Download or read book Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics written by Jørn Brøndal and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic Leadership and Midwestern Politics investigates the notion of ethnic identity as it relates to Scandinavian Americans and political affiliations in Wisconsin, from 1890-1914. Jørn Brøndal traces the evolution of their political alliances as they move from an early patronage system to one of a more enlightened social awareness, prompted by the Wisconsin Progressives led by Robert M. La Follette. Brøndal's exceptionally thorough research and cogent arguments combine to explain the workings of a political system that accorded nationality a major role in politics at the expense of real political, social, and economic issues in the early 1890s, and how (and why) the Progressives determined to change that system. Brøndal explains the change by looking at several important Scandinavian-American institutions, including the church, mutual aid fraternities, the temperance movement, the Scandinavian-language press, political clubs, and labor and farmer organizations, showing how these institutions impacted the construction of a nascent sense of Scandinavian American national identity and made a lasting mark on the Scandinavian-American role in politics.
Download or read book Midwestern Progressive Politics written by Russel Blaine Nye and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The La Follettes of Wisconsin written by Bernard A. Weisberger and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1994-02-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collective biography of a prominent American political family, the La Follettes of Wisconsin, whose lives were inexorably linked with the Progressive movement.
Download or read book Hinterland Dreams written by Eric J. Morser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1840s, La Crosse, Wisconsin, was barely more than a trading post nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River. But by 1900 the sleepy frontier town had become a thriving city. Hinterland Dreams tracks the growth of this community and shows that government institutions and policies were as important as landscapes and urban boosters in determining the small Midwestern city's success. The businessmen and -women of La Crosse worked hard to attract government support during the nineteenth century. Federal, state, and municipal officials passed laws, issued rulings, provided resources, vested aldermen with financial and regulatory power, and created a lasting legal foundation that transformed the city and its economy. As historian Eric J. Morser demonstrates, the development of La Crosse and other small cities linked rural people to the wider world and provided large cities like Chicago with the lumber and other raw materials needed to grow even larger. He emphasizes the role of these municipalities, as well as their relationship to all levels of government, in the life of an industrializing nation. Punctuated with intriguing portraits of La Crosse's early citizens, Hinterland Dreams suggests a new way to understand the Midwest's urban past, one that has its roots in the small but vibrant cities that dotted the landscape. By mapping the richly textured political economy of La Crosse before 1900, the book highlights how the American state provided hinterland Midwesterners with potent tools to build cities and help define their region's history in profound and lasting ways.
Download or read book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest 1870 1920 written by Sara Egge and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Gita Chaudhuri Prize Winner of the 2019 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award Historian Sara Egge offers critical insights into the woman suffrage movement by exploring how it emerged in small Midwestern communities—in Clay County, Iowa; Lyon County, Minnesota; and Yankton County, South Dakota. Examining this grassroots activism offers a new approach that uncovers the sophisticated ways Midwestern suffragists understood citizenship as obligation. These suffragists, mostly Yankees who migrated from the Northeast after the Civil War, participated enthusiastically in settling the region and developing communal institutions such as libraries, schools, churches, and parks. Meanwhile, as Egge’s detailed local study also shows, the efforts of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association did not always succeed in promoting the movement’s goals. Instead, it gained support among Midwesterners only when local rural women claimed the right to vote on the basis of their well-established civic roles and public service. By investigating civic responsibility, Egge reorients scholarship on woman suffrage and brings attention to the Midwest, a region overlooked by most historians of the movement. In doing so, she sheds new light onto the ways suffragists rejuvenated the cause in the twentieth century.
Download or read book George Bancroft Brahmin Rebel written by Russel Blaine Nye and published by Octagon Press, Limited. This book was released on 1972 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Progressivism A Very Short Introduction written by Walter Nugent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of conservative dominance, the election of Barack Obama may signal the beginning of a new progressive era. But what exactly is progressivism? What role has it played in the political, social, and economic history of America? This very timely Very Short Introduction offers an engaging overview of progressivism in America--its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. A many-sided reform movement that lasted from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. Progressive national leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald answered the growing call for change. They fought for worker's compensation, child labor laws, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation; they enacted anti-trust laws, improved living conditions in urban slums, instituted the graduated income tax, won women the right to vote, and laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's New Deal. Nugent shows that the progressives--with the glaring exception of race relations--shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed. Offering a succinct history of the broad reform movement that upset a stagnant conservative orthodoxy, this Very Short Introduction reveals many parallels, even lessons, highly appropriate to our own time. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
Download or read book Kansas Populism written by O. Gene Clanton and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2021-10-08 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because Kansas has been called “the leading Midwestern Populist state,” and the Midwestern phrase was the principle one of this significant movement in American history, this first comprehensive history of the Kansas People’s party, its leaders, and their thoughts and actions is an important addition to Populist historiography. Through this study of the leadership, as well as a complete and personal background analysis of the Populist and Republican members of five Kansas legislatures, the author helps to place Populism within its proper historical context. Although Kansas Populism is shown to have had a retrogressive strain, the pervasive force of the movement is revealed as a constructive and progressive response to the technological achievements that had revolutionized agriculture and industry over the course of the nineteenth century. Their answers were not always commendable, but the Populists were the first political activists to come to grips in an effective manner with the problems created by the continuing economic revolution that uniquely characterizes modern history, and they were “intent on demonstrating, apparently, that the purification of politics was not an iridescent dream.” In the dialogue which they conducted, in the program which they advance, they assisted in launching a progressive quest that continues in our own time. Undertaken with the objective of testing recent controversial interpretations of the Populist movement, this book, according to one reader, “far surpasses” studies of Populism in other states “done long ago and innocent of modern methods.” It contains passages “almost epigrammatic in their perceptiveness” and is notable for the author’s “fairness in dealing with the evidence.” In fact, the breadth of research and the extensive annotation and bibliographical material included make this volume an important source in itself.
Download or read book Unreasonable Men written by Michael Wolraich and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, the Republican Party stood at the brink of an internal civil war. After a devastating financial crisis, furious voters sent a new breed of politician to Washington. These young Republican firebrands, led by "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin, vowed to overthrow the party leaders and purge Wall Street's corrupting influence from Washington. Their opponents called them "radicals," and "fanatics." They called themselves Progressives. President Theodore Roosevelt disapproved of La Follette's confrontational methods. Fearful of splitting the party, he compromised with the conservative House Speaker, "Uncle Joe" Cannon, to pass modest reforms. But as La Follette's crusade gathered momentum, the country polarized, and the middle ground melted away. Three years after the end of his presidency, Roosevelt embraced La Follette's militant tactics and went to war against the Republican establishment, bringing him face to face with his handpicked successor, William Taft. Their epic battle shattered the Republican Party and permanently realigned the electorate, dividing the country into two camps: Progressive and Conservative. Unreasonable Men takes us into the heart of the epic power struggle that created the progressive movement and defined modern American politics. Recounting the fateful clash between the pragmatic Roosevelt and the radical La Follette, Wolraich's riveting narrative reveals how a few Republican insurgents broke the conservative chokehold on Congress and initiated the greatest period of political change in America's history.
Download or read book A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era written by Christopher McKnight Nichols and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections
Download or read book The American Midwest in Film and Literature written by Adam R. Ochonicky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.
Download or read book Faith and Power written by Felipe Hinojosa and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Faith and Power is framed within the larger processes of immigration, refugee policies, deindustrialization, the rise of the religious left and right, the human rights revolution, and the Chicana/ o, Puerto Rican, and Immigrant freedom movements. The book explores religion and religious politics as part of the larger ecosystem that has shaped Latina/o communities specifically and American politics in general"--
Download or read book What s the Matter with Kansas written by Thomas Frank and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of "our most insightful social observers"* cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"—the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking "what 's the matter with Kansas?"—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests? Where's the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism? The questions are urgent as well as provocative. Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism—the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat—and showing how our long culture wars have left us with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders' "values" and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy. A brilliant analysis—and funny to boot—What's the Matter with Kansas? presents a critical assessment of who we are, while telling a remarkable story of how a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs came to convince a nation that they spoke on behalf of the People. *Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Cold War University written by Matthew Levin and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2013-07-17 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated in the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to American universities to promote higher enrollments, studies of foreign languages and cultures, and, especially, scientific research. In Cold War University, Matthew Levin traces the paradox that developed: higher education became increasingly enmeshed in the Cold War struggle even as university campuses became centers of opposition to Cold War policies. The partnerships between the federal government and major research universities sparked a campus backlash that provided the foundation, Levin argues, for much of the student dissent that followed. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of the hubs of student political activism in the 1950s and 1960s, the protests reached their flashpoint with the 1967 demonstrations against campus recruiters from Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. Levin documents the development of student political organizations in Madison in the 1950s and the emergence of a mass movement in the decade that followed, adding texture to the history of national youth protests of the time. He shows how the University of Wisconsin tolerated political dissent even at the height of McCarthyism, an era named for Wisconsin's own virulently anti-Communist senator, and charts the emergence of an intellectual community of students and professors that encouraged new directions in radical politics. Some of the events in Madison—especially the 1966 draft protests, the 1967 sit-in against Dow Chemical, and the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing—have become part of the fabric of "The Sixties," touchstones in an era that continues to resonate in contemporary culture and politics.
Download or read book The Last Liberal Republican written by John Roy Price and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.
Download or read book The Emerging Democratic Majority written by John B. Judis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-02-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.
Download or read book Justice and Humanity written by Richard Allen Morton and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the life of Chicago's first reformist mayor and Illinois' most progressive governor (1913-1917). Portrays a man who made an enduring contribution to justice and humanity, whose humility precluded the messianic or demagogic tendencies of many reformist leaders of his day. Emphasizes, in a larger context, the importance of leadership in the shaping of events and public policy. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
