Download or read book Fault Lines A History of the United States Since 1974 written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gripping and troubling account of the origins of our turbulent times.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States When—and how—did America become so polarized? In this masterful history, leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment. It all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the wind-down of the Vietnam War. What follows is the story of our own lifetimes. It is the story of ever-widening historical fault lines over economic inequality, race, gender, and sexual norms firing up a polarized political landscape. It is also the story of profound transformations of the media and our political system fueling the fire. Kruse and Zelizer’s Fault Lines is a master class in national divisions nearly five decades in the making.
Download or read book One Nation Under God written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.
Download or read book The Fierce Urgency of Now written by Julian E. Zelizer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A majestic big-picture account of the Great Society and the forces that shaped it, from Lyndon Johnson and members of Congress to the civil rights movement and the media Between November 1963, when he became president, and November 1966, when his party was routed in the midterm elections, Lyndon Johnson spearheaded the most transformative agenda in American political history since the New Deal, one whose ambition and achievement have had no parallel since. In just three years, Johnson drove the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; the War on Poverty program; Medicare and Medicaid; the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities; Public Broadcasting; immigration liberalization; a raft of consumer and environmental protection acts; and major federal investments in public transportation. Collectively, this group of achievements was labeled by Johnson and his team the “Great Society.” In The Fierce Urgency of Now, Julian E. Zelizer takes the full measure of the entire story in all its epic sweep. Before Johnson, Kennedy tried and failed to achieve many of these advances. Our practiced understanding is that this was an unprecedented “liberal hour” in America, a moment, after Kennedy’s death, when the seas parted and Johnson could simply stroll through to victory. As Zelizer shows, this view is off-base: In many respects America was even more conservative than it seems now, and Johnson’s legislative program faced bitter resistance. The Fierce Urgency of Now animates the full spectrum of forces at play during these turbulent years, including religious groups, the media, conservative and liberal political action groups, unions, and civil rights activists. Above all, the great character in the book whose role rivals Johnson’s is Congress—indeed, Zelizer argues that our understanding of the Great Society program is too Johnson-centric. He discusses why Congress was so receptive to passing these ideas in a remarkably short span of time and how the election of 1964 and burgeoning civil rights movement transformed conditions on Capitol Hill. Zelizer brings a deep, intimate knowledge of the institution to bear on his story: The book is a master class in American political grand strategy. Finally, Zelizer reckons with the legacy of the Great Society. Though our politics have changed, the heart of the Great Society legislation remains intact fifty years later. In fact, he argues, the Great Society shifted the American political center of gravity—and our social landscape—decisively to the left in many crucial respects. In a very real sense, we are living today in the country that Johnson and his Congress made.
Download or read book America s Promise written by W. J. Rorabaugh and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's Promise is a concise, highly readable introduction to American History. Designed to clearly explain major themes and events, it also captures the rich and often amusing character of the American people. The strong narrative emphasizes public life and how individuals constructed public structures in which they lived and worked. Including the latest scholarship in social, cultural, and political history, the work integrates the history and importance of women and minorities. To aid students in learning and reviewing, each chapter begins with a preview of the main ideas that will be discussed and ends with a conclusion that reinforces the key concepts. Rather than being simply declaratory signposts, section headings highlight main ideas and help carry along the narrative. A glossary defines main terms, and a timeline helps students keep track of events. Selected readings are also included to encourage further reading and study. Finally, carefully selected illustrations and maps portray, pinpoint, and illuminate important episodes in American history. The most concise and competitively priced book available, America's Promise is a breath of fresh air in the introductory market.
Download or read book White Flight written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book When Computers Went to Sea written by David L. Boslaugh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-04-16 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Computers Went to Sea explores the history of the United States Navy's secret development of code-breaking computers and their adaptation to solve a critical fleet radar data handling problem in the Navy's first seaborne digital computer system - that went to sea in 1962. This is the only book written on the United States Navy's initial application of shipboard digital computers to naval warfare. Considered one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by the US Navy, the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) was the subject of numerous studies attempting to pinpoint the reason for the systems inordinate success in the face of seemingly impossible technical challenges and stiff resistance from some in the military. The system's success precipitated a digital revolution in naval warfare systems. Dave Boslaugh details the innovations developed by the NTDS project managers including: project management techniques, modular digital hardware for ship systems, top-down modular computer programming techniques, innovative computer program documentation, and other novel real-time computer system concepts. Automated military systems users and developers, real-time process control systems designers, automated system project managers, and digital technology history students will find this account of a United States military organization's initial foray into computerization interesting and thought provoking.
Download or read book These Truths A History of the United States written by Jill Lepore and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Download or read book Living Downtown written by Paul E. Groth and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.
Download or read book The Coming of the American Behemoth written by Michael Joseph Roberto and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primer on the history of American fascism Most people in the United States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism, operating under the guise of American free-enterprise. But, as Michael Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the Great Depression of the following decade. Drawing from a range of authors who wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s, Roberto examines how the driving force of American fascism comes, not from reactionary movements below, but from the top, namely, Big Business and the power of finance capital. More subtle than its earlier European counterparts, writes Roberto, fascist America’s racist, top-down quashing of individual liberties masqueraded as “real democracy,” “upholding the Constitution,” and the pressure to be “100 Percent American.” The Coming of the American Behemoth is intended as a primer, to forge much-needed discourse on the nature of fascism, and its particular forms within the United States. The book focuses on the role of the capital-labor relationship during the period between the two World Wars, when the United States became the epicenter of the world-capitalist system. Concentrating on specific processes, which he characterizes as terrorist and non-terrorist alike, Roberto argues that the interwar period was a fertile time for the incubation of a protean, more salable form of tyranny – a fascist behemoth in the making, whose emergence has been ignored or dismissed by mainstream historians. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism.
Download or read book Fragile Democracy written by James L. Leloudis and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation. North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why--a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment--we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.
Download or read book Voter Suppression in U S Elections written by Stacey Abrams and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Following the model of the first book in the "History in the Headlines (HiH) series (Catherine Clinton's Confederate Statues and Memorialization), Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening, history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the United States. The book includes an edited transcript of a conversation hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2019, as well as the "ten best" articles students and interested citizens should read about voter access and suppression. The book will have an online presence that hosts additional content (more articles, podcasts, other news) on the press's Manifold digital publishing platform site"--
Download or read book Burning Down the House written by Julian E. Zelizer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book! A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice The story of how Newt Gingrich and his allies tainted American politics, launching an enduring era of brutal partisan warfare When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, President Obama observed that Trump “is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party.” In Burning Down the House, historian Julian Zelizer pinpoints the moment when our country was set on a path toward an era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics, an era that was ignited by Newt Gingrich and his allies. In 1989, Gingrich brought down Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright and catapulted himself into the national spotlight. Perhaps more than any other politician, Gingrich introduced the rhetoric and tactics that have shaped Congress and the Republican Party for the last three decades. Elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich quickly became one of the most powerful figures in America not through innovative ideas or charisma, but through a calculated campaign of attacks against political opponents, casting himself as a savior in a fight of good versus evil. Taking office in the post-Watergate era, he weaponized the good government reforms newly introduced to fight corruption, wielding the rules in ways that shocked the legislators who had created them. His crusade against Democrats culminated in the plot to destroy the political career of Speaker Wright. While some of Gingrich’s fellow Republicans were disturbed by the viciousness of his attacks, party leaders enjoyed his successes so much that they did little collectively to stand in his way. Democrats, for their part, were alarmed, but did not want to sink to his level and took no effective actions to stop him. It didn’t seem to matter that Gingrich’s moral conservatism was hypocritical or that his methods were brazen, his accusations of corruption permanently tarnished his opponents. This brand of warfare worked, not as a strategy for governance but as a path to power, and what Gingrich planted, his fellow Republicans reaped. He led them to their first majority in Congress in decades, and his legacy extends far beyond his tenure in office. From the Contract with America to the rise of the Tea Party and the Trump presidential campaign, his fingerprints can be seen throughout some of the most divisive episodes in contemporary American politics. Burning Down the House presents the alarming narrative of how Gingrich and his allies created a new normal in Washington.
Download or read book The Sixties and the End of Modern America written by David Steigerwald and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 1995 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an historical narrative that describes and analyzes the changes and excitement of the 60s. The author sees the period as one that proved Americans can do better than they have done in the me-decade of the 80s. He proposes that it was a time that rejected complacency in order to recover a zeal for the pursuit of excellence, for the nation to re-awaken to a sense of national mission and ideals; and a time when artists, intellectuals and the young offered alternatives to what the nation had become. The book focuses on what this period meant in US history, and addresses current issues, bringing an historical perspective to bear on issues of race, ethnicity and gender, among others.
Download or read book Annals of the Former World written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
Download or read book The Radio Right written by Paul Matzko and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By the early 1960s, and for the first time in history, most Americans across the nation could tune their radio to a station that aired conservative programming from dawn to dusk. People listened to these shows in remarkable numbers; for example, the broadcaster with the largest listening audience, Carl McIntire, had a weekly audience of twenty million, or one in nine American households. For sake of comparison, that is a higher percentage of the country than would listen to conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh forty years later. As this Radio Right phenomenon grew, President John F. Kennedy responded with the most successful government censorship campaign of the last half century. Taking the advice of union leader Walter Reuther, the Kennedy administration used the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Communications Commission to pressure stations into dropping conservative programs. This book reveals the growing power of the Radio Right through the eyes of its opponents using confidential reports, internal correspondence, and Oval Office tape recordings. With the help of other liberal organizations, including the Democratic National Committee and the National Council of Churches, the censorship campaign muted the Radio Right. But by the late 1970s, technological innovations and regulatory changes fueled a resurgence in conservative broadcasting. A new generation of conservative broadcasters, from Pat Robertson to Ronald Reagan, harnessed the power of conservative mass media and transformed the political landscape of America"--
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left written by L. Benjamin Rolsky and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action. The creator of comedies such as All in the Family and Maude, Lear was spurred to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in response to the rise of the religious right. Rolsky offers engaged readings of Lear’s iconic sitcoms and published writings, considering them as an expression of what he calls the spiritual politics of the religious left. He shows how prime-time television became a focus of political dispute and demonstrates how Lear’s emergence as an interfaith activist catalyzed ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were determined to push back against conservatism’s ascent. Rolsky concludes that Lear’s political involvement exemplified religious liberals’ commitment to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what they saw as the public interest. An interdisciplinary analysis of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.
Download or read book The Associates Four Capitalists Who Created California Enterprise written by Richard Rayner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true-life tale of ruthless ambition, staggering greed, and the making of a nation. Four men--Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins--rose from their position as middle-class merchants to become the force behind the transcontinental railroad.
