Politics and Society in Modern America
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Civil Defense Begins at Home
Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties
by Laura McEnaney
Part 6 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Laura McEnaney is Assistant Professor of History at Whittier College in California.
Dad built a bomb shelter in the backyard, Mom stocked the survival kit in the basement, and the kids practiced ducking under their desks at school. This was family life in the new era of the A-bomb. This was civil defense. In this provocative work of social and political history, Laura McEnaney takes us into the secretive world of defense planners and the homes of ordinary citizens to explore how postwar civil defense turned the front lawn into the front line. The reliance on atomic weaponry as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy cast a mushroom cloud over everyday life. American citizens now had to imagine a new kind of war, one in which they were both combatants and targets. It was the Federal Civil Defense Administration's job to encourage citizens to adapt to their nuclear present and future.
As McEnaney demonstrates, the creation of a civil defense program produced new dilemmas about the degree to which civilian society should be militarized to defend itself against internal and external threats. Conflicts arose about the relative responsibilities of state and citizen to fund and implement a home-front security program. The defense establishment's resolution was to popularize and privatize military preparedness. The doctrine of "self-help" defense demanded that citizens become autonomous rather than rely on the federal government for protection. Families would reconstitute themselves as paramilitary units that could quash subversion from within and absorb attack from without.
Because it solicited an unprecedented degree of popular involvement, the FCDA offers a unique opportunity to explore how average citizens, community leaders, and elected officials both participated in and resisted the creation of the national security state. Drawing on a wide variety of archival sources, McEnaney uncovers the broad range of responses to this militarization of daily life and reveals how government planners and ordinary people negotiated their way at the dawn of the atomic age. Her work sheds new light on the important postwar debate about what total military preparedness would actually mean for American society. "A thought-provoking and richly empirical study of the evolution of civil defense and its implications for American citizens and their government during the first full decade of the nuclear age . . . McEnaney's book is an absolute must-read for those interested in nuclear history, the social history of the 1950s, as well as gender and race analyses."---Paul G. Pierpaoli, Military History "[A] chilling study of the militarization of the American home under the civil defense policies of the Cold War."---Tom Vanderbilt, Bookforum "McEnaney's well-researched and well-written monograph adds to our understanding of the Cold War, the 1950s, and the relationship between military and domestic policy. Her analysis of gender, race and class adds significant dimensions to the current literature."---D'Ann Campbell, The Journal of American History "An important book that examines both the historical roots of Cold War political development in the United States and the effects of domestic Cold War mobilization on American society. I highly recommend Civil Defense Begins at Home to anyone interested in this important phase of postwar American political development. This book will be an excellent addition to advanced undergraduate courses as well as graduate courses in history, political science, and American studies."---Andrew D. Grossman, Journal of Cold War Studies "The book focuses on the political culture in which [Civil Defense] activists sought to devise a program, pry support from a stingy Congress, and evangelize the public. . . . [It is] admirably well researched often imaginative, and always interesting."---Richard M. Fried, American Historical Review "[A] superb social history of American civil defense programs in the 1950s. . . . I highly re
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Divided We Stand
American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality
by Bruce Nelson
Part 8 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Bruce Nelson is Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His first book, Workers on the Waterfront, was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize by the Organization of American Historians. His next book will be an exploration of the process of "becoming Irish" in the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on the ports of New York and Liverpool.
Divided We Stand is a study of how class and race have intersected in American society--above all, in the "making" and remaking of the American working class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing mainly on longshoremen in the ports of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and on steelworkers in many of the nation's steel towns, it examines how European immigrants became American and "white" in the crucible of the industrial workplace and the ethnic and working-class neighborhood.
As workers organized on the job, especially during the overlapping CIO and civil rights eras in the middle third of the twentieth century, trade unions became a vital arena in which "old" and "new" immigrants and black migrants forged new alliances and identities and tested the limits not only of class solidarity but of American democracy. The most volatile force in this regard was the civil rights movement. As it crested in the 1950s and '60s, "the Movement" confronted unions anew with the question, "Which side are you on?" This book demonstrates the complex ways in which labor organizations answered that question and the complex relationships between union leaders and diverse rank-and-file constituencies in addressing it.
Divided We Stand includes vivid examples of white working-class "agency" in the construction of racially discriminatory employment structures. But Nelson is less concerned with racism as such than with the concrete historical circumstances in which racialized class identities emerged and developed. This leads him to a detailed and often fascinating consideration of white, working-class ethnicity but also to a careful analysis of black workers--their conditions of work, their aspirations and identities, their struggles for equality. Making its case with passion and clarity, Divided We Stand will be a compelling and controversial book. "A superbly written, intellectually exciting and pioneering book . . . Nelson weds detailed research with indepth interviews, oral histories and his own first-hand experience . . . With grace and acuity, Nelson unites his far-ranging concerns [and] successfully argues that race and ethnicity have long been central issues in the labor movement . . . This book has the potential to profoundly change how we read and think about American history." "This study moves labor historians one step closer to the overarching synthesis that has eluded them for over 30 years . . . This is an important piece of scholarship that deserves wide attention and debate." "A powerful and disturbing book about the nature of race relations in
working-class America."---Peter Cole, History: Reviews of New Books "A valuable contribution to the increasingly acrimonious debate over the meaning, content, and significance of white racial identity in American labor history."---Steven A. Reich, Journal of Southern History "By placing working-class white racism and black resistance strategies at the forefront of his study, Nelson's Divided We Stand reinforces recent scholarship on the interplay of class and race formation in nineteenth and twentieth century United States and African American history."---Joe W. Trotter, Journal of American Ethnic History "A landmark study of race and trade unionism in longshoring and steel from the rise of heavy industry in the late 1800s to its decline in the 1980s. . . . Nelson digs deeply into archival sources and oral interviews to describe real workers and their shop-floor experience in compelling detail."---Frank Towers, The Historian "Few books fundamentally reshape intellectual and political debates. This one deserves a
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For All These Rights
Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State
by Jennifer Klein
Part 20 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2004 Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, Business History Conference" "Winner of the 2004 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians" Jennifer Klein is Assistant Professor of History, at Yale University.
The New Deal placed security at the center of American political and economic life by establishing an explicit partnership between the state, economy, and citizens. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, most people depend overwhelmingly on private health insurance and employee benefits. The astounding rise of this phenomenon from before World War II, however, has been largely overlooked. In this powerful history of the American reliance on employment-based benefits, Jennifer Klein examines the interwoven politics of social provision and labor relations from the 1910s to the 1960s. Through a narrative that connects the commercial life insurance industry, the politics of Social Security, organized labor's quest for economic security, and the evolution of modern health insurance, she shows how the firm-centered welfare system emerged. Moreover, the imperatives of industrial relations, Klein argues, shaped public and private social security.
Looking closely at unions and communities, Klein uncovers the wide range of alternative, community-based health plans that had begun to germinate in the 1930s and 1940s but that eventually succumbed to commercial health insurance and pensions. She also illuminates the contests to define "security"--job security, health security, and old age security--following World War II.
For All These Rights traces the fate of the New Deal emphasis on social entitlement as the private sector competed with and emulated Roosevelt's Social Security program. Through the story of struggles over health security and old age security, social rights and the welfare state, it traces the fate of New Deal liberalism--as a set of ideas about the state, security, and labor rights--in the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond. "[T]his book provides a fresh and compelling interpretation of some of the critical junctures in the development of old-age pensions and health insurance. This carefully argued and documented book is also invaluable for anyone wrestling with the question of 'what next?' for social security and health-care reform in the United States."---Marie Gottschalk, International Review of Social History "What makes this splendid book so enlightening is Klein's ability to see multiple actors in motion and to grasp how several complex dynamics intersected in the crucial years between 1920 and 1950. Policy makers, political actors, union leaders, rank-and-file workers, associations, employers, insurers: all played a key role in the path--determining decisions taken in these crucial years. Klein handles all of these actors with a sure hand. . . . By brilliantly illuminating the historical roots of today's growing crisis, she makes an enormous contribution."---Joseph A. McCartin, American Historical Review "[Klein] pull[s] no punches. By bringing political economy back in, [she] offer[s] the most complex and satisfying explanation to date of America's exceptional trajectory toward the public-private welfare state. . . . [This book] will have a lasting impact on the way policy scholars see the public-private welfare state."---Beatrix Hoffman, Journal of Policy History "For scholars of the welfare state, this book provides a fresh and compelling interpretation of some of the critical junctures in the development of old-age pensions and health insurance. This carefully argued and documented book is also invaluable for anyone wrestling with the question of 'what next' for social security and health-care reform in the United States."---Marie Gottschalk, International Review of Social History "For All These Rights, meticulous in its historical research and forthright in its policy conclusions, is of compelling importance to all who want a richer understanding
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Defending America
Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial
by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman
Part 33 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Elizabeth Lutes Hillman is Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law, Camden. A veteran of the United States armed forces, she previously taught history at the United States Air Force Academy and at Yale University.
From going AWOL to collaborating with communists, assaulting fellow servicemen to marrying without permission, military crime during the Cold War offers a telling glimpse into a military undergoing a demographic and legal transformation. The post-World War II American military, newly permanent, populated by draftees as well as volunteers, and asked to fight communism around the world, was also the subject of a major criminal justice reform. By examining the Cold War court-martial, Defending America opens a new window on conflicts that divided America at the time, such as the competing demands of work and family and the tension between individual rights and social conformity.
Using military justice records, Elizabeth Lutes Hillman demonstrates the criminal consequences of the military's violent mission, ideological goals, fear of homosexuality, and attitude toward racial, gender, and class difference. The records also show that only the most inept, unfortunate, and impolitic of misbehaving service members were likely to be prosecuted. Young, poor, low-ranking, and nonwhite servicemen bore a disproportionate burden in the military's enforcement of crime, and gay men and lesbians paid the price for the armed forces' official hostility toward homosexuality. While the U.S. military fought to defend the Constitution, the Cold War court-martial punished those who wavered from accepted political convictions, sexual behavior, and social conventions, threatening the very rights of due process and free expression the Constitution promised. "Provocative and thought provoking. Hillman's work is singular and will certainly incite lively and productive debate."---William Kautt, Journal of Military History "With Defending America, Elizabeth Hillman confirms her place as one of the preeminent military law and history scholars of her generation. Her book could not be more timely as the scale and tempo of American military operations increase. Clearly written and accessible to the general reader as well as specialists, it will help us better understand the surprising array of military justice controversies that have arisen in recent years, including those that continue to emerge as a result of the war in Iraq, as well as place them in context with developments during the formative Cold War years. Professor Hillman has tapped a valuable mass of case law and organized it in a new and thought-provoking way. Three cheers."-Eugene R. Fidell, President, National Institute of Military Justice "Defending America is a splendid piece of work. Hillman writes with style and wit and makes a compelling case for the importance of her subject. Everyone working on the Cold War, on military history, and in particular on the legal history of the period, will need to read this book."-Marilyn B. Young, New York University, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 "This innovative and well-researched book moves the reader through twenty-two years of U.S. military law and justice. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of military culture at a moment when military justice has become especially visible and debated. In Hillman's skillful hands military courts-martial become a vehicle through which to explore the changing relation of the military to a broader American culture-a culture emerging from one hot global war and facing a much longer and infinitely more complex cold war. Hillman admirably illuminates the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexual ideologies inflected the implementation and execution of military law."-Leisa D. Meyer, College of William and Mary
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American Babylon
Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
by Robert O. Self
Part 34 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2005 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians" "Winner of the 2005 Best Book in Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Association" "Winner of the 2004 Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2004 Best Book in North American Urban History, Urban History Association" Robert O. Self is assistant professor of history at Brown University.
A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland
As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension.
American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.
Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America. "[A]n original and complex explanation for the urban crisis that transformed Oakland, California, from 1945 to 1978. . . . By placing the history of Oakland and its African American community in a new theoretical framework that emphasizes suburban growth, tax revolts, and battles over land, jobs, and political power, Self has challenged historians to reconsider the way that they study postwar black urban communities."---Albert S. Broussard, Journal of American History "[M]eticulously researched. . . . [A] compelling, complex, and original account of black and, to a lesser extent, white community politics in metropolitan Oakland California from 1945 to 1978."---Cynthia Horan, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science "By placing the history of Oakland and its African American community in a new theoretical framework that emphasizes suburban growth, tax revolts, and battles over land, jobs, and political power, Self has challenged historians to reconsider the way that they study postwar black urban communities."---Albert S. Broussard, Journal of American History "If you are concerned with the postwar city, race, economics, and politics, get this book and read it."---Kenneth Durr, American Historical Review "American Babylon traces the dialectic of suburbanization and black power in my hometown of Oakland, California. Encapsulating the postwar history of hundreds of mid-sized American cities, Robert Self's original and fascinating case study historicizes city-suburb racial segregation as a creation within living memory. We cannot heal or make sense of the nation we live in now without American Babylon."-Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University, author of Southern History across the Color Line "American Babylon promises to be one of those rare works that redefines the field. Robert Self brilliantly weaves together histories tha
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Trucking Country
The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy
by Shane Hamilton
Part 56 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Shane Hamilton is associate professor of history and associate director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. With Sarah Phillips, he is author of The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics.
Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.
Hamilton challenges the popular notion of "red state" conservatism as a devil's bargain between culturally conservative rural workers and economically conservative demagogues in the Republican Party. The roots of rural conservatism, Hamilton demonstrates, took hold long before the culture wars and free-market fanaticism of the 1990s. As Hamilton shows, truckers helped build an economic order that brought low-priced consumer goods to a greater number of Americans. They piloted the big rigs that linked America's factory farms and agribusiness food processors to suburban supermarkets across the country.
Trucking Country is the gripping account of truckers whose support of post-New Deal free enterprise was so virulent that it sparked violent highway blockades in the 1970s. It's the story of "bandit" drivers who inspired country songwriters and Hollywood filmmakers to celebrate the "last American cowboy," and of ordinary blue-collar workers who helped make possible the deregulatory policies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and set the stage for Wal-Mart to become America's most powerful corporation in today's low-price, low-wage economy.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "This detailed, closely argued book chronicles the U.S. trucking industry's history, particularly its role in rolling back New Deal policies and regulations. Hamilton is a knowledgeable guide to everything from beef trusts to the National Farmers Organization to the 1979 strike that opens the book, in which 75,000 truckers tried to shut down the nation's highway system. Economy and market buffs looking for a different perspective on America's 20th century economic evolution will find this intriguing and informative." "With the US again engaged in a debate over the merits of regulation versus the free market, the book's academic research touches on some timely historical issues. It is also a fascinating account of the political battles over the diesel engine and the refrigerated truck, which had emerged as the new technology of the 1920s and 1930s and a threat to the dominance of the railroad distribution system for beef and milk by a few large meat packing companies and local dairies."---Jonathan Birchall, Financial Times "Trucking Country offers a finely crafted mix of cultural identity, regional tradition, economic history, legislative politics, political argument and policy transformation. Shane Hamilton uses the history and contemporary development of the trucking industry in the U.S. to reveal the social, economic and political dynamics that were instrumental in shifting the industry away from the heavy regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) towards deregulation, fragmentation, and free-market competition."---Michael Foley, Times Higher Education "Independent trucking is for Hamilton what Kansas was for Frank--the locus that shows a part of what has gone wrong with American politics."---David Kusnet, Bookforum "Trucking Country intervenes in [the] crowded debate over the demise of New Deal liberalism from a genuinely original vantage point: the political culture of independent long-haul truckers and the political economy shaped by the agribusiness corporations that they served."---Matthew Lassiter, Democracy "If you want to know what really drives the US economy,
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Americans at the Gate
The United States and Refugees during the Cold War
by Carl J. Bon Tempo
Part 57 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Carl J. Bon Tempo is assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Albany.
Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War. This dramatic reversal gave rise to intense political and cultural battles, pitting refugee advocates against determined opponents who at times successfully slowed admissions. The first comprehensive historical exploration of American refugee affairs from the midcentury to the present, Americans at the Gate explores the reasons behind the remarkable changes to American refugee policy, laws, and programs.
Carl Bon Tempo looks at the Hungarian, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee crises, and he examines major pieces of legislation, including the Refugee Relief Act and the 1980 Refugee Act. He argues that the American commitment to refugees in the post-1945 era occurred not just because of foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War, but also because of particular domestic developments within the United States such as the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Right, and partisan electoral politics. Using a wide variety of sources and documents, Americans at the Gate considers policy and law developments in connection with the organization and administration of refugee programs.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "The author is adept at unraveling the complex underpinnings and evolution of this postwar 'American identity,' utilizing an impressive range of archival and published sources. . . . For those specializing in post-WW II US history, this is an essential contribution."---K.A. Tyvela, Choice "Carl J. Bon Tempo has done a solid overall job of examining the acceptance of refugees into the US during the Cold War. His book is concise and historically accurate. . . . It deserves consideration by scholars of human rights, migration, and foreign policy. It provides a good base for dispersing information and facts to students as well and should be useful in undergraduate courses for this purpose."---Samuel S. Stanton, Jr., Law and Politics Book Review "In the post-war period, the United States admitted millions of refugees. In this ambitious book, Carl J. Bon Tempo set out to explain how and why this new American approach to refugee affairs developed and evolved between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. In doing so, the author decided to go beyond foreign policy imperatives to confront a multiplicity of factors, weighing the evolution of their relative significance. Set in the Cold War context, the impact of anticommunism at home and abroad constitutes the main element of this study. Indeed, the propaganda value of accepting refugees fleeing communism remained central to US policy and manifest in the persistence of the 'refugee equals European anticommunist' equation. Bon Tempo's study of how this equation evolved and receded--without totally disappearing over the period--is a major contribution of this book." "Carl Bon Tempo's new book offers a new perspective. . . . By placing the overlapping and intertwined problems and dichotomies of the Cold War, human rights and, to a lesser extent, the Civil Rights movement as part of American refugee policies, this book deserves to be read."---Mario Menéndez, Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines "This book is a superb introduction to the history of U.S. refugee politics and policy and an important contribution to American civic education."---Karen Jacobsen, Journal of American Ethnic History "Bon Tempo's deft and compelling narrative works at the intersection of the domestic and the global to marvelously recast our understanding of post-1945 American attitudes and policies toward refugees. Looking beyond a more traditional Cold War frame, he convincingly explores how the overlapping and intertwined histories of anticommunism, race, electoral poli
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Poverty Knowledge
Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History
by Alice O'Connor
Part 59 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001" Alice O'Connor was formerly the Assistant Director of the Project on Social Welfare and the American Future at the Ford Foundation, the Director for the Programs on Persistent Urban Poverty and International Migration at the Social Science Research Council, a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy.
Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide.
The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims. "In this thoroughly researched and clearly written book, O'Conner offers a comprehensive look at the changing ways American experts have thought about poverty in the 20th Century. . . . A rewarding read." "O'Connor provides the most up-to-date history of poverty and welfare in the US in this highly recommended [book]. . . . Her argument is unique, controversial, and convincing." "Poverty Knowledge has many strengths. It is a well-written analysis by a historian with substantial experience in the not-for-profit organizations that funded and substantively influenced much of the production of poverty knowledge over the past two decades. . . . The descriptive materials alone will make this book an essential addition to the history of the social sciences. . . [It] will be essential reading for historians of the social and policy sciences."---Robert F. Kelly, Contemporary Sociology "O'Connor's book surpasses previous accounts of American approaches to poverty and makes a very significant contribution to critical writing on the welfare state."---Ruth Crocker, American Historical Review "A book that should be read by everyone engaged in poverty knowledge and social policy."---Deborah L. Little, American Journal of Sociology "This deeply researched and panoramic book is intellectual history at its best."---Thomas Jackson, The Historian "A brief review cannot do justice to the richness and subtlety of this fine study. . . . [O'Connor's] argument is on the whole d
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Dead on Arrival
The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America
by Colin Gordon
Part 60 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Colin Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. He is the author of New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935.
Why, alone among industrial democracies, does the United States not have national health insurance? While many books have addressed this question, Dead on Arrival is the first to do so based on original archival research for the full sweep of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of political, reform, business, and labor records, Colin Gordon traces a complex and interwoven story of political failure and private response. He examines, in turn, the emergence of private, work-based benefits; the uniquely American pursuit of "social insurance"; the influence of race and gender on the health care debate; and the ongoing confrontation between reformers and powerful economic and health interests.
Dead on Arrival stands alone in accounting for the failure of national or universal health policy from the early twentieth century to the present. As importantly, it also suggests how various interests (doctors, hospitals, patients, workers, employers, labor unions, medical reformers, and political parties) confronted the question of health care--as a private responsibility, as a job-based benefit, as a political obligation, and as a fundamental right.
Using health care as a window onto the logic of American politics and American social provision, Gordon both deepens and informs the contemporary debate. Fluidly written and deftly argued, Dead on Arrival is thus not only a compelling history of the health care quandary but a fascinating exploration of the country's political economy and political culture through "the American century," of the role of private interests and private benefits in the shaping of social policy, and, ultimately, of the ways the American welfare state empowers but also imprisons its citizens. "This is a sophisticated, impassioned, and well-documented analysis of the failures of twentieth-century American health reform efforts."---David Rosner, Business History Review "[A] brilliantly recounted, thoughtful, and persuasive argument, not for simple explanations, but for a complex, on-the-ground discussion of what it was in the United States that made universal health insurance 'dead on arrival.'. . . [This book] is impeccably and impressively researched, drawing extensively on governmental and private archives."---Rosemary A. Stevens, Bulletin of the History of Medicine "Another autopsy of the failure to implement a US national health plan? Yes, but Dead on Arrival is more interesting, informative, and compelling than others. Its strength lies in the integration of multiple social, economic, and political perspectives within a historical context to address the question, why no national health insurance?"---Bernard S. Bloom, Journal of the American Medical Association "A welcome addition to a large literature on the modern United States medical system. . . . [It] illuminates the political deadlock and the institutional rigidity of the American system and offers a cogent explanation for why reform has been so intractable in health care throughout the last hundred years."---Declan O'Reilly, Enterprise & Society "A treasure trove of information for anyone seriously wishing to tackle this issue."---Tom Gallagher, San Francisco Bay Guardian "At a time of renewed popular and scholarly debate over America's exceptional welfare state, students of American public affairs will find much of value in Gordon's timely book."---Jacob S. Hacker, Political Science Quarterly "This is a bold, clearly written, and engaging analysis of the place of universal health insurance in the American welfare state. It represents a serious argument about the American political arena, presents a plausible argument for its position, and backs that up with a standard of scholarship I respect."-Ted Marmor, Yale University, author of The Politics of Medicare
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More Equal Than Others
America from Nixon to the New Century
by Godfrey Hodgson
Part 61 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Godfrey Hodgson is an Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He is the author of six books, including The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography, People's Century, and America In Our Time (1976, Princeton 2005).
During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. More Equal Than Others looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls "the conservative ascendancy" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics.
Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe.
More Equal Than Others addresses a broad range of issues, with chapters on politics, the new economy, immigration, technology, women, race, and foreign policy, among others. A fitting sequel to the author's critically acclaimed America In Our Time, More Equal Than Others is not only an outstanding synthesis of history, but a trenchant commentary on the state of the American Dream. "In More Equal Than Others, an up-to-the-minute critique of modern American life, the British historian Godfrey Hodgson combines intelligent discussions of pressures that have shaped American society during the last quarter-century . . . With a factoid-packed jeremiad against the triumph of the suburb--the demographic zone where half the population now lives, where two-thirds of new jobs are located, whose voting strength overawes Congress. . . . Although Hodgson writes as a liberal, he levels [his] charges across party lines."---Allen D. Boyer, New York Times Book Review "[A] wonderfully written, wide-ranging and profoundly depressing book. Hodgson's theme is that the US has changed for the worse in the past 25 years: inequality is supplanting equality, even equality of opportunity."---Kathleen Burk, Financial Times "[Hodgson] sees a country which the postwar liberal consensus has indeed moved right, turning free-market capitalism from an economic theory into a cultural template. The result is an America in which financial segregation increasingly preserves opportunity for a wealthy elite. . . . [He] argues convincingly that American society has come to resemble old-fashioned Europe, with its strictly class-structured elites."---Michael Carlson, The Spectator "The most thoughtful, thorough and sorrowful book imaginable on what has happened in these years."---Bernard Crick, The Independent "Godfrey Hodgson . . . delivers a relentless indictment of an American grown . . . far too sure of itself. In More Equal Than Others, he argues that a wave of right-wing triumphalism has overtaken the country since the Soviet Union's death from exhaustion. In its train, it has brought us a sanctification of the unfettered market, an intensification of Americans' long-standing contempt for government, and--most appallingly--a complacent acceptance of unprecedented inequalities in wealth, education, and opportunity."---Matthew A. Crenson, Political Science Quarterly
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Taken Hostage
The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam
by David Farber
Part 62 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
David Farber is Professor of History at Temple University, specializing in twentieth-century American history. His most recent book is Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans captive. Thus began the Iran Hostage Crisis, an affair that captivated the American public for 444 days and marked America's first confrontation with the forces of radical Islam. Using hundreds of recently declassified government documents, historian David Farber takes the first in-depth look at the hostage crisis, examining its lessons for America's contemporary War on Terrorism.
Unlike other histories of the subject, Farber's vivid and fast-paced narrative looks beyond the day-to-day circumstances of the crisis, using the events leading up to the ordeal as a means for understanding it. The book paints a portrait of the 1970s in the United States as an era of failed expectations in a nation plagued by uncertainty and anxiety. It reveals an American government ill prepared for the fall of the Shah of Iran and unable to reckon with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his militant Islamic followers.
Farber's account is filled with fresh insights regarding the central players in the crisis: Khomeini emerges as an astute strategist, single-mindedly dedicated to creating an Islamic state. The Americans' student-captors appear as less-than-organized youths, having prepared for only a symbolic sit-in with just a three-day supply of food. ABC news chief Roone Arledge, newly installed and eager for ratings, is cited as a critical catalyst in elevating the hostages to cause célèbre status.
Throughout the book there emerge eerie parallels to the current terrorism crisis. Then as now, Farber demonstrates, politicians failed to grasp the depth of anger that Islamic fundamentalists harbored toward the United States, and Americans dismissed threats from terrorist groups as the crusades of ineffectual madmen.
Taken Hostage is a timely and revealing history of America's first engagement with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, one that provides a chilling reminder that the past is only prologue. "Farber . . . provides a fascinating glimpse into how events in Iran capped for Americans a decade of unfulfilled expectations and widespread disillusionment in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the fall of Saigon and a spiraling energy crisis."---Reza Aslan, The Nation "While Farber presents a detailed picture of the coming of the Iranian revolution, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the United States' inability to see the deal effectively with either, at the heart of his tale is America. Farber satisfyingly contextualizes the moment, vividly redrawing stagflation, the energy crisis and national malaise. . . . Farber gives a needed history lesson on the depth of political anger in the Islamic world and on the United States' incapacity to communicate its message." "Readers who want to explore the causes of the current war on terrorism should read this cogent recounting of the hostage crisis of the 1970s. Unlike earlier accounts, which were written before September 11, 2001, Farber's work forcefully demonstrates that the United States can no longer ignore the popularity of fundamental Islam in Muslim nations or the all-too-widespread contempt for American democracy in these countries."---Karl Helicher, ForeWord Magazine "David Farber's book demonstrates that Americans--then as now--understood neither the foe that confronted them nor its motives."---Anthony McRoy, Muslim World Book Review "This is solid narrative history. It does not attempt a generalized analysis of the behavior of revolutionary regimes, nor does it seek to place the response to this hostage crisis within a larger historical context. Farber's epilogue, moreover, offers no especially dramatic observations, though he does point toward the fact that Rona
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In Search of Another Country
Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
by Joseph Crespino
Part 63 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2008 Lillian Smith Book Award, Southern Regional Council" "Winner of the 2007 McLemore Prize for the Best Mississippi History Book" Joseph Crespino is Assistant Professor of History at Emory University.
In the 1960s, Mississippi was the heart of white southern resistance to the civil-rights movement. To many, it was a backward-looking society of racist authoritarianism and violence that was sorely out of step with modern liberal America. White Mississippians, however, had a different vision of themselves and their country, one so persuasive that by 1980 they had become important players in Ronald Reagan's newly ascendant Republican Party.
In this ambitious reassessment of racial politics in the deep South, Joseph Crespino reveals how Mississippi leaders strategically accommodated themselves to the demands of civil-rights activists and the federal government seeking to end Jim Crow, and in so doing contributed to a vibrant conservative countermovement. Crespino explains how white Mississippians linked their fight to preserve Jim Crow with other conservative causes--with evangelical Christians worried about liberalism infecting their churches, with cold warriors concerned about the Communist threat, and with parents worried about where and with whom their children were schooled. Crespino reveals important divisions among Mississippi whites, offering the most nuanced portrayal yet of how conservative southerners bridged the gap between the politics of Jim Crow and that of the modern Republican South.
This book lends new insight into how white Mississippians gave rise to a broad, popular reaction against modern liberalism that recast American politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century. "In his study of Mississippi, Crespino provides a challenging, comprehensive examination of white southerners confronting the modern Civil Rights Movement. While focusing on the actions, strategies, and beliefs from the Brown v. Board of Education decision to the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Crespino successfully reevaluates the perspective of southern whites beyond the Ku Klux Klan and those espousing virulent racism."---J. Michael Bitzer, Choice "In this important and engagingly written book historian Joseph Crespino has examined Mississippi's white population and has discovered more complexity, and much more change over time, than Phil Ochs [in his biting anthem, 'Here's to the State of Mississippi'] would have thought possible."---Bruce Nelson, Journal of Southern History "Elucidating the connection between modern conservatives who avow racial equality and the southern segregationists who so strongly resisted it, . . . Crespino counters the facile historical claims of conservatives who identify their movement with the religious, nonviolent, and integrationist civil rights crusades of the 1950s and early 1960s."---Paul V. Murphy, American Historical Review "Crespino navigates . . . with consummate skill, offering clear understandings of state and national politics and basing his linkages of the two fields on solid evidence. . . . In Search of Another Country is a stellar work of historical scholarship, powerfully researched, organized, and argued."---Peter N. Stearns, Journal of Social History "In Search of Another Country is an excellent addition to the growing literature on the Republican counterrevolution in the American South. It is well researched and deftly argued. Although the layman might not appreciate its careful attention to detail, the specialist will. Indeed, it is a book that deserves a place on the shelf of every research library."---Barton C. Shaw, Journal of American Studies In Search of Another Country represents a major advance in our understanding of the conservative counterrevolution that remade the American political landscape after the sixties. This book is the best retort to those who still see the civil rights movement in triumphalist terms. Elegantly written and meticulously resear
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The Straight State
Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
by Margot Canaday
Part 64 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2012 Biennial Book Award, Order of the Coif" "Winner of the 2011 John Boswell Prize, Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History" "Winner of the 2010 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians" "Winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award, LGBT Studies by the Lambda Literary Foundation" "Co-Winner of the 2010 Gladys M. Kammerer Award, American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2010 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, American Studies Association" "Winner of the 2010 Cromwell Book Prize, American Society for Legal History" Margot Canaday is assistant professor of history at Princeton University.
How the government enforced sex and gender conformity and relegated gays to second-class citizenship
The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.
Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control-immigration, the military, and welfare-and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades.
Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America. "It is not really news that inhabitants of the United States are governed by what historian Margot Canaday calls, in the title of her excellent book, a 'straight state.' For some time now, scholars of sexuality (following in the footsteps of those who have studied and challenged the race and gender hierarchies embedded in state policies and actions) have professed the analytical goal of what historian Lisa Duggan, writing in 1994, called 'queering the state.' These scholars have argued that the supposed naturalness of the heterosexual couple, and the unnaturalness of alternatives, is presumed and reinforced in the ordinary workings of government. Canaday's substantial contribution is to trace, in gripping and at times horrifying detail, exactly how the United States came to operate in this fashion over the course of much of the twentieth century. The Straight State provides a compelling history of the designation of 'the homosexual as the anticitizen.' . . . The Straight State is a captivating, engagingly written work of social, political, legal and sexual history, and the fruit of an extraordinary attention to archival documents."---Steven Epstein, Nation "[Canaday] succeeds in . . . contributing brilliantly both to understandings of the relationship between state practices and the construction of identity and to the story of the rise of the modern bureaucratic state as a sexual state. . . . [This] book . . . presents a fascinating reframing of a familiar story and opens substantial new space for related research."---J
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Troubling the Waters
Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century
by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg
Part 68 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2006" "Co-Winner of the 2006 Saul Viener Book Prize, American Jewish Historical Society" Cheryl Lynn Greenberg is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the author of "Or Does it Explode?" and To Ask for an Equal Chance, and the editor of A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC.
Was there ever really a black-Jewish alliance in twentieth-century America? And if there was, what happened to it? In Troubling the Waters, Cheryl Greenberg answers these questions more definitively than they have ever been answered before, drawing the richest portrait yet of what was less an alliance than a tumultuous political engagement--but one that energized the civil rights revolution, shaped the agenda of liberalism, and affected the course of American politics as a whole.
Drawing on extensive new research in the archives of organizations such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, Greenberg shows that a special black-Jewish political relationship did indeed exist, especially from the 1940s to the mid-1960s--its so-called "golden era"--and that this engagement galvanized and broadened the civil rights movement. But even during this heyday, she demonstrates, the black-Jewish relationship was anything but inevitable or untroubled. Rather, cooperation and conflict coexisted throughout, with tensions caused by economic clashes, ideological disagreements, Jewish racism, and black anti-Semitism, as well as differences in class and the intensity of discrimination faced by each group. These tensions make the rise of the relationship all the more surprising--and its decline easier to understand.
Tracing the growth, peak, and deterioration of black-Jewish engagement over the course of the twentieth century, Greenberg shows that the history of this relationship is very much the history of American liberalism--neither as golden in its best years nor as absolute in its collapse as commonly thought. "[Greenberg's] smart and comprehensive analysis . . . is one of the best of a spate of new books on this topic, with her fine research and careful delineation of the facts." "The vexed topic of black-Jewish relations in 20th-century America requires a brave writer, and Greenberg confronts the issue with honesty and dedication. While she provides ample evidence that the golden age of cooperation between the two groups wasn't as harmonious as generally believed, she also provides numerous examples of cohesion during the more fraught times. Greenberg is not only adept at uncovering little-known controversies and victories; her brief exposition of the famous New York City teachers' strike in the late 1960s, an incident widely credited with bringing to a boil simmering black-Jewish tensions, is a masterpiece of compression and insight." "Greenberg's most impressive achievement is the way she weaves the story of black-Jewish relations into the larger history of American liberalism in the twentieth century...While the likelihood of another 'golden age' of black-Jewish relations seems remote, what is certain is that Greenberg's book will be essential reading for anyone interested in this complex relationship and in the history of American liberalism more broadly."---Eric L. Goldstein, American Historical Review "Troubling the Waters gives textured life to more than 100 years of civil rights efforts and offers a window into the complex, political decision-making of courageous and often admirable individuals."---Jane Gordon, Diverse "[Cheryl Greenberg] provides extremely detailed histories of Jewish and African American civil rights efforts, together and as separate communities. . . . [F]or the scholar and political tactician, the volume is a goldmine of information. . . . [T]his book is likely to become one of the classic histories of black-Jewish relations in the United States." "Greenberg's is one of the best of a spate of new books on t
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Debtor Nation
The History of America in Red Ink
by Louis Hyman
Part 72 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011: Top 25 Books" Louis Hyman is assistant professor of history at the ILR School of Cornell University.
The story of personal debt in modern America
Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America, Debtor Nation traces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream-thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition.
How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful-choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production.
From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending, Debtor Nation presents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business. "Incredibly timely."---Diane Coyle, The Enlightened Economist blog "[Debtor Nation] does a splendid job unpacking the origins and evolution of credit and debt in the US, an effort that should give news consumers a new and useful perspective on the American consumer. . . . Hyman tells the story of America's debt obsession engagingly and without an overabundance of jargon."---Asa Fitch, The National "As an elegantly crafted historical analysis of how consumer credit grew to a colossus, Debtor Nation is compelling reading. As a well-documented financial analysis, Debtor Nation exposes the weak underside of lenders' balance sheets. Legislators should read it. Lobbyists for banks and other lenders may not be able to ignore it."---Andrew Allentuck, Financial Post "Beautifully written, painstakingly documented, and altogether persuasive, the book provides a comprehensive look at the history of consumer debt in the U.S. . . . [Debtor Nation] is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the modern credit system in the U.S. It manages to weave together a long history of developments within America's credit markets in a narrative that is both fascinating and frightening." "Hyman has written an insightful book about the evolution of U.S. credit markets. Debtor Nation is particularly relevant given the recent financial crisis and after reading it, it is clear that a complete story of the crisis must begin decades earlier. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about U.S. credit markets, or about how the U.S. became so dependent on debt."---Katharine L. Shester, EH.net "Debtor Nation offers several possibilities for use by family and consumer sciences professionals. For pre-professionals or college students interested in debt access and use in the U. S., this book is a concise source of events and key laws passed to regulate credit and credit access. . . . For educators who cover consumer choice and responsibility, this book is packed with examples of how ignorance is costly and has been used by those in business to profit from the uninformed."---Cathy F. Bowen, Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences "De
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Between Citizens and the State
The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century
by Christopher P. Loss
Part 81 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2013 Outstanding Book Award, American Educational Research Association" Christopher P. Loss is assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University.
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. "Loss has succeeded in a very ambitious project, and shows the many ways that higher education serves as a key intermediary between state and citizen. I hope other academics will take up the challenge and build on his very good start."---Nancy L. Ruther, Times Higher Education "Loss offers a well-researched, important narrative of the escalating involvement of federal policy in U.S. higher education from WWI through the 1970s and of the remarkable social outcomes or effects thereof. . . . Loss's book merits a place on university library shelves as well on the reading lists of courses on public policy and on the history of American higher education." "Between Citizens and the State provides an accurate and cogent perspective on movements in American society that have led members of government and higher education to clash, but also to collaborate. Loss provides new insights on a one-hundred-year relationship that has largely been neglected by scholars."---Hani Morgan, Journal of American History "Between Citizens and the State is an ambitious history of the politics of higher education in the twentieth century. . . . Exploring the linkage between politics as it affected higher education and the development of the social sciences is one of the significant achievements of this book."---Nannerl O. Keohane, Perspectives on Politics "Admirably ambitious in scope and engagingly written. . . . Loss argues that political leaders and educational elites worked together to create a partnership between higher education and the state over the course of the last century. While historians of science have recognized this, Loss's important contribution to the discussion is to focus not on the collaboration's goal of producing experts and expert knowledge but on the goal of creating democratic citizens."---Rebecca Lowen, American Historical Review "Loss' book does more than chronicle the relationship between the government and higher education; it highlights the significance of higher education's place in providing citizens a space to develop their voice, power, and political and personal identities. In doing
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School Lunch Politics
The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program
by Susan Levine
Part 82 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Susan Levine is professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Labor's True Woman and Degrees of Equality.
Whether kids love or hate the food served there, the American school lunchroom is the stage for one of the most popular yet flawed social welfare programs in our nation's history. School Lunch Politics covers this complex and fascinating part of American culture, from its origins in early twentieth-century nutrition science, through the establishment of the National School Lunch Program in 1946, to the transformation of school meals into a poverty program during the 1970s and 1980s. Susan Levine investigates the politics and culture of food; most specifically, who decides what American children should be eating, what policies develop from those decisions, and how these policies might be better implemented.
Even now, the school lunch program remains problematic, a juggling act between modern beliefs about food, nutrition science, and public welfare. Levine points to the program menus' dependence on agricultural surplus commodities more than on children's nutritional needs, and she discusses the political policy barriers that have limited the number of children receiving meals and which children were served. But she also shows why the school lunch program has outlasted almost every other twentieth-century federal welfare initiative. In the midst of privatization, federal budget cuts, and suspect nutritional guidelines where even ketchup might be categorized as a vegetable, the program remains popular and feeds children who would otherwise go hungry.
As politicians and the media talk about a national obesity epidemic, School Lunch Politics is a timely arrival to the food policy debates shaping American health, welfare, and equality.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "A comprehensive examination of school lunches' complex history from the birth of home economics and food as a nutritional science to the arrival of vending machines in cafeterias."---Eliza Krigman, The Nation "[T]his book is an admirable history of the political landscape of school lunch, setting the stage for future scholarship on this rich and intriguing topic. . . . Levine's book is a fine study of the history of school lunch vis-a-vis welfare programs and politics."---Amy Bentley, American Historical Review "[Susan Levine] traces the [school lunch] program back to the Progressive Era, when localized charities distributed school lunches as a way to counteract malnutrition. But over the course of the program's lifetime, the interests of the agricultural and commercial food industries have largely superseded those of students. Levine provides an in-depth look at how such factors as early nutritionists' disdain for Italian cooking have led to the ubiquitous greasy pizza of today's school cafeteria." "Levine chronicles the history of what she describes as the most popular--yet flawed and poorly understood--social welfare program in the US: The National School Lunch Program. . . . While studies in the politics of food have become popular in the last decade, as have studies of welfare, Levine's work stands out for linking these two areas of inquiry."---M. J. Garrison, Choice "Levine has succeeded in writing the rare policy history that is also a page turner. Her engaging and at times witty prose tells a story of food science, agricultural surplus, gender, race, and the welfare state. She puts a human face on the policy makers in this story, if not the recipients of free lunches."---Meghan K. Winchell, Reviews in American History "Susan Levine's highly readable and politically astute history of the school lunch program explains why things have not worked out as well for that program. The answer Levine provides in this book is quite sobering. Perhaps, the more people read books like Susan Levine's, the more citizens can empower themselves to push past those constr
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The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left
by Landon R. Y. Storrs
Part 86 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Landon R. Y. Storrs is professor of history at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era.
How Red Scare politics undermined the reform potential of the New Deal
In the name of protecting Americans from Soviet espionage, the post-1945 Red Scare curtailed the reform agenda of the New Deal. The crisis of the Great Depression had brought into government a group of policy experts who argued that saving democracy required attacking economic and social inequalities. The influence of these men and women within the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and their alliances with progressive social movements, elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. Landon Storrs draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program-created in response to claims that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government-to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies.
Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. Storrs finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, she also shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their supposedly effeminate spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day.
Through a gripping narrative based on remarkable new sources, Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare repressed political debate and constrained U.S. policymaking in fields such as public assistance, national health insurance, labor and consumer protection, civil rights, and international aid. "In her persuasive new book, Landon Storrs . . . provides a fascinating account of how we lost our path to a New Deal by succumbing to the politics of fear. . . . [T]he powerful anticommunist movement, which silenced feminism (among other social movements), helped to move social policy away from the left-liberal consensus of the thirties and toward the less vital center, where it has remained ever since."---Alice Kessler-Harris, Women's Review of Books "[I]mportant, portentous work . . . the means by which the once powerful American Left was reduced to stigmatized impotence were far from pretty. In fact, Storrs argues convincingly that historians have yet to grasp just how ugly they were."---David Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement "Why is there no socialism in the United States? In this book, University of Iowa history professor Landon R. Y. Storrs proposes a new answer: Much more than previously supposed, left-leaning policy makers were targeted by government 'loyalty' investigations and intimidated into adopting conservative ideas. In making the argument, Storrs does a lot of spectacular things."---Rick Perlstein, Bookforum "An exceptional piece of detective work, The Second Red Scare is one of the finest books written on the McCarthy era in the last decade and raises important questions that will no doubt be debated at length in the decade to come."---Alex Goodall, Journal of American Studies "At a time when respect for civil liberties in America seems tenuous, [this] provocative book deserve[s] a wide audience."---Dean J. Kotlowski, International Social Science Review "
Storrs' research in the brilliant book is prodigious. . . . Her
accomplishment . . . is truly awesome, as she creates a giant jigsaw
puzzle, methodically putting each piece in its place to reveal an
unexpected picture."---M. J. Heale, Re
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White Flight
Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
by Kevin M. Kruse
Part 89 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Co-Winner of the 2007 Best Book Award, Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award, Southern Historical Association" "Winner of the 2007 Malcolm Bell, Jr., and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the Best Book in Georgia History, Georgia Historical Society" Kevin M. Kruse is associate professor of history at Princeton University.
During the civil rights era, Atlanta thought of itself as "The City Too Busy to Hate," a rare place in the South where the races lived and thrived together. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."
In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "In White Flight, a study of white resistance to desegregation in Atlanta, Kruse produces a panoramic and engaging portrayal of the struggle over desegregation."---Ronald Brownstein, American Prospect "An ambitious, well-researched, and interesting study, White Flight offers a provocative examination of the connections between race and conservative politics."---Jeff Roche, Journal of American History "Kruse presents a nuanced portrayal of the trends that fostered the growth of the suburbs and the casting aside of racist demagoguery."---Jonathan Tilove, Times-Picayune "White Flight provides a detailed yet fascinating history of right-wing backlash against the civil rights movement that has relevance not only for historians but also for political scientists. Kevin Kruse's study deserves a wide reading."---R. Claire Snyder, New Political Science "In his book, Kevin Kruse analyzes the ideology accompanying white flight and its ongoing impact on American politics. . . . In a beautifully written, clearly structured, and deeply researched narrative, Kruse lays out the historical processes that led to the development of modern conservatism."---Kristen O'Hare, Urban History Review "Kruse's ultimate success lies in using history to answer contemporary political questions, and without compromising his professional standards."---Clay Risen, Nashville Scene "In Kruse's skillful hands, Atlanta's struggle over integration takes on many of the characteristics of low-level urban warfare. . . . Kruse illuminates a key phase in American political development."---Kimberley S. Johnson, Perspectives on Politics "Kruse provides a useful resource in the debate over the significance of race in politics. His book is thoroughly researched and well written. Students interested in modern politics and Civil Rights histories alike would greatly benefit from thi
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Little Rock
Race and Resistance at Central High School
by Karen Anderson
Part 96 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Karen Anderson is professor emeritus of history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II and coauthor of Present Tense: The United States since 1945.
A political history of the most famous desegregation crisis in America
The desegregation crisis in Little Rock is a landmark of American history: on September 4, 1957, after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called up the National Guard to surround Little Rock Central High School, preventing black students from going in. On September 25, 1957, nine black students, escorted by federal troops, gained entrance. With grace and depth, Little Rock provides fresh perspectives on the individuals, especially the activists and policymakers, involved in these dramatic events. Looking at a wide variety of evidence and sources, Karen Anderson examines American racial politics in relation to changes in youth culture, sexuality, gender relations, and economics, and she locates the conflicts of Little Rock within the larger political and historical context.
Anderson considers how white groups at the time, including middle class women and the working class, shaped American race and class relations. She documents white women's political mobilizations and, exploring political resentments, sexual fears, and religious affiliations, illuminates the reasons behind segregationists' missteps and blunders. Anderson explains how the business elite in Little Rock retained power in the face of opposition, and identifies the moral failures of business leaders and moderates who sought the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools, and institutional racism.
Probing the conflicts of school desegregation in the mid-century South, Little Rock casts new light on connections between social inequality and the culture wars of modern America.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "The author applies class and gender perspectives to enhance understanding of the roles women played in the crisis, especially the Mothers' League of Central High School and the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. Anderson's book belongs in every college, university, and public library." "Karen Anderson's Little Rock is recommended for its acute examination of race and gender issues in the South in the 1950s."---Oscar R. Williams, Journal of African American History "Little Rock is based on research in a wide variety of sources, from manuscript archives and newspapers to organizational and school records and oral histories, as well as the vast secondary literature on this topic. The result is a well-written account of an important battle in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Scholars of civil rights, politics, and law in the United States will find this work worthwhile and enjoyable."---Brian J. Daugherity, Journal of Southern History "Little Rock contributes much to our understanding of southern American desegregation. . . . By acknowledging the connections between multifarious oppressions, Little Rock usefully contextualizes what could otherwise be taken for granted as only a story about race without downplaying the obvious racially based elements of conflict surrounding educational integration."---Steven L. Foy, European Legacy "[T]his volume brilliantly details the moral shortfalls of people who sought 'the appearance of federal compliance rather than actual racial justice, leaving behind a legacy of white flight, poor urban schools, and institutional racism.'"---Ruth Tait, Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World "Telling the fascinating story of the Little Rock crisis in wonderful detail, this book mines newspapers, personal papers, memoirs, interviews, and more, for the background behind the headlines. The
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Impossible Subjects
Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
by Mae M. Ngai
Part 105 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2005 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, American Studies Association" "Winner of the 2005 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians" "Honorable Mention for the 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights" "Co-Winner of the 2004 History Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies" "Co-Winner of the 2004 First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians" "Winner of the 2004 Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2004" "Winner of the 2004 Theodore Saloutos Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" Mae M. Ngai is professor of history and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University. Her books include The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America.
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy-a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s-its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "[A] deeply stimulating work. . . . Ngai's undeniable premise--as pertinent today as ever--is that the lawfully regulated part of our immigration system is only the tip of the iceberg. Even as we have allowed legal immigrants, mostly from Europe, through the front door, we have always permitted others, generally people of color, to slip in the back gate to do essential jobs."---Tamar Jacoby, Los Angeles Times Book Review "'Legal' and 'illegal,' as Ngai's book illustrates, are administrative constructions, always subject to change; they do not tell us anything about the desirability of the persons so constructed."---Louis Menand, New Yorker "Ngai pulls no punches, arguing that in most cases . . . illegal [immigrants] were stigmatized by negative racial stereotypes and branded as dangerous. . . . [I]t belongs in every library and should be referenced in every ethnic studies course." "May Impossible Subjects indeed lead to bold changes? Ngai creates that possibility, through altering our vision of immigration history, in showing us the constructed and contingent nature of its legal regulation. Impossible Subjects is essential reading."---Leti Volpp, Michigan Law Review "Ngai's book is a stunning piece of scholarship. . . . [F]or background reading of 'illegal immigration' that takes a broader view, this is an outstanding book."---David M. Reimers, International History Review "Ngai has produced a valuable reinterpretation of twentieth-century American immigration history, one that will push other scholars of race, immigration, and policy in new directions as well."---Charlotte Brooks, Journal of American History "Impossible Subjects offers an important contribution to U.S. histories of race, citizenship, and immigration. This stunning history of U.S. immigration policy dispels the liberal rhetoric that underlies popular notions of immigrant America, as it establishes the designation of Asians and Mexicans as perpetual racial others. Everyone in the field of race and immigration should read this thought provoking book."---Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, American Journal of Sociology "This superb book by historian Mae Ngai addresses the emergence of the le
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The Loneliness of the Black Republican
Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power
by Leah Wright Rigueur
Part 110 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"James P. Hanlan Book Award, New England Historical Association" "Winner of the 2017 Crader Family Book Prize in American Values, Crader Family Endowment at Southeast Missouri State University" Leah Wright Rigueur is assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The story of black conservatives in the Republican Party from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan
Covering more than four decades of American social and political history, The Loneliness of the Black Republican examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan's presidential ascent in 1980. Their unique stories reveal African Americans fighting for an alternative economic and civil rights movement-even as the Republican Party appeared increasingly hostile to that very idea. Black party members attempted to influence the direction of conservatism-not to destroy it, but rather to expand the ideology to include black needs and interests.
As racial minorities in their political party and as political minorities within their community, black Republicans occupied an irreconcilable position-they were shunned by African American communities and subordinated by the GOP. In response, black Republicans vocally, and at times viciously, critiqued members of their race and party, in an effort to shape the attitudes and public images of black citizens and the GOP. And yet, there was also a measure of irony to black Republicans' "loneliness": at various points, factions of the Republican Party, such as the Nixon administration, instituted some of the policies and programs offered by black party members. What's more, black Republican initiatives, such as the fair housing legislation of senator Edward Brooke, sometimes garnered support from outside the Republican Party, especially among the black press, Democratic officials, and constituents of all races. Moving beyond traditional liberalism and conservatism, black Republicans sought to address African American racial experiences in a distinctly Republican way.
The Loneliness of the Black Republican provides a new understanding of the interaction between African Americans and the Republican Party, and the seemingly incongruous intersection of civil rights and American conservatism. "[B]lack Republicans are perceived to be the token black person in a group of Republicans, and the token Republican in a group of black people. This sense of isolation has shaped the black Republican experience for decades. Their plight is chronicled exceptionally well in The Loneliness of the Black Republican by Harvard Kennedy School professor Leah Wright Rigueur. Her thorough examination traces the winding journey of black Republicans from the inception of the New Deal to the election of Ronald Reagan."---Theodore R. Johnson, The Atlantic "The Loneliness of the Black Republican is meticulous, well-crafted, and consistently astute about the fractious recent history of the Grand Old Party."---Artur Davis, Weekly Standard "Leah Wright Rigueur's book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican, provides an intellectual and thought-provoking voice to this intriguing debate. . . . [H]er well-researched work is evenhanded--and, at times, sympathetic. In many ways, it's the most significant book ever written about the collapse of black support in the Republican party."---Michael Taube, Washington Times "This book adds much needed depth to the understanding of the diversity of black politics during these years (1930s to 1980)." "Meticulously researched . . . . Rigueur . . . gives us one of the first attempts at understanding who black Republicans were, the values they held, and how they engaged in party politics."---James Wolfinger, Journal of American History "Rigueur provides a powerful addition to wider scholarship on black political behavior."---Corey D. Fields, Political Science Quarterly "There is much to be admired in Leah Wright Rig
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Cities of Knowledge
Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley
by Margaret Pugh O'Mara
Part 111 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Margaret Pugh O'Mara teaches history at Stanford University. The dissertation this book is based upon won the Urban History Association's award for Best Dissertation in Urban History completed in 2002.
What is the magic formula for turning a place into a high-tech capital? How can a city or region become a high-tech powerhouse like Silicon Valley? For over half a century, through boom times and bust, business leaders and politicians have tried to become "the next Silicon Valley," but few have succeeded. This book examines why high-tech development became so economically important late in the twentieth century, and why its magic formula of people, jobs, capital, and institutions has been so difficult to replicate. Margaret O'Mara shows that high-tech regions are not simply accidental market creations but "cities of knowledge"--planned communities of scientific production that were shaped and subsidized by the original venture capitalist, the Cold War defense complex.
At the heart of the story is the American research university, an institution enriched by Cold War spending and actively engaged in economic development. The story of the city of knowledge broadens our understanding of postwar urban history and of the relationship between civil society and the state in late twentieth-century America. It leads us to further redefine the American suburb as being much more than formless "sprawl," and shows how it is in fact the ultimate post-industrial city. Understanding this history and geography is essential to planning for the future of the high-tech economy, and this book is must reading for anyone interested in building the next Silicon Valley. "Margaret O'Mara's book shows how very far from simple was US experience when dissected in detail and how very hard it was in reality to emulate Silicon Valley/Stanford success even for other American cities. This is a very interesting book. And a very timely one. It is refreshing to read a book with the historical perspective that policymakers and analysts alike too often lack."---Jane Marceau, Australian Review "O'Mara's study is richly wrought, and her emphasis on place adds an important new dimension to discussions of Cold War political economy and its legacies."---Daniel Lee Kleinman, Journal of American History "Can American cities survive in the twenty-first century? Margaret Pugh O'Mara puts forth a blueprint, not only for their survival, but one that could lead to an economic resurgence that restores cities to their traditional leadership role."-Edward G. Rendell, Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania "Margaret Pugh O'Mara has written a timely and brilliant exposition of the powerful forces that helped create the great suburban 'centers' of America's knowledge economy. This book is essential reading for every American metropolis imagining a high-tech future."-Bruce Katz, Director, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, The Brookings Institution "An original, compelling, and important book, Cities of Knowledge is at once a work of deep empirical research and of creative interpretation. O'Mara's study will make major contributions to economic history, political history, and the cultural history of suburban development in post-World War II America."-Bruce Schulman, author of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 "O'Mara tells you why the search for the next Silicon Valley has been so difficult and so important. By placing the history of Silicon Valley and its would-be imitators in Philadelphia and Atlanta into a larger history of postwar America, she challenges us to think about whether conventional cities can compete with emerging cities of knowledge and if so, on what terms. Urban planners may not find her four lessons easy to implement, but they have plenty to learn from them."-Stuart W. Leslie, author of The Cold War and American Science "Cities of Knowledge is an important work that
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Suburban Warriors
The Origins of the New American Right
by Lisa McGirr
Part 115 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2001 Book Award, New England Historical Association" "Winner of the Robert G. Athearn Prize in Western American History" Lisa McGirr is professor of history at Harvard University.
In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century.
Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism.
While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens-and often upsets-our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America. "Suburban Warriors affords a rare picture of the grass-roots process actually working at a specific site. . . . McGirr's setting is California's Orange County, which became America's most celebrated conservative stronghold in the 1960s. McGirr's book provides a valuable scholarly analysis of the demographics, culture, and history that made the county distinctively conservative."---Russell Baker, New York Review of Books "McGirr paints a complex picture . . . Incisive, yet fair, this represents an important standing of how antimodernist ideologies continue to thrive." "A fascinating tale . . . Suburban Warriors goes a long way to explaining the origins of a movement whose influence remains formidable to this day."---Stephen Dale, Washington Post Book World "Orange County's success as a crucible for conservatism, McGirr skillfully argues, was rooted in the fact that it took tried and true American values of individualism and community, boldly exaggerated them and then recombined them in ways that accentuated their messy contradictions. . . . McGirr blends political and social history and goes where few analysts before: to the kitchen tables as well as the meeting halls of the early right-wing movement. This is the book's great contribution."---Arlene Stein, The Nation "The best book yet written about the local insurgencies that dumped liberal Republicanism into the dustbin of history and made the GOP party of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich."---Michael Kazin, Lingua Franca "Well written and authoritative, enriched by the voices of the Orange County conservatives [McGirr] interviewed and by deep archival research."---Mark Schmitt, American Prospect "The strength of her book is her explanation of the gr
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The Rise of a Prairie Statesman
The Life and Times of George McGovern
by Thomas Knock
Part 121 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Biography & Autobiography, Association of American Publishers" Thomas J. Knock is Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of the prize-winning To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order and the coauthor of The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (both Princeton). He lives in Dallas, Texas.
The first major biography of the 1972 U.S. presidential candidate and unsung champion of American liberalism
The Rise of a Prairie Statesman is the first volume of a major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became America's most eloquent and prescient critic of the Vietnam War. In this masterful book, Thomas Knock traces George McGovern's life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city's streets.
Drawing extensively on McGovern's private papers and scores of in-depth interviews, Knock shows how McGovern's importance to the Democratic Party and American liberalism extended far beyond his 1972 presidential campaign, and how the story of postwar American politics is about more than just the rise of the New Right. He vividly describes McGovern's harrowing missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 bomber pilot, and reveals how McGovern's combat experiences motivated him to earn a PhD in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress. When President Kennedy appointed him director of Food for Peace in 1961, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of the program's school lunch initiative that soon was feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world. As a senator, he delivered his courageous and unrelenting critique of Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam-a conflict that brought their party to disaster and caused a new generation of Democrats to turn to McGovern for leadership.
A stunning achievement, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman ends in 1968, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, when the "Draft McGovern" movement thrust him into the national spotlight and the contest for the presidential nomination, culminating in his triumphal reelection to the Senate and his emergence as one of the most likely prospects for the Democratic nomination in 1972.. "The Rise of a Prairie Statesman is the remarkable story of the making of one of the lions of liberalism, yet a man who also won the Distinguished Flying Cross. This brilliantly told saga of how a soft-spoken man of the Midwest shook up the established political order and emerged as one of the most eloquent and thoughtful leaders of the twentieth century is a must-read for anyone interested in American politics in the postwar era."---Robert P. Watson, Journal of American History "An important reconsideration of a significant 20th-century politician." "[I]n every way, the book succeeds. This is political writing--and life-writing--of the first order." "This biography will stand as the standard bearer for all future biographies. It is detailed enough to get to know the person in-depth, and it is well written; unlike some biographies, this one flows smoothly, but keeps it academic for fellow researchers and students." "First rate. . . . The book is worth owning."---Bob Mercer, Rapid City Journal "Ably and engagingly written, copiously documented." "Knock's highly informed, comprehensive, and sympathetic portrait of George McGovern up through his 1968 reelection to the Senate suggests that the second volume will amply prove his credentials as a statesman, explain his greatness, and make it apparent why he merits a two-volume biography."---Bartholomew Sparrow, Perspectives on Politics "I started [the book] believing George McGovern to be the greatest presidential nominee of my lifetime and I
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Getting Tough
Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America
by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Part 129 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"One of CHOICE's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2017" "Honorable Mention for the 2018 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians" Julilly Kohler-Hausmann is associate professor of history at Cornell University.
The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs
In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period.
When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force.
Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state. "A vital reminder that reactionary ideas gestate at the local level before they get nationalized. And, with enough organizing, so too might emancipatory ones."---Dan Berger, Truthout "This extraordinary book analyzes changing state-level policies toward drugs, welfare, and incarceration in the 1970s in the US, revealing connections between welfare and imprisonment as institutions of social regulation. . . . Drawing on statements and letters from officials, activists, prisoners, welfare recipients, and concerned citizens, Kohler-Hausmann illuminates the often contradictory and always contingent dialogues through which 'tough' policies were legitimized and enacted. . . . The inclusion of so many voices leads to a lively and engaging read." "In her groundbreaking book, Kohler-Hausmann draws important new connections between penal and social welfare policy and debunks common assumptions about poverty, crime, and drug use in the process. Getting Tough transforms the way we view the late twentieth-century United States and speaks to the problems at the center of American democracy today."-Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America "Getting Tough is an extraordinary gift to all of us who have long tried to make sense of how the United States came to build one of the world's most punitive carceral states, so closely on the heels of having constructed a redistributive welfare state. Examining the complex histories and sensibilities of political elites, grassroots activists, and voters, while illuminating the lived experiences of drug sellers, welfare recipients, and prisoners, Kohler-Hausmann
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The Deportation Machine
America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants
by Adam Goodman
Part 131 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History" "Winner of the Henry Adams Book Prize, Society for History in the Federal Government" "Winner of the PROSE Award in North American History, Association of American Publishers" "Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" "Finalist for the Shapiro Book Prize, The Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington" Adam Goodman teaches in the Department of History and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago. Twitter @adamsigoodman
The unknown history of deportation and of the fear that shapes immigrants' lives
Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time.
In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms-formal deportations, "voluntary" departures, and self-deportations-and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, The Deportation Machine introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion.
This revelatory book chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship. "In his superbly researched and briskly narrated The Deportation Machine, Adam Goodman, an assistant professor of history and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, comprehensively recasts the way we think about expulsions from the US and their effects."---Julia Preston, New York Review of Books "Could not be timelier. The Deportation Machine provides new, crucial insights into the history of migrant expulsion and the origins of today's crises."---Hilary Goodfriend, NACLA Report on the Americas "The Deportation Machine is the first book to measure accurately the magnitude of exclusion and removal in modern American history. With painstaking archival work, Goodman tracks the true, and truly devastating, extent of removal policies. He makes an essential contribution."---Allison Brownell Tirres, Public Books "Adam Goodman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines how immigration policies and practices have been shaped as much by those who interpret, administer, execute and enforce the laws as by those who write them. . . . Although these measures may appear extreme, distasteful and even un-American, they are, Goodman reminds us, a continuation rather than a deviation from past practices."---David Nasaw, New York Times Book Review "[A] superb history. . . . The Deportation Machine unearths policies and practices that have received scant attention and contributes immeasurably to our understanding of the dark side of immigration policy."---Susan Hartmann, H-Net Reviews "Deportation policy in the United States is nonsensical because it is determined by two opposing impulse
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Gateway State
Hawai'i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire
by Sarah Miller-Davenport
Part 134 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Honorable Mention for the BAAS Book Prize, British Association for American Studies" Sarah Miller-Davenport is lecturer in U.S. history at the University of Sheffield.
How Hawai'i became an emblem of multiculturalism during its journey to statehood in the mid-twentieth century
Gateway State explores the development of Hawai'i as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of American global power in the era of decolonization. The establishment of Hawai'i statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, not only in the ways Americans defined their nation's role on the international stage but also in the ways they understood the problems of social difference at home. Hawai'i's remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of postwar multiculturalism, which was a response both to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States.
Once a racially problematic overseas colony, by the 1960s, Hawai'i had come to symbolize John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. This was a more inclusive idea of who counted as American at home and what areas of the world were considered to be within the U.S. sphere of influence. Statehood advocates argued that Hawai'i and its majority Asian population could serve as a bridge to Cold War Asia-and as a global showcase of American democracy and racial harmony. In the aftermath of statehood, business leaders and policymakers worked to institutionalize and sell this ideal by capitalizing on Hawai'i's diversity. Asian Americans in Hawai'i never lost a perceived connection to Asia. Instead, their ethnic difference became a marketable resource to help other Americans navigate a decolonizing world.
As excitement over statehood dimmed, the utopian vision of Hawai'i fell apart, revealing how racial inequality and U.S. imperialism continued to shape the fiftieth state-and igniting a backlash against the islands' white-dominated institutions. "Gateway State is a great book about Hawai'i statehood and a pathbreaking story of race and foreign relations in postwar America. By viewing this Cold War crossroads from local, national, and global perspectives, Sarah Miller-Davenport deftly integrates Hawai'i history into U.S. history. Gateway State gives readers a whole new way of thinking about the United States in the Pacific world in the twentieth century."-Christopher Capozzola, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "This powerful book reveals the ways that Americans' ideological uses of racially integrated Hawai'i-as message to a decolonizing world and model for a desegregating mainland-bolstered racial and imperial inequalities, and promoted new forms of intractable, hierarchical difference in the name of multiculturalism. Deeply researched and elegantly crafted, Gateway State is a critically important work in the historiographies of U.S. racial formation, overseas colonialism, and the United States in the world."-Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines "Gateway State is an indispensable book that argues for Hawai'i's centrality in U.S. postwar global expansion, race relations at home, and the fraught origins of multiculturalism. Put simply, this is an important work."-Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Columbia University "A highly original, deeply researched, and lucidly presented work, Gateway State offers a rich investigation into the political, cultural, and discursive efforts that moved Hawai'i to statehood. With crisp and forceful arguments and vivid abundant details, this highly teachable book will have a significant impact on American and transpacific studies and considerations of the United States in the world."-Penny Von Eschen, Cornell University "Gateway State centers the political importance of Hawai'i in the midst of post–World War II global decolonization and racial liberation movements in the United States. Well-researched and brilliantly argued, this book examines
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The Industrialists
How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism
by Jennifer A. Delton
Part 138 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Jennifer A. Delton is professor of history at Skidmore College. She is the author of Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal; Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990; and Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.
The first complete history of US industry's most influential and controversial lobbyist
Founded in 1895, the National Association of Manufacturers-NAM-helped make manufacturing the basis of the US economy and a major source of jobs in the twentieth century. The Industrialists traces the history of the advocacy group from its origins to today, examining its role in shaping modern capitalism, while also highlighting the many tensions and contradictions within the organization that sometimes hampered its mission.
In this compelling book, Jennifer Delton argues that NAM-an organization best known for fighting unions, promoting "free enterprise," and defending corporate interests-was also surprisingly progressive. She shows how it encouraged companies to adopt innovations such as safety standards, workers' comp, and affirmative action, and worked with the US government and international organizations to promote the free exchange of goods and services across national borders. While NAM's modernizing and globalizing activities helped to make American industry the most profitable and productive in the world by midcentury, they also eventually led to deindustrialization, plant closings, and the decline of manufacturing jobs.
Taking readers from the Progressive Era and the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and the Trump presidency, The Industrialists is the story of a powerful organization that fought US manufacturing's political battles, created its economic infrastructure, and expanded its global markets-only to contribute to the widespread collapse of US manufacturing by the close of the twentieth century. "The accomplished historian Jennifer Delton has written an extremely important book on one of the United States' leading business organizations, the National Association of Manufacturers . . . . [A] meticulously researched study." "For too long, we have heard only the National Association of Manufacturers' loudest voices-arrogant yet fearful. Delton takes us deeper, revealing a century of pragmatic work helping firms modernize, globalize, and professionalize their management. The Industrialists brilliantly probes NAM's complex internal and external tensions, uncovering a surprising and powerful history of America itself."-Pamela Laird, University of Colorado Denver "Jennifer Delton has written by far the most comprehensive history of this important organization. This crisply written, deeply researched study illuminates much about the broader history of business politics in the twentieth century."-Kim Phillips-Fein, New York University "The Industrialists showcases one of America's most accomplished political and business historians at her finest. Delton's provocative book puts the National Association of Manufacturers not on the reactionary fringes but at the center of American capitalism and debates about industrial reform, labor policy, globalization, and neoliberalism."-Benjamin C. Waterhouse, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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The Politics of Whiteness
Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South
by Michelle Brattain
Part 143 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Michelle Brattain is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.
The Politics of Whiteness presents the first sustained analysis of white racial identity among workers in what was the South's largest industry--the textile industry--for much of the twentieth century. Grounding her work in a study of Rome, Georgia, and surrounding Floyd County from the Great Depression to the 1970s, Michelle Brattain paints a richly textured local portrait of how the varied social benefits of whiteness shaped the experience of textile millhands and, as a result, Southern politics. In doing so, she challenges traditional views of Southern politics as dominated by elites and marked by passivity among Southern workers. Brattain uncovers considerable white working-class political influence and activism for decades starting in the 1930s--which, by re-creating and defending Southern institutions grounded in the idea of racial difference, helped pave the way for resistance to the civil rights movement.
Structured chronologically, this book revises the current understanding, in the Southern working-class context, of paternalism, the New Deal, the 1934 General Textile Strike, the Second World War, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission. It addresses the vast influence of Eugene Talmadge and his son in twentieth-century Georgia politics, and the emergence of Republican influence in the South. Finally there came the moment when formerly explicit defenses of white supremacy were transformed into an intangible, but still powerful, politics of whiteness. The Politics of Whiteness will interest anyone concerned with the history of American politics, the labor movement, or race in America. "Brattain's book is well written and well researched. . .. By stressing the ambiguous nature of the relationship between race and class in the mid-twentieth-century mind, she has reminded us that political views are formed from a variety of impulses."---Tim Lockley, Political Studies "Well written and soundly researched. . . . Brattain's monograph gives us a completely researched and cleanly written case study."---Hugh Davis Graham, Journal of American Ethnic History "A compelling, thoroughly researched monograph with a serious argument worth engaging. It deserves the attention of students of twentieth-century southern, labor, and political history."---Steven A. Reich, Journal of American History "A fine study that addresses major issues in southern and American history. It is well researched, well conceived, and generally persuasive."---Thomas E. Terrill, Journal of Southern History "In a narrative that is briskly written, closely argued, and generally persuasive . . . Brattain argues that whiteness, far from being a troublesome distraction, was at the core of the white workers place in the South."---Carl Burkart, Southern Cultures "Brattain's book is well written, and is a fascinating read on how local and state politics worked to protect local white privilege. . . . [O]ne suspects that the concept of whiteness and its influence on decisions made by American workers transcends the borders of a town in Georgia, and has much to say about how Americans share or do not share access to wealth and power throughout America today."---Mary Waalkes, Journal of Social History "This study takes working class conservatism seriously and refuses to wave it away as false consciousness. It offers a full account of the role of whiteness and white privilege in structuring such conservatism, and intriguing hints as to the role of local boosterism and gender politics in generating both quietism and activism."-David Roediger, Babcock Professor of History, University of Illinois "The Politics of Whiteness is a very fine piece of historical scholarship, written with verve, grace, and clarity. It is clearly a significant contribution to the history of race and of southern labor and politics. Through both its careful use of local history and its addition of racial ana
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24/7 Politics
Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News
by Kathryn Cramer Brownell
Part 148 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"A New Yorker Best Book We've Read This Year" "A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year" "Winner of the PROSE Award in Media and Cultural Studies, Association of American Publishers" Kathryn Cramer Brownell is associate professor of history at Purdue University and the author of Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life.
How cable television upended American political life in the pursuit of profits and influence
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment-frequently at the expense of fostering responsible citizenship.
In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for today's rampant polarization and scandal politics-the intentional restructuring of television as a political institution is. She describes how cable innovations-from C-SPAN coverage of congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV's foray into presidential politics in the 1990s-took on network broadcasting using market forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval.
24/7 Politics reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground. "Brownell is an excellent historian, and her account of cable's evolution from the period right after World War II to the period right after the Cold War is among the best I have read."---Jesse Walker, Reason "Brownell, a historian, details how the opponents of network broadcasting successfully cast the industry as 'elitist' and peddled cable as a democratizing force that would 'empower people, politicians, and perspectives.' Her persuasive account argues that cable's advocates were, in fact, motivated primarily by profit, and that cable television's Sisyphean pursuit of ratings and revenue ultimately served to cultivate a toxic media-and political-environment." "The book's clear argument is conveyed through meticulous research blended with captivating stories, and the cast of characters ranges from franchise owners and lobbyists to policy wonks and presidents. This book provides a new way of looking at the familiar histories of both cable television and American electoral politics due to its impressive deep dives into pivotal moments where those two histories were tied together." "Brownell is a great writer, the subject is decidedly relevant, and the timing of the book's publication is beyond prescient. . . . The consequence of cable television will be felt long after subscriptions fade to black. This makes 24/7 Politics a must read for those who are concerned about the crumbling of American unity and disintegration of agreed upon fact."---Alison Dagnes, Bucks County Beacon "24/7 Politics is the definitive history of the cable industry in the United States. Kathryn Cramer Brownell has a knack for finding the colorful characters and key moments that pull readers in-all while illuminating the high stakes of cable's success not just for the media industry but for American democracy."-Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politi
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The Walls Within
The Politics of Immigration in Modern America
by Sarah R. Coleman
Part 150 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" "Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize, Western Association of Women Historians" Sarah R. Coleman is assistant professor of history at Texas State University. Twitter @sarahrcoleman6
A history of the battles over US immigrants' rights since 1965-and how these conflicts reshaped access to education, employment, civil liberties, and more
The 1965 Hart-Celler Act transformed the American immigration system by abolishing national quotas in favor of a seemingly egalitarian approach. But subsequent demographic shifts resulted in a backlash over the social contract and the rights of citizens versus noncitizens. In The Walls Within, Sarah Coleman explores those political clashes, focusing not on attempts to stop immigration at the border, but on efforts to limit immigrants' rights within the United States through domestic policy. Drawing on new materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, and immigration and civil rights organizations, Coleman exposes how the politics of immigration control has undermined the idea of citizenship for all.
Coleman shows that immigration politics was not just about building or tearing down walls, but about employer sanctions, access to schools, welfare, and the role of local authorities in implementing policies. In the years after 1965, a rising restrictionist movement sought to marginalize immigrants in realms like public education and the labor market. Yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, restrictionists faced countervailing forces committed to an expansive notion of immigrants' rights. In the 1990s, with national politics gridlocked, anti-immigrant groups turned to statehouses to enact their agenda. Achieving strength at the local level, conservatives supporting immigration restriction actually acquired more influence under the Clinton presidency than even during the so-called Reagan revolution, resulting in dire consequences for millions of immigrants.
Revealing the roots behind much of today's nativist sentiment, The Walls Within examines debates about who is entitled to the American dream, and how such dreams can be subverted for those already calling the country home. "Immigrants' struggles to live and flourish in the United States aren't only about the border, Sarah Coleman demonstrates in this comprehensive examination of immigration politics since 1965."---Elizabeth Palmer, The Christian Century "The complex thicket of political divisions over immigration policy, whose origins in the late twentieth century Coleman so ably analyzes, remain largely intact. For those eager to advance the cause of immigrant rights, or for anyone who wants to understand the historical roots of the current political landscape, The Walls Within should be required reading."---Ruth Milkman, Dissent "Coleman provides valuable historical perspective on how the politics of immigration control has resulted in dire consequences for millions of immigrants and transformed the US into a country in which the benefits of citizenship are denied to a significant population living legally within its borders. . . . Recommended." "The virtue of Coleman's book is its thick descriptive account of the to-and-fro struggle between liberals and conservatives and her appreciation of the variety of contingent realities that made outcomes difficult to predict."---Peter Kivisto, Ethnic and Racial Studies "The Walls Within is a significant and ambitious book. Bringing new evidence and a fresh perspective to important questions, Coleman tackles the development of immigrant rights over four decades and across four broad policy areas. The result is a major intervention into our understanding of immigrant rights post-1965."-Cybelle Fox, author of Three Worlds of Relief "The Walls Within is an important read for anyone wanting a better understanding of how we got to where we are, and how much it resembles wh
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A Fabulous Failure
The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
by Nelson Lichtenstein
Part 155 of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the right
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation's economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton's expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration's progressive reformers-people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz-were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in-which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a "fabulous decade"-ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.
A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency's progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful. Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton). Judith Stein (1940–2017) was Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. "A Fabulous Failure is a brilliant analysis of how Bill Clinton fell short in delivering to average Americans. Deeply researched, it takes a fresh look at the way Clinton's policies, whether on free trade, financial deregulation, or other matters, often favored corporate America and Wall Street over working Americans, fueling income inequality and harming blue-collar communities."-Steven Greenhouse, author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
"A major and much-needed reconsideration of the Clinton years. A Fabulous Failure provides an original take on why this president moved the American political economy in the post–New Deal direction that he did, and offers essential insights into why the Clinton era was so pivotal to our world today. This book is a must-read for understanding why the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class."-Meg Jacobs, Princeton University
"Equipped with a profound knowledge of political economy and policymaking, Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein brilliantly explain how the liberal ambitions of the Clinton administration gave way to a dubious agenda of neoliberalism. Their book is the wisest history of the 1990s that has yet been written. Crafted with authority and graceful prose, A Fabulous Failure is a splendid success."-Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
"Lichtenstein and Stein have written the definitive account of the Democratic Party's descent from FDR's New Deal into neoliberal captivity and its political result-Trump and Trumpism. Their prodigious research informs this superb historical narrative of ideological seduction and political corruption. C
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Hillbilly Highway
The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class
by Max Fraser
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"The best book to explain the world J. D. Vance came from is Max Fraser's Hillbilly Highway."-Jessica Wilkerson, author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice
Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway, Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture-from the modern industrial labor movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today's white working-class conservatives.
The book draws on a diverse range of sources-from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music-to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalization, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest-bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present.
The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century. Max Fraser is assistant professor of history at the University of Miami. A former journalist, he has written for the Nation and other publications. "The best book to explain the world where J. D. Vance came from is Max Fraser's Hillbilly Highway."-Jessica Wilkerson, author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice
"This remarkably wide-ranging and beautifully written book attacks head-on the accounts of the 'hillbilly' popularized by J. D. Vance and others and provides a fundamental reorientation of twentieth-century political, labor, and urban history. In doing so, Max Fraser offers important new insights that help explain the long roots of illiberalism among a group that has become ever more important to the political and economic story of the present."-Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
"Hillbilly Highway is the first serious history of the mass migration of millions of poor southern whites into the cities of the Midwest after World War II. Max Fraser skillfully catalogs the experiences of rural transplants, explores class identity, reports on cultural backlash, and shows how these migrants, too often ignored, shaped the politics of welfare. This is an insightful, nuanced, and eye-opening book."-Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
"Hillbilly Highway cuts a revelatory path through modern American history. With razor-sharp analysis and deep empathy, Max Fraser recovers the uneasy story of southern white migrants who transformed the nation's industrial heartland-where they were often needed but rarely wanted. This is working-class history at its best."-Jarod Roll, author of Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950
"Eloquent and brilliant, Max Fraser's Hillbilly Highway puts the reader on the road with the poor whites of the mountain South who travelled back and forth between the attachments and memories of home and the displacements and opportunities of Midwestern cities. Fraser's tremendous achievement is to demonstrate beyond
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Power Lines
Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
by Andrew Needham
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2016 George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History" "Winner of the 2015 Caughey Western History Prize, Western History Association" "Winner of the 2015 Hal K. Rothman Prize, Western History Association" "Winner of the 2015 David J. Weber-Clements Prize, Western History Association" "Winner of a 2015 Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association" Andrew Needham is associate professor of history at New York University.
How high energy consumption transformed postwar Phoenix and deepened inequalities in the American Southwest
In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis.
Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix-driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscape, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest. Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power lines created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental changes associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier. Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities.
Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region. "Power Lines is an important contribution to urban, environmental, and western history."---Adam Rome, Journal of American History "A complex and provocative analysis."---Julie Cohn, Environmental History "Needham's disciplined focus on the mechanisms of power in the modern Southwest does much to clarify the origins of modern America--and to demonstrate the utter centrality of indigenous people to that story."---James Rice, AlterNative "Needham's work is remarkable in its ability to draw together a range of actors, sites, scales, and technologies involved in the uneven development of not just Phoenix or the Navajo, but the entire Southwest. By making these connections visible, Power Lines is an important piece of scholarship for those interested in how energy, and electricity in particular, shapes the lives of people located in very different, yet connected, locations."---Conor Harrison, Planning Perspectives "[A] tremendous accomplishment. By weaving together a swarm of previously disconnected histories and historiographies, Power Lines offers a bracing new perspective on energy, development, politics, and protest in the modern Southwest."---Thomas G. Andrews, Western Historical Quarterly "A remarkably complex, sophisticated look at the causes and consequences of metropolitan growth in the American Southwest in the mid-twentieth century. . . . Power Lines achieves a very impressive, relatively concise synthesis of the expansion of the use of electricity in Phoenix in the mid-twentieth century while at the same time introducing origin
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The Good Immigrants
How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
by Madeline Y. Hsu
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in History" "Winner of the 2016 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" "Runner-up for the 2016 Hamilton Book Awards, University Co-operative Society, University of Texas at Austin" "Winner of the 2015 Douglass C. North Research Award, Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE)" "Winner of the 2015 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" "Honor Book, 2015 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association" Madeline Y. Hsu is associate professor of history and past director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home and the coedited anthology Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture.
Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites-intellectuals, businessmen, and students-who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness.
The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act.
Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans. "Hsu's well-researched study focuses on the ways in which certain categories of the same ethnic group were designated as exempt and thus permitted admission. . . . A worthy read, as it fills a gap in our understanding of the history of U.S. immigration policy and the implications of this policy in educational history."---Eileen H. Tamura, History of Education Quarterly "This book will . . . provide relevant historical context for anybody formulating ideas about Europe's current debate on migration and asylum-seeking."---Charlotte De Blois, Asian Affairs "The Good Immigrants provides much insight on a variety of topics. Those who want to learn more about US immigration policies, cultural relations between the US and China during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese refugees during the 1940s to 1960s, and Chinese transpacific migration will not want to miss it."---Chi-ting Peng, Pacific Affairs "A strikingly timely and significant contribution to our understanding of America's immigration policies and practices since the late nineteenth century."---Karen Leonard, H-Net Reviews "'America is a land of immigrants'-so true. But the state determines who it wants and doesn't want in decidedly unsentimental ways. Hsu's deeply researched and empathetically narrated history reveals how racial thinking, economic need, and international politics transformed the Chinese from being mostly undesirable to selectively welcomed and celebrated. This i
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No Man's Land
Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor
by Cindy Hahamovitch
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2012 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians" "Winner of the 2012 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians" "Winner of the 2012 Philip Taft Labor History Award, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012" Cindy Hahamovitch is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She is the author of The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945.
From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor.
Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews, No Man's Land tells the history of the American "H2" program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours.
No Man's Land puts Jamaican guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration. "No Man's Land is a fascinating, engaging study of one of the less-known guest worker programs in the U.S., the temporary recruitment of Jamaican nationals to work in the agriculture industry. Basing her work on a wide range of primary documents and oral interviews, the author illustrates the harsh and vulnerable working and living conditions guest workers experienced as they toiled in the fields of the Northeast, the South, and Florida. . . . Overall, this is a fantastic book that gives a clear understanding of how Jamaican guest workers labored, lived, and struggled in the U.S.; the political and economic debates behind the rise and fall of temporary work programs; and the similarities and differences with other guest worker programs throughout the world." "Hahamovitch weaves together an illuminating account of history that explores how greed, racial tensions, political persuasion, and lots and lots of money created and preserved the American guestworker program."---Jihan A. Kahssay, European Legacy "Cindy Hahamovitch's award-winning book . . . deserves the widespread praise that it has received. In this well-written, carefully crafted, and compelling book, Hahamovitch provides a fascinating account of the experiences of Jamaican guestworkers and the H2 Program that brought them to the United States. . . . Hahamovitch's work is filled with original insights and compelling arguments that should be of use to anyone who is interested in race relations, global capitalism, and justice. Perhaps most important, Hahamovitch documents and explains how the rise of guestworker programs is usually accompanied by an equally significant rise in undocumented immigration."---Kathleen Mapes, Journal Of Southern History "No Man's Land stakes o
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Lobbying America
The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA
by Benjamin C. Waterhouse
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Benjamin C. Waterhouse is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Lobbying America tells the story of the political mobilization of American business in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Waterhouse traces the rise and ultimate fragmentation of a broad-based effort to unify the business community and promote a fiscally conservative, antiregulatory, and market-oriented policy agenda to Congress and the country at large. Arguing that business's political involvement was historically distinctive during this period, Waterhouse illustrates the changing power and goals of America's top corporate leaders.
Examining the rise of the Business Roundtable and the revitalization of older business associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waterhouse takes readers inside the mind-set of the powerful CEOs who responded to the crises of inflation, recession, and declining industrial productivity by organizing an effective and disciplined lobbying force. By the mid-1970s, that coalition transformed the economic power of the capitalist class into a broad-reaching political movement with real policy consequences. Ironically, the cohesion that characterized organized business failed to survive the ascent of conservative politics during the 1980s, and many of the coalition's top goals on regulatory and fiscal policies remained unfulfilled. The industrial CEOs who fancied themselves the "voice of business" found themselves one voice among many vying for influence in an increasingly turbulent and unsettled economic landscape.
Complicating assumptions that wealthy business leaders naturally get their way in Washington, Lobbying America shows how economic and political powers interact in the American democratic system. "Waterhouse's Lobbying America is an intricate, well-woven history of the efforts by business to influence U.S. politics. Waterhouse tells the story of how the business community came to lobby with an increasingly unified voice against a background of societal change, shifting cultural values, and an increasingly global economy. . . . Immediately of interest to political scientists and historians, this engaging history of business, politics, and societal change will find a wider audience among readers interested in national politics." "Lobbying America is a deeply researched, persuasively argued study that makes important contributions to our understanding of the relationship of business and politics."---Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Journal of American History "The era explored by Waterhouse is rich with complex details. Managing such complexity is a monumental task. Ultimately, Waterhouse succeeds in convincing the reader that corporate lobbyists working on 'small details and short-term benefits' supplanted lobbyists focused on 'big-ticket ideological issues.'"---Scott H. Ainsworth, Economic History Review "[Waterhouses's] focus on business lobbying is perceptive and elegantly written and Waterhouse has made an important contribution to the literature on business and politics in the twentieth century."---Gregory L. Schneider, American Historical Review "Lobbying America explores the fractious history of business influence over American politics and brilliantly charts the business establishment's post-1970 counteroffensive against what its leaders saw as oppressive taxation, regulatory overreach, and an arrogant union movement. Attuned to the political successes and failures of organized business, Waterhouse has produced a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the United States' late twentieth-century embrace of free market ideology."-Edward Balleisen, Duke University "In crisp, lucid prose, Waterhouse makes a convincing case for the success of pro-business mobilization during the 1970s and 80s. Waterhouse shows corporate lobbyists reacting to and learning from their opponents in the environmental, consumer, and labor movements, a
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Don't Blame Us
Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
by Lily Geismer
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Lily Geismer is assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College.
Don't Blame Us traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, Lily Geismer challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that-far from being an exception to national trends-the suburbs of Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the twentieth century. "Don't Blame Us is a very readable and informative book." "This brilliantly argued and beautifully written book was . . . eye-opening for me both as a scholar and a product of the world Geismer reveals in all of its complexity."---Elise Lemire, New England Quarterly "[An] exhaustively researched, compelling book. . . . Geismer presents a fresh and much-needed portrait of a middle-class white suburbia n the most Democratic of states--Massachusetts--that forces us to reconsider easy teleological narratives of liberal 'decline' and conservative ascendancy."---Jonathan Bell, American Historical Review "[A] provocative and well-researched book. . . . Broad scope and impressive relevance. . . . Particularly impressive about Don't Blame Us is the way Geismer so thoroughly considers the many factors that went into the making of what might be termed the American urban crisis."---Kenneth T. Jackson, Journal of American History "Don't Blame Us illustrates the wider importance of suburban America in postwar politics, and fills a significant gap in the scholarship of modern American political history. . . . A riveting book; Geismer skillfully weaves a historical narrative from the local and compellingly positions this in relation to the national."---Oscar Winberg, American Studies in Scandinavia "This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the reinvention of American liberalism since the 1960s. Don't Blame Us reveals how affluent white suburban professionals moved a new set of material concerns-their own-to the center of public life. Surprising and provocative, this story deserves the widest possible discussion."-Nancy MacLean, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace "Don't Blame Us isolates a crucially important topic and confronts it from a wholly original, richly suggestive perspective. A valuable and original contribution to American political history, the book challenges the master narrative of the rise of the Right and the decline of the liberal coalition, and locates post-New Deal liberalism in particular spatial, institutional, and ideological venues."-Bruce Schulman, Boston University "Geismer recovers an all but forgotten chapter of suburban liberalism in America. Don't Blame Us is an unusually ambitious and compelling book that combines a detailed history of local politics in a way that forces a reconceptualization of broader national narratives of political development."-Joseph Crespino, author of Strom Thurmond's America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution "Don't Blame Us is a remarkable piece of scholarship that tells an engaging and multifaceted story about suburban political activism and sensibilities. Geismer's work is incredibly valuable for rethin
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The Other Women's Movement
Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America
by Dorothy Sue Cobble
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2005 - 28th Annual Philip Taft Labor History Award, International Association of Labour History Institutions" "Honorable Mention for the 2004 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2004" Dorothy Sue Cobble is Professor of Labor Studies, History, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University where she directs the Institute for Research on Women. She is the author of Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century and Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership.
American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state. This socially and ethnically diverse movement for change emerged first from union halls and factory floors and spread to the "pink collar" domain of telephone operators, secretaries, and airline hostesses. From the 1930s to the 1980s, these women pursued answers to problems that are increasingly pressing today: how to balance work and family and how to address the growing economic inequalities that confront us. The Other Women's Movement traces their impact from the 1940s into the feminist movement of the present.
The labor reformers whose stories are told in The Other Women's Movement wanted equality and "special benefits," and they did not see the two as incompatible. They argued that gender differences must be accommodated and that "equality" could not always be achieved by applying an identical standard of treatment to men and women. The reform agenda they championed--an end to unfair sex discrimination, just compensation for their waged labor, and the right to care for their families and communities--launched a revolution in employment practices that carries on today.
Unique in its range and perspective, this is the first book to link the continuous tradition of social feminism to the leadership of labor women within that movement. "This [book] . . . shows the results of prodigious research. . . . Cobble believes that labor feminism learned from second-wave feminism and that later the new feminism learned from the old. She outlines steps that must be taken for labor feminism to be revitalized." "Dorothy Sue Cobble has recovered . . . a feminist legacy that in its embrace of female difference refused to conform to 'men's ways.' She provides a usable past for those of us who wish to revalue women's labors. . . . Cobble's stunning reinterpretation persuasively shows that we've been looking in the wrong place for a mass movement after suffrage and before women's liberation. She names this movement 'labor feminism.'"---Eileen Boris, Women's Review of Books "A rich contribution to the history of American women and American labor from the 1930s to the 1980s." "In this meticulously documented and richly characterized book . . . [Cobble] provides a detailed and lively account . . . of the aspirations of an often-overlooked movement within what is commonly considered a monolithic American [feminism]." "[A] sweeping new history of working-class feminism. . . . Future studies of post-World War II labor activism, politics, and feminism will build on this crucial work."---Annelise Orleck, Reviews in American History "Meticulously researched and beautifully written. The kind of history that causes us radically to rethink what we thought we knew about the relationship between feminism and social class. We cannot afford to ignore the lessons of the past she so cogently analyzes for today's activists and scholars.
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Philanthropy in America
A History
by Olivier Zunz
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Olivier Zunz is the Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why the American Century?, Making America Corporate, and The Changing Face of Inequality.
How philanthropy has shaped America in the twentieth century
American philanthropy today expands knowledge, champions social movements, defines active citizenship, influences policymaking, and addresses humanitarian crises. How did philanthropy become such a powerful and integral force in American society? Philanthropy in America is the first book to explore in depth the twentieth-century growth of this unique phenomenon. Ranging from the influential large-scale foundations established by tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and the mass mobilization of small donors by the Red Cross and March of Dimes, to the recent social advocacy of individuals like Bill Gates and George Soros, respected historian Olivier Zunz chronicles the tight connections between private giving and public affairs, and shows how this union has enlarged democracy and shaped history.
Demonstrating that America has cultivated and relied on philanthropy more than any other country, Philanthropy in America examines how giving for the betterment of all became embedded in the fabric of the nation's civic democracy. "In a sweeping, insightful history, Olivier Zunz has traced the evolution of American philanthropy over the past 150 years and its contribution to democracy and civil society. What is particularly satisfying is his focus--somewhat rare among books about American philanthropy--on the extent to which foundations and other grantmaking programs have been involved in shaping national affairs and public policy. This involvement, Zunz rightfully claims, has been an important force not only in strengthening American democracy but in establishing philanthropic institutions as integral parts of society. . . . A splendid book about philanthropy in America."---Pablo Eisenberg, The Nation "One of the lessons of Olivier Zunz's meticulous new history, however, is that innovation in philanthropy is not new. There has been constant evolution in the ways that US citizens donate to good causes, in how private charity interacts with government policy, and in the degree to which it is dominated by the wealthy."---John Gapper, Financial Times "A readable account of how philanthropy caught on in the United States more pervasively than any other nation. . . . Zunz mixes case studies, mini-biography and academic theory to demonstrate that both the superwealthy and common folks have invested in giving to the needy as part of an effort to make America a better place. . . . A sterling example of how an academic author can combine high-level theory with interesting, important real-world examples." "[T]his is an excellent resource for those interested in philanthropy and its place in American life." "In Philanthropy in America, a beautifully written and constantly engaging new book, the historian Olivier Zunz takes the reader on a journey from the mid-19th century origins of organized giving to the present day."---Michael Edwards, Chronicle of Philanthropy "Zunz succeeds especially well in tracing the legal and regulatory evolution of philanthropy and also in showing that many of the questions we in the sector debate today have in fact been around for a long time, albeit it in shifting guises. . . . This book is a must-read for any practitioner or student of philanthropy; and I recommend it as well to serious students of general U.S. history." "In this inspiring, captivating, and thought-provoking book, Zunz presents a comprehensive history of twentieth-century philanthropy in the United States."---Thomas Adam, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "You would be hard pressed to find another book that so deftly conveys the ups and downs of the non-profit world. . . . Overall, a solid book that will lead to more insight into the evolution of the non-profit sector."---Fabio Rojas,
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Relentless Reformer
Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America
by Robyn Muncy
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Robyn Muncy is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 and the coauthor of Engendering America: A Documentary History, 1865 to the Present.
Josephine Roche (1886–1976) was a progressive activist, New Deal policymaker, and businesswoman. As a pro-labor and feminist member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, she shaped the founding legislation of the U.S. welfare state and generated the national conversation about health-care policy that Americans are still having today. In this gripping biography, Robyn Muncy offers Roche's persistent progressivism as evidence for surprising continuities among the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
Muncy explains that Roche became the second-highest-ranking woman in the New Deal government after running a Colorado coal company in partnership with coal miners themselves. Once in office, Roche developed a national health plan that was stymied by World War II but enacted piecemeal during the postwar period, culminating in Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. By then, Roche directed the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund, an initiative aimed at bolstering the labor movement, advancing managed health care, and reorganizing medicine to facilitate national health insurance, one of Roche's unrealized dreams.
In Relentless Reformer, Muncy uses Roche's dramatic life story-from her stint as Denver's first policewoman in 1912 to her fight against a murderous labor union official in 1972-as a unique vantage point from which to examine the challenges that women have faced in public life and to reassess the meaning and trajectory of progressive reform. "Muncy offers readers a biography of Progressive woman reformer-entrepreneur Josephine Roche, who has been largely overlooked by historians for her many contributions throughout the 20th century . . . [A] fine book." "Relentless Reformer is a very necessary addition to the reading list of any student of the history of the United States of America. For those of a non-academic nature it is a jolly good read. It takes a worthy place in the comprehensive series Politics and Society in Twentieth-century America."---Don Vincent, Open History Journal "In her exemplary biography, Muncy never flinches from telling us the bad along with the good, drawing a portrait of a whole human being with profound lessons to teach."---Alice Kessler-Harris, Women's Review of Books "A model of biography as social and political history, Relentless Reformer tells the compelling story of one life as it shaped and exemplified a larger public life."---Barbara Melosh, Journal of American History "Muncy set out to return Roche to the prominence she deserves, while at the same time demonstrating how and why women's contributions are often ignored and or forgotten. . . . She succeeded in accomplishing this, while writing an engaging and comprehensive biography."---Katherine G. Aiken, American Historical Review "Josephine Roche finally has her due, thanks to Robyn Muncy's sparkling political biography. Policewoman and business owner, labor-relations and public-health pioneer, political insider and female outsider, Roche emerges warts and all as a slayer of inequality. More than an exercise in recovery, Relentless Reformer challenges conventional wisdom on the detrimental impact of private welfare on public programs as it charts the persistence of a democratic, state-centric progressivism over the course of the twentieth century."-Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara "Relentless Reformer brings to life one of this country's truly great twentieth-century feminists. A visionary who knew how to get things done, Josephine Roche worked with presidents, governors, and union leaders to achieve her ideal of industrial democracy. Robyn Muncy's masterful and page-turning biography sh
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Morning in America
How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980's
by Gil Troy
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Gil Troy, a native of Queens, New York, is Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of Mr. and Mrs. President: From the Trumans to the Clintons (Kansas), an updated, paperback edition of Affairs of State: The Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple Since World War II (Free Press); and of See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Free Press).
Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counterrevolution that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers and his detractors, is often "yes." In Morning in America, Gil Troy argues that the Great Communicator was also the Great Conciliator. His pioneering and lively reassessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy takes us through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters, integrating the story of the Reagan presidency with stories of the decade's cultural icons and watershed moments-from personalities to popular television shows.
One such watershed moment was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With the trauma of Vietnam fading, the triumph of America's 1983 invasion of tiny Grenada still fresh, and a reviving economy, Americans geared up for a festival of international harmony that-spurred on by an entertainment-focused news media, corporate sponsors, and the President himself-became a celebration of the good old U.S.A. At the Games' opening, Reagan presided over a thousand-voice choir, a 750-member marching band, and a 90,000-strong teary-eyed audience singing "America the Beautiful!" while waving thousands of flags.
Reagan emerges more as happy warrior than angry ideologue, as a big-picture man better at setting America's mood than implementing his program. With a vigorous Democratic opposition, Reagan's own affability, and other limiting factors, the eighties were less counterrevolutionary than many believe. Many sixties' innovations went mainstream, from civil rights to feminism. Reagan fostered a political culture centered on individualism and consumption-finding common ground between the right and the left.
Written with verve, Morning in America is both a major new look at one of America's most influential modern-day presidents and the definitive story of a decade that continues to shape our times. "A lively, sprawling work that sees Reagan's reflection in everything from '80s TV shows such as Dynasty to the rejection of 'New Coke' by consumers to the creation of CNN and USA TODAY. . . . He may have disregarded the rise of AIDS and seemed clueless about the rise in homelessness during his watch, but he also helped create 'an Era of Good Feelings' that left most Americans feeling better about themselves and their country."---Susan Page, USA TODAY "Morning in America is the rarest of academic histories: insightful, energetic, and a joy to read."---Peter Schweizer, The New York Sun "[A] masterly study of Ronald Reagan's presidency--the best single book we have on his administration to date."---David Turner, Raleigh News & Observer "The main thing Troy has produced is a portrait of the United States in the 1980s in all of its color and texture. . . . [T]he book is a mine of information on U.S. popular culture, presented by one who lived through those times."---Norman Webster, Montreal Gazette "A balanced, thoughtful, and thoroughly entertaining account of Reagan's legacy. . . . This book is sure to become popular and deserves a large audience. Enthusiastically recommended." "A valuable and enjoyable book. . . . Troy's readable book is impressive in its integration of political and social history, while he rightly recognizes that popular culture can provide an effective gauge of the public mood. Thus, he effectively uses the television series Hill Street Blues to illustrate attitudes towards crime and race, and throughout, he uses television, film, and popular music. Troy is anything but a Reagan cheerleader, and he stresses the still contentious nature of the Reagan record."---Philip Jenkins, B
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Mothers of Conservatism
Women and the Postwar Right
by Michelle M. Nickerson
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Michelle M. Nickerson is associate professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago. She is coeditor of Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region.
Mothers of Conservatism tells the story of 1950s Southern Californian housewives who shaped the grassroots right in the two decades following World War II. Michelle Nickerson describes how red-hunting homemakers mobilized activist networks, institutions, and political consciousness in local education battles, and she introduces a generation of women who developed political styles and practices around their domestic routines. From the conservative movement's origins in the early fifties through the presidential election of 1964, Nickerson documents how women shaped conservatism from the bottom up, out of the fabric of their daily lives and into the agenda of the Republican Party.
A unique history of the American conservative movement, Mothers of Conservatism shows how housewives got out of the house and discovered their political capital. "Nickerson has enriched conservative historiography by examining the integral role women played in conservatism's development and implementation and has forced feminist historiography to confront the complications that conservative female activists bring to the literature."---Mary C. Brennan, Journal of American History "Michelle M. Nickerson's carefully crafted study of grassroots conservative activists in Los Angeles County in the 1950s and early 1960s offers an important contribution to the scholarship on twentieth-century conservatism and women's political activism in the pre-Feminine Mystique (1963) 'doldrums.'"---Sylvie Murray, American Historical Review "Mothers of Conservatism provides a useful guide to American grassroots conservatism from before World War I to the present."---Christine Graf, InterLib "Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin? They had antecedents. Many, many antecedents. Michelle Nickerson uncovers an entire undiscovered lost continent of right-wing organizing-and in the process produces a wealth of new and profound insights about grassroots conservatism as a whole. A remarkable book."-Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America "In this engaging book, Nickerson shows how the conservative political movement emerged from coffee klatches, church socials, strategy meetings, and rallies-all led by women. So many scholars focus on the male intellectuals and politicians whose ideas launched a political insurgency, but Nickerson thoroughly reconstructs the world of the women activists who were key players in mid-century America's right-wing insurgency. This is an important addition to scholarship on the new right and an important intervention in women's history too."-Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania "In this timely look at the grassroots origins of modern conservatism, Nickerson explores the political campaigns of anticommunist women in suburban Los Angeles during the 1950s and early 1960s. Her careful reconstruction of the ideological formation of housewife populism moves beyond the conventional wisdom of the backlash narrative by demonstrating the deep roots of family values conservatism and the central role of women in defending local communities against liberal government programs-insights that illuminate our own political moment as well."-Matthew D. Lassiter, author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South "Focusing on conservative women in Los Angeles in the early years of the Cold War, this first-rate book challenges an established literature portraying women in the 1950s as domesticated and isolated in the private sphere of the home. By detailing their political activities, Nickerson persuasively shows how women constituted a vanguard of the conservative movement emerging in the postwar period."-Donald Critchlow, Barry Goldwater Chair of American Institutions, Arizona State University "Mothers of Conservatism is f
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A Class by Herself
Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s
by Nancy Woloch
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2016 Philip Taft Labor History Award, Cornell University School of Industrial & Labor Relations" "Winner of the 2015 William G. Bowen Award, Industrial Relations Section of Princeton University" "Honorable Mention for the 2015 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize for American Legal History/Biography, Langum Charitable Trust" Nancy Woloch teaches history at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her books include Women and the American Experience and Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents.
A Class by Herself explores the historical role and influence of protective legislation for American women workers, both as a step toward modern labor standards and as a barrier to equal rights. Spanning the twentieth century, the book tracks the rise and fall of women-only state protective laws-such as maximum hour laws, minimum wage laws, and night work laws-from their roots in progressive reform through the passage of New Deal labor law to the feminist attack on single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nancy Woloch considers the network of institutions that promoted women-only protective laws, such as the National Consumers' League and the federal Women's Bureau; the global context in which the laws arose; the challenges that proponents faced; the rationales they espoused; the opposition that evolved; the impact of protective laws in ever-changing circumstances; and their dismantling in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Above all, Woloch examines the constitutional conversation that the laws provoked-the debates that arose in the courts and in the women's movement. Protective laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to current labor law; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that abridged citizenship and impeded equality for much of the century.
Drawing on decades of scholarship, institutional and legal records, and personal accounts, A Class by Herself sets forth a new narrative about the tensions inherent in women-only protective labor laws and their consequences. "Woloch retells the history of protective legislation as a scholarly page-turner, complete with 'close calls and near misses, false hopes and unintended consequences'. . . . The resulting narrative leaves readers with a deeper appreciation for both the messiness of feminist polities and the power of history as a tool for helping us see the world fresh."---Amy Richter, Law and History Review "Woloch does a remarkable job of pulling a wide array of disparate events together to form a single narrative supporting her central theme. . . . This text is highly recommended for any university or academic law library."---Miriam A. Murphy, Law Library Journal "A Class by Herself is a masterful history of interest group politics that shaped government, business and labor relations, and gender politics throughout the twentieth century. Labor organizers, clubwomen, judges, pro-business attorneys, reformers and their lawyer allies, bureaucrats, feminists, and aggrieved workers all receive attention in this superb history of protective labor legislation."---Kathleen A. Laughlin, American Historical Review "A fascinating story of 'false hopes and unintended consequences.'"---Lara Vapnek, Reviews in American History "Sophisticated and meticulously researched. . . . The first study to provide a comprehensive view of sex-specific labor laws over their more than century-long existence. Woloch's work will no doubt become indispensible to the history of gendered labor law."---Jan Doolitle Wilson, Journal of American History "Historian Woloch analyzes the fraught history of protective laws for women workers. She skillfully synthesizes many strands of the historiography of protective legislation while making an original contribution with close analyses of the people and particulars of key court cases and decisions that shaped the reformist and legislative landscape over a century. . . . Woloch deftly
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State of the Union
A Century of American Labor
by Nelson Lichtenstein
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2003 Philip Taft Labor History Award, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002" Nelson Lichtenstein is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the 2012 recipient of the Sol Stetin Award in Labor History and is the author of twelve books, including Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, Labor's War at Home, and The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.
In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century.
The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.
Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.
This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions.? "A remarkable accomplishment. . . . Lichtenstein provides an authoritative account of labor's decline, an agenda for its renewal and an argument for the necessity of its revitalization if American democracy is to thrive in coming years. The result is a brilliant historical introduction to today's labor movement and the perils and possibilities that confront it. . . . If American labor's fortunes do improve, no recent book will have made a greater contribution to its revival."---Joseph A. McCartin, The Washington Post "Obituaries of the labor movement, or at least predictions of its impending demise, are familiar to readers of the popular and business presses and various academic tomes. However one comes down on the issues of the prospects for labor's revival or the desirablity of democratizing the workplace, the country's recent economic crisis has made the labor question again worth debating vigorously. State of the Union is an excellent start."---Eric Arnesen, Chicago Tribune "Absorbing. . . . Lichtenstein'
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The Color of Success
Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
by Ellen D. Wu
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
"Winner of the 2016 AAAS Award for Best Book in History, Association for Asian American Studies" "Winner of the 2014 Best First Book, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" "Finalist for the 2015 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society" Ellen D. Wu is assistant professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington.
The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.
Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.
By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood. "Historian Wu sets the record straight, offering the manner in which Asians worked to overcome prejudice from the 1890s through more recent events, including WWII, the communist revolution in China, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars." "The Color of Success provides an insightful account of not just race relations, but race making. . . . It is a remarkable illustration of how ethnic stereotypes have less to do with any innate racial or biological reality, and everything to do with the political dynamics of the societies in which we live."---Christina Ho, Australian Review of Public Affairs "Wu's research is thorough: her list of news¬papers consulted is mind-boggling, she has read every book and article that matters and worked her way through a multitude of archives. Her argument is complex and has the ring of truth. Her prose is clear and graceful. The book is not really about Asian Americans; it is about Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans. But seldom has a scholar gone so deeply into two different ethnic communities and emerged with such subtle and far-reaching results. The Color of Success is a major intervention in American racial history."---Paul Spickard, Journal of American History "Ellen D. Wu has produced a masterful work in The Color of Success that very well may prove to be the definitive study of the historical origins of the 'model minority' stereotype of Asian Americans."---Jonathan Y. Okamura, Patterns of Prejudice "Wu's research is thorough: her list of newspapers consulted is mind-boggling, she has read every book and article that matters and worked her way through a multitude of archives. Her argument is complex and has the ring of truth. Her prose is clear and graceful. . . . [S]eldom has a scholar gone so deeply into two different ethnic communities and emerged with such subtle and far-reaching results. The Color of Success is a major intervention in American racial history."---Paul Spickar
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The Great Exception
The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics
by Jefferson Cowie
Part of the Politics and Society in Modern America series
Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. His work has also appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
How the New Deal was a unique historical moment and what this reveals about U.S. politics, economics, and culture
Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception. "One of the year's most important political books."---E.J. Dione Jr., Washington Post "Cowie--like the best work of the mid-century historian Richard Hofstadter, whom he frequently cites--has written not so much a work of American history as a brilliant meditation about a central dilemma of American history." "Jefferson Cowie offers a grand interpretation of the road blocks to change. . . . A rich survey, studded with insights culled from a generation of scholarship."---Michael Kazin, , Bookforum "Cowie sings the achievements of the New Deal in a tragic register, emphasizing its transformative power while lingering on its compromises. . . . Cowie's vision is coherent and arresting, and helps to make sense of recurring puzzles in American political experience. As a literary-intellectual posture, moreover, his fatalism is downright infectious." "Important."---Harold Meyerson, , American Prospect "Engaging and highly readable, Cowie's book provides an excellent, thought-provoking introduction to American economic and political history." "Pessimistic, powerful and well-documented."---David C. Ungar, Survival "A fresh, original look at a perennial historical conundrum."---Roger Biles, Annals of Iowa "It is bound to become a staple for teaching and understanding modern political, and especially working-class, history."---Oscar Winber, History "Jefferson Cowie's The Great Exception is a brilliant contribution to the understanding of American politics. Cowie makes the case that the halcyon era of liberalism, from Roosevelt to Kennedy, was an outlier-and that the victories of Reagan and Gingrich were not revolutions but restorations. A must-read."-Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times political columnist "The Great Exception is exceptionally brilliant in casting light on our contemporary struggle with plutocracy. Jefferson Cowie explains why a New Deal type of labor law reform is no longer in the cards. If a labor movement is to come back, it will have to find another way. Let us be grateful for so deft an elucidation of our post-New Deal gridlock."-Thomas Geoghegan, author of Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement "With impressive brevity, clarity, and eloquence, Jefferson Cowie offers up a challenge to almost all previous New Deal scholarship that cannot be ignored or wished away. His insights will be disconcerting to many. But this seminal work of historical analysis should inspire historians, journalists, and political activists to rethink America's recent past and, even more so, its present and future."-Eric Alterman, columnist for The Nation and author of The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama "Linking the past and present in an arresting way,