Just in time for summer reading season, the Hoover Institution has a whole range of books on offer about America’s founding, China, the Cold War, education policy, free speech, economics, and so much more. Find them at Hoover Institution Press, all major booksellers, and your local library!
Notes on Freedom: A Hoover Treasury
Foreword by Condoleezza Rice. Hoover Institution Press, 2026.
What makes America? And why has the American spirit prevailed? In Notes on Freedom: A Hoover Institution Treasury, Hoover scholars and other impactful minds present a vital collection of wisdom, exploring the enduring values that illuminate our nation’s past, inspire our present, and offer hope for the future.
From the insightful words of Herbert Hoover on the Bill of Rights to Ronald Reagan's stirring call to tear down the Berlin Wall, from Margaret Thatcher's reflections on leadership to Milton Friedman's clear-eyed defense of free markets, Notes on Freedom provides engaging ideas from some of the most influential voices of the Hoover Institution.
Unstable Majorities Continue: The Trump Era
By Morris P. Fiorina. Hoover Institution Press, 2026.
This nonpartisan, data-driven discussion of the state of American politics from Hoover Senior Fellow Morris P. Fiorina examines party sorting and the unprecedented electoral instability of our era, which continued in the 2024 US presidential election. It follows the author’s 2017 book Unstable Majorities, which identified this trend in analyzing the 2016 election. Fiorina reveals unique insights about the views of the average voter, why the Democrats can’t seem to make headway with independents, and how extreme partisans in both major parties, demanding ideological purity, have reoriented the entire electoral system.
The Troika: A Story of Three Families, Friendship, and the Cold War
By Markus Wolf. Edited by Christian F. Ostermann and Katharina Friedla. Hoover Institution Press, 2026.
In The Troika, translated into English for the first time, former East German spymaster Markus Wolf follows three boys and their Communist expatriate families—two from Germany, one from the United States—who form deep childhood bonds as they come of age in Moscow during the turmoil of Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s. Dispersed by the events of World War II, they wind up in different corners of the geopolitical map as they mature, survive the chaos of war, and struggle to reinforce or abandon the principles instilled in them as young men.
The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices
By Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem. Foreword by James O. Ellis Jr. and Niall Ferguson. Hoover Institution Press, 2025.
In The Arsenal of Democracy, Hoover Fellow Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem of the Yorktown Institute write about the urgent need for rearmament but also the prioritization of key defense projects by the US as it contends with a rising China. They argue that “the margin of deterrence against China is rapidly shrinking, driven not by a failure of US technological innovation but by the American and allied defense industrial base’s inability to field and sustain cutting-edge capabilities at scale, at speed, and under constant pressure.” Halem and Freymann show that America’s most “time-sensitive industrial investments” should be “in munitions, to close a widening missile gap; drones, to compete with China's mass production; and submarines, to address the profound crisis in the attack submarine force’s industrial capacity and sustainment.”
National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America
By Michael R. Auslin. Simon & Schuster, 2026.
Did you know that for years in the 1800s, the original Declaration of Independence was hung rather nonchalantly in the halls of the US Patent Office? Or that its image was often used in 20th-century ads to sell insurance or home heating fuel? In National Treasure, Distinguished Research Fellow Michael Auslin traces the Declaration’s history, tracking all the places it was housed and hidden since its signing and finding some rather unusual places it could be found over the years. He also asks whether the document can today serve to bring us together as a nation, as we mark 250 years since it came to be.
Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations after the Cold War
By Rose Gottemoeller. Stanford University Press, 2026.
A new book by Hoover Institution Research Fellow Rose Gottemoeller offers an insider’s account of how leaders in Washington and the then newly democratic Russian government forged a working relationship that advanced international security and cooperation in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations after the Cold War, Gottemoeller challenges the view held by some contemporary Russian officials and commentators that the United States sought to weaken or isolate Russia during the turbulent post-Soviet transition of the 1990s. According to that narrative, the United States was primarily focused on expanding NATO and undermining Russian influence.
Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It
By Tyler Goodspeed. Hatchette, 2026.
Seeking to determine whether there could possibly be a pattern or predicting indicator to when recession is about to strike, Visiting Fellow Tyler Goodspeed looked at 132 economic downturns in the US and the UK, dating back all the way to the year 1800, and found that no, there really isn’t any reliable predictor for a crash. He argues that the “boom-bust” view of business cycles fails every test one can put to it. And the contours of an expansion carry no information about the recession that follows. Expansions never die of old age. No leading indicator forecasts recessions reliably over four centuries. And recessions do not cleanse; if anything they discriminate against the young, against dynamic firms, and against research and development. Each recession, in Goodspeed’s telling, is an expansion that failed in its own way.
Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
By Frank Dikötter. Bloomsbury, 2026.
In Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Senior Fellow Frank Dikötter uses surviving historical records, sometimes found only after an immense effort, to demonstrate how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today exercises a vice-like grip on control of narratives about its own history, and the histories of its erstwhile rivals, yet Dikötter explains how he has been able to construct a more objective account of how Communism came to power in China. He argues that the Communists succeeded in part because “the [CCP], not least their chairman, became more determined than their opponents in carrying out unrestricted warfare, devoid of any rules.” As he concludes, CCP leaders “excelled in a very traditional pursuit of power, prevailing over their opponents through the amoral application of military strategy, including every ancient tactic prescribed by Sun Tzu and the other great strategists of the past: feign, lie, deceive, retreat, hit, run, sabotage; view everything as a means to achieving the end.”
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future
By Dan Wang. W.W.Norton, 2025.
In Breakneck, Hoover Research Fellow Dan Wang contrasts the “lawyerly” society of the United States, defined by a concern for individual rights, with the “engineering culture” of contemporary China, focused on “physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants.” While noting that America’s lawyerly disposition has important advantages, like securing a stable rule of law conducive to investment and property rights protections, Wang makes the case that to compete effectively with China, the US should try to adopt more of an engineering mindset toward solving large-scale problems. As he concludes, “Ultimately, if America refuses to build, it will be subject to the whims of countries that do.”
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
By Michael McFaul. Harper Collins, 2025.
In Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Senior Fellow Michael McFaul challenges the encroaching orthodoxy of current US thinking on Russia and China, arguing persuasively that the way forward is not to force our current conflict into a decades-old paradigm but to learn from our Cold War past so that democracy can again emerge victorious. Examining America’s layered, modern history with both Russia and China, he demonstrates that instead of simplistically framing our competition with China and Russia as a second Cold War, we must understand the unique military, economic, and ideological challenges that come from China and Russia today, and develop innovative policies that follow from that analysis, not just return to the Cold War playbook.
Self-Censorship
By Glenn Loury. Polity, 2025.
In Self-Censorship, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Glenn Loury argues that the real barriers to totally free, unconstrained speech begin within our own minds. He outlines the powerful social forces that can prevent speakers from voicing unpopular views in public forums.
Every society, Loury notes, has norms to enforce. That can be a good thing: There ought to be social sanctions for, say, compulsive liars. When, however, a society shows a low degree of tolerance for speech about matters of political importance, self-censorship proliferates, and public discourse and policy suffer.
Hoover Press Reports and Essays
Aside from books, Hoover scholars are always working on new essays, research papers, and white papers addressing critical policy challenges across technology, education, and national security.
Before jumping into Hoover’s recent fare, a must-read is Milton Friedman’s 1993 essay Why Government Is the Problem. In it, Friedman discusses a government system that is no longer controlled by “we, the people.” Instead of Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” we now have a government “of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats,” including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats.
Fellows Herb Lin and Maria Langhan Riekhof with the Tech Futures Lab published a white paper in May 2026 examining how policymakers can better anticipate and respond to strategic technological surprise from global adversaries. Also released in May was “The Unheard Voices Project: Community Conversations,” a report capturing perspectives often missing from national education policy debates. In February, a new essay presented a framework for understanding how bottom-up innovation in K–12 education can start, spread, and scale beyond initial pilot programs. Hugo Bromley, Eyck Freymann, and Kazuto Suzuki authored an essay published May 28 outlining an operating framework for allied nations to coordinate economic statecraft efforts. And Senior Fellow Drew Endy and coauthors drafted Biosecurity, Really, a report examining practical approaches to biological risk management.
Substack
In addition to writing books, essays, and white papers, a whole host of Hoover fellows write original content on Substack. In the foreign policy and defense space, Senior Fellows H.R. McMaster and Michael McFaul are writing at History We Don’t Know and McFaul’s World, respectively. Leading up to America’s 250th, Distinguished Research Fellow Michael R. Auslin is writing about the history of the capital region at The Patowmack Packet. And tracking how artificial intelligence is changing the political realm and influencing the electorate, Senior Fellow Andrew B. Hall writes at Free Systems.
You can also find regular columns and video series from Hoover heavyweights such as John Cochrane, Elizabeth Economy, Ross Levine, and others at Hoover’s own Substack: Freedom Frequency.
