increasing their global power and influence from the beginning. Drive...
G. Elliott Morris
Dec 17, 2017A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of one of the major shapers of American foreign policyOn the eve of his inauguration as President, Woodrow Wilson commented, "It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs." As America was drawn into the Great War in Europe, Wilson used his scholarship, his p...
G. Elliott Morris
Dec 17, 2017
Barbarian Virtues
The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917
How a new American identity was forged by immigration and expansion a century ago.In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America's newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century. Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, tr...
G. Elliott Morris
Dec 17, 2017This introduction to the diplomacy of the American Revolution presents a fresh, realistic, and balanced portrait of revolutionary diplomats and diplomacy."The best single-volume introduction to the diplomacy of the American Revolution that we have." -H.M. Scott, University of St. Andrews, Scotland"This book certainly will become the new standard ac...
G. Elliott Morris
Dec 17, 2017