Author: Oscar HandlinPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
The American People in the Twentieth Century
Author: Oscar HandlinAmerican Crucible
Author: Gary GerstlePublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 543
Book Description
This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt’s vision of a hybrid and superior “American race,” strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in “Anglo-Saxon” culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan’s and Clinton’s attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.
Between Citizens and the State
Author: Christopher P. LossPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691163340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
The American Far West in the Twentieth Century
Author: Earl Spencer PomeroyPublisher:
ISBN: 9780300158526
Category : Pacific and Mountain States
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
"A leading western specialist argues that the history of the American West did not end in the year 1900 and was shaped as much by events and innovations in the twentieth century, in a study that describes a modern West." -- annotation from Book Index with Reviews.
American Empire at the Turn at the Twentieth Century
Author: Kristin L. HogansonPublisher: Macmillan Higher Education
ISBN: 1319065066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Book Description
This volume introduces students to primary documents on American empire from a pivotal era of U.S. expansion beyond the North American continent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Along with covering a wide range of places-including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines--the documents touch on a wide range of themes, among them race, citizenship, civilization, democracy, cross-cultural encounter, and self-determination. Kristin Hoganson's introduction provides the context essential to understanding this period and the ways in which the echoes of 1898 still reverberate today, including in the reach of U.S. power and the composition of the American people. Through a collection of sources representing the voices of those living under imperial rule as well as those imposing and opposing it, students can consider the American imperial endeavors. Document headnotes, maps, a Chronology of American Empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Questions for Consideration, and a Selected Bibliography provide pedagogical support.
American Law in the Twentieth Century
Author: Lawrence Meir FriedmanPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300102992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1468
Book Description
American law in the twentieth century describes the explosion of law over the past century into almost every aspect of American life. Since 1900 the center of legal gravity in the United States has shifted from the state to the federal government, with the creation of agencies and programs ranging from Social Security to the Securities Exchange Commission to the Food and Drug Administration. Major demographic changes have spurred legal developments in such areas as family law and immigration law. Dramatic advances in technology have placed new demands on the legal system in fields ranging from automobile regulation to intellectual property. Throughout the book, Friedman focuses on the social context of American law. He explores the extent to which transformations in the legal order have resulted from the social upheavals of the twentieth century--including two world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution. Friedman also discusses the international context of American law: what has the American legal system drawn from other countries? And in an age of global dominance, what impact has the American legal system had abroad? This engrossing book chronicles a century of revolutionary change within a legal system that has come to affect us all.
CULTURE AS HISTORY
Author: Warren SusmanPublisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307826147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
Bringing together for the first time the best of twenty-five years of unique critical work, Warren Susman takes us on a startling tour through the conflicts and events which have transformed the social, political, and cultural face of America in this century. Probing a rich panoply of images from the mass media and advertising, testing prevalent intellectual and economic theories, linking the revolutions in communications and technology to the rise of a new pantheon of popular heroes. Susman documents and analyzes the process through which the older, Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture has given way to the leisure-oriented, consumer society we now inhabit: the culture of abundance.
America Revised
Author: Frances FitzGeraldPublisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
"Almost all of the book appeared initially in the New Yorker." Bibliography: p. [227]-240.
The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century
Author: Peter DreierPublisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568586949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514
Book Description
A hundred years ago, any soapbox orator who called for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment, an end to lynching, or a federal minimum wage was considered a utopian dreamer or a dangerous socialist. Now we take these ideas for granted -- because the radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day. Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks. In popular media, the most persistent interpreter of America's radical past is Glenn Beck, who teaches viewers a wildly inaccurate history of unions, civil rights, and the American Left. The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century, a colorful and witty history of the most influential progressive leaders of the twentieth century and beyond, is the perfect antidote.
Remaking America
Author: John E. BodnarPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691034959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
In a compelling inquiry into public events ranging from the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through ethnic community fairs to pioneer celebrations, John Bodnar explores the stories, ideas, and symbols behind American commemorations over the last century. Such forms of historical consciousness, he argues, do not necessarily preserve the past but rather address serious political matters in the present.--Publisher description.