The Road To Now Podcast: Featured Books From RTN Guests

In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their... Read more »

Coke’s insatiablethirst for resources shapes the company and reshapes the globe in thisabsorbing history.

Coca-Cola’s success in building a global empire out ofsugary water drew on more than a secret formula and brilliant advertising. Thereal secret to Coke’s success was its strategy, from the beginning, to offloadproduction costs and risks onto... Read more »

Since 1959, conflict and aggression have dominated the story of U.S.-Cuban relations. From John F. Kennedy's offering of an olive branch to Fidel Castro after the missile crisis, to Henry Kissinger's top-secret quest for normalization, to Barack Obama's promise of a "new approach," William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh reveal a fifty-year... Read more »

In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French... Read more »

The best-selling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with "dignity." Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body.... Read more »

The Liberal Rednecks—a Southern-based stand-up comedy group known for their scathing political satire—celebrate all that’s good about Dixie while leading a progressive revolution toward a New South.

The American South is home to some of the best music, cuisine, athletics, whiskey, and weather the country has to offer, but its reputation as a... Read more »

The cocreator of the Washington Post's Made by History blog reveals how the rise of conservative talk radio gave us a Republican Party incapable of governing and paved the way for Donald Trump. Radio hosts form a deep bond with their audience, which gives them enormous political power. Unlike elected representatives, however, they must entertain... Read more »

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows... Read more »

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public... Read more »

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in... Read more »

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became... Read more »

Best-selling author and mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. The best questions come from kids. What would happen to an astronaut's body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop... Read more »

"Christopher Klein's fresh telling of this story is an important landmark in both Irish and American history." —James M. McPherson

Just over a year after Robert E. Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they fought... Read more »

Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been invoked—against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton—and explain what it means today.

Impeachment is a double-edged sword. Though it was designed to check tyrants, Thomas Jefferson also called impeachment “the most formidable weapon for the purpose of... Read more »

The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society - and sets out to try to stop it. 

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from... Read more »

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and... Read more »

2020 Audie Awards® WINNER - History/Biography

As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this... Read more »

Winner of the William G. Bowen Prize
Named a "Triumph" of 2018 by New York Times Book Critics
Shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award

The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy"--how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of... Read more »