The depth of Hoover’s scholarship is reflected in the numerous books published by our fellows on a broad variety of topics and issues. This timely and prodigious output offers insights on the most pressing issues in public policy. The books they published this year explore issues including improving monetary policy, addressing America’s civic education crisis, Hoover’s efforts to acquire the Soviet archives, deterring China from invading Taiwan, the history of the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, perspectives on revitalizing political and economic governance at state and local levels, and much more.
Please check out this selection of books published by Hoover scholars in 2024.
The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan
Edited by Matt Pottinger (Hoover Institution Press)
Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has openly expressed his intention to annex Taiwan to mainland China, even threatening the use of force. An invasion or blockade of Taiwan by Chinese forces would be catastrophic, with severe consequences for democracies worldwide. In The Boiling Moat, Matt Pottinger and a team of scholars and distinguished military and political leaders urgently outline practical steps for deterrence.
Getting Monetary Policy Back on Track
Edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and John B. Taylor (Hoover Institution Press)
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
In May 2023, the world’s top economic policymakers and academics convened at the Hoover Institution for the annual Monetary Policy Conference. This volume presents the full proceedings from this conference—the presentations, responses, and discussions. In it, participants debate the meaning of getting monetary policy “back on track,” the significance of recent bank failures, and how to improve forecasting and oversight.
Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives
By Charles G. Palm (Hoover Institution Press)
Foreword by Condoleezza Rice, Introduction by Stephen Kotkin
Publication Date: June 1, 2024
In late 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. Over the next 12 years, the Hoover Institution microfilmed and published the newly opened records of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State. Charles Palm, who led this mission, details how he and his colleagues secured a historic agreement with the Russian Federation, then launched and successfully carried out the joint project with the Russian State Archives and their partner, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd.
Forging Trust with India: The Dramatic Story of Achieving the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement
By David C. Mulford (Hoover Institution Press)
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Fifteen years after the passage of the historic 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, Ambassador David Mulford offers a definitive personal account reflecting on the four years of negotiations that led to this transformative accomplishment—the cornerstone of modern US-India relations. India is a rapidly emerging global power. Its population has surpassed China’s, and it is on a path to becoming the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. As Mulford explains, forging trust and friendship between the United States and India has transformed how the nations engage with each other and has set the stage for confronting the mutual challenges that lie ahead.
American Federalism Today: Perspectives on Political and Economic Governance
Edited by Michael J. Boskin (Hoover Institution Press)
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
The framers of the US Constitution enumerated specific powers for the federal government, leaving all else under the purview of states or the people. Over time, the federal government has expanded its role, yet the American people have more trust in state and local governments that are closer to them—and where co-partisanship is often a matter of necessity. Scholars and practitioners in policymaking gathered at the Hoover Institution in September 2023 to discuss the ramifications of federalism for contemporary issues. American Federalism Today presents those conference proceedings.
Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold History of the 1930s
Edited by Eiichiro Azuma and Kaoru Ueda (Hoover Institution Press)
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
The era sandwiched between the 1924 US Immigration Act and the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor marks an important yet largely buried period of Japanese American history. This book offers the first English translation of Yasuo Sakata’s seminal essay arguing that the 1930s constitutes a chronological and conceptual “missing link” between two predominant research interests: the pre-1924 immigration exclusion and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation
By Victor Davis Hanson (Basic Books)
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span centuries, from the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World, to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.
A Republic, if We Can Teach It: Fixing America’s Civic Education Crisis
By David Davenport and Jeffrey Sikkenga (Republic Book Publishers)
Publication Date: May 14, 2024
America faces a crisis in civic education that imperils the long-term health of the country. Too many Americans―especially young people―do not have the knowledge of their nation’s history and founding principles necessary to sustain the republic. In what has become a vicious cycle, these young people grow up disengaged and distrustful. And they do not understand America’s struggle to live up to its principles of freedom, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead, too many believe that America’s story is essentially one of oppression, not freedom―injustice, not hope. Jeff Sikkenga and David Davenport diagnose the problem facing our republic while proposing actionable solutions.
At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House
By H.R. McMaster (HarperCollins Publishers)
Publication Date: August 27, 2024
At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive president drive necessary shifts in US foreign policy at a critical moment in history. H.R. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyperpartisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump’s presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term might look like.
The Troubling State of India's Democracy
Edited by Sumit Ganguly, Dinsha Mistree, and Larry Diamond (University of Michigan Press)
Publication Date: August 6, 2024
As India’s power and prominence rise on the international stage, its longstanding tradition of democracy is under threat. Since establishing a secular and democratic constitution in 1950, India has held elections at the local, state, and national levels, with frequent transitions of power between opposing parties. This commitment to democracy has provided political order to a country that is twice the size of Europe and with a stunning array of social and economic divides.
Breaking the Mold: India's Untraveled Path to Prosperity
By Raghuram G. Rajan and Rohit Lamba (Princeton University Press)
Publication Date: May 14, 2024
India is at a crossroads today. Its growth rate, while respectable relative to other large countries, is too low for the jobs its youths need. Intense competition in low-skilled manufacturing, increasing protectionism globally, and growing automation make the situation still more difficult. Divisive majoritarianism does not help. India broke away from the standard development path—from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing, and finally services—by leapfrogging the intermediate steps. Rather than attempting to revert to development paths that may not be feasible anymore, the nation must embark on a truly Indian path.
New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State
By Anthony Gregory (Harvard University Press)
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
New Deal Law and Order follows President Franklin Roosevelt, Attorney General Homer Cummings, and their war on crime coalition, which overcame institutional and political challenges to the legitimacy of national law enforcement. Promises of law and order helped to manage tensions among key Democratic Party factions—organized labor, Black Americans, and White Southerners. Their anticrime program, featuring a strengthened criminal code, an empowered FBI, and the first federal war on marijuana, was essential to the expansion of national authority previously stymied on constitutional grounds. This nascent carceral liberalism both accommodated a redoubled emphasis on rehabilitation and underwrote a massive wave of prison construction across the country. Alcatraz, an unforgiving punitive model, was designed to be a “symbol of the triumph of law and order.” The emergent security state eventually transformed both liberalism and federalism and, in the process, reoriented the terms of US political debate for decades to come.
