The Capitol Riots maps out the events of the January 6, 2021 insurrectionary riots at the United States Capitol building, providing context for understanding the contributing factors and ongoing implications of the uprising. This definitive text explores the rise of populism, disinformation, conspiracy theories, the alt-right, and white supremacy during the lead-up to and planning of the Stop the Steal campaign, as well as the complex interplay during the riots of political performances, costumes, objectives, communications, digital media, datafication, race, gender, and—ultimately—power. Assembling raw data from social media, selfie photos and videos, and mainstream journalism, the authors develop a timeline and data visualizations representing the events. They delve into the complex, openly shared narratives, motivations, and actions of people on the ground that day who violated the symbolic center of U.S. democracy. An analysis of visual data reveals an affective outpouring of mutually amplifying expressions of frustration, fear, hate, anger, and anomie that correspond to similar logics and counter-logics in the polarized and chaotic contemporary media environment that have only been intensified by COVID-19 lockdowns, conspiracy theories, and a call to action at the Capitol from the outgoing POTUS and his inner circle. The book will appeal to both a general audience of those curious about how and why the Capitol riots unfolded and to students and scholars of communications, political science, media studies, sociology, education, surveillance studies, digital humanities, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, and datafication studies. It will also find an audience within computer science and technology studies through its approach to big data, data visualization, AI, algorithms, data tracking, and other data sciences.

Everything you wanted to know about the Capitol riot including antecedents, minute-by-minute details, charges, arrests, groups involved, individuals, weapons used, motivation of those people arrested, aftermath, etc. Includes modal profiles of violent offenders, female offenders, and notorious non-violent offenders as well as outliers in each category (e.g., youngest, oldest, smartest). Data is based on nearly 600 arrests as of August 2021. There is a companion book (Insurrection - The Rioters) that has detailed profiles on all the violent offenders and all the female offenders as of April 2021.

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery. These fights didn’t happen in a vacuum. Freeman’s dramatic accounts of brawls and thrashings tell a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful emotions they elicited, raised tensions between North and South and led toward war. In the process, she brings the antebellum Congress to life, revealing its rough realities—the feel, sense, and sound of it—as well as its nation-shaping import. Funny, tragic, and rivetingly told, The Field of Blood offers a front-row view of congressional mayhem and sheds new light on the careers of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and other luminaries, as well as introducing a host of lesser-known but no less fascinating men. The result is a fresh understanding of the workings of American democracy and the bonds of Union on the eve of their greatest peril.

Americans were shocked and outraged to see chaos unfold at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The melee shut down plans by some Republican lawmakers to object to Congress’s official certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Democrats, the news media, and many leading Republicans immediately blamed the roughly four-hour disturbance on President Trump. The president “incited an insurrection,” the American pubic was told. It prompted a second impeachment trial of Donald Trump after he left office. But one year later, the original narrative of what happened that day has crumbled while hundreds of Americans have been swept up in an unprecedented investigation led by Joe Biden’s Justice Department to punish them for their involvement in the January 6th protest. The public has been misled—and flat-out lied to—about a number of aspects related to that day. This book exposes them all.

***THE INSTANT New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and IndieBound BESTSELLER*** An NPR Book of the Day Picking up where the New York Times bestselling Front Row at the Trump Show left off, this is the explosive look at the aftermath of the election—and the events that followed Donald Trump’s leaving the White House all the way to January 6—from ABC News' chief Washington correspondent. Nobody is in a better position to tell the story of the shocking final chapter of the Trump show than Jonathan Karl. As the reporter who has known Donald Trump longer than any other White House correspondent, Karl told the story of Trump’s rise in the New York Times bestseller Front Row at the Trump Show. Now he tells the story of Trump’s downfall, complete with riveting behind-the-scenes accounts of some of the darkest days in the history of the American presidency and packed with original reporting and on-the-record interviews with central figures in this drama who are telling their stories for the first time. This is a definitive account of what was really going on during the final weeks and months of the Trump presidency and what it means for the future of the Republican Party, by a reporter who was there for it all. He has been taunted, praised, and vilified by Donald Trump, and now Jonathan Karl finds himself in a singular position to deliver the truth.

Early in his campaign, Donald Trump boasted that 'I know words. I have the best words', yet despite these assurances his speech style has sown conflict even as it has powered his meteoric rise. If the Trump era feels like a political crisis to many, it is also a linguistic one. Trump has repeatedly alarmed people around the world, while exciting his fan-base with his unprecedented rhetorical style, shock-tweeting, and weaponized words. Using many detailed examples, this fascinating and highly topical book reveals how Trump's rallying cries, boasts, accusations, and mockery enlist many of his supporters into his alternate reality. From Trump's relationship to the truth, to his use of gesture, to the anti-immigrant tenor of his language, it illuminates the less obvious mechanisms by which language in the Trump era has widened divisions along lines of class, gender, race, international relations, and even the sense of truth itself.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security state. Barack Obama campaigned on changing George W. Bush's "global war on terror" but ended up entrenching extraordinary executive powers, from warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention to military commissions and targeted killings. Then Obama found himself bequeathing those authorities to Donald Trump. How did the United States get here? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage reveals high-level national security legal and policy deliberations in a way no one has done before. He tells inside stories of how Obama came to order the drone killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecendented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret program that logged every American's phone calls. Encompassing the first comprehensive history of NSA surveillance over the past forty years as well as new information about the Osama bin Laden raid, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Bush's and Obama's post-9/11 presidencies in the Trump era.