Download or read book Pocketbook Politics written by Meg Jacobs and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-12 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as Pocketbook Politics dramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.
Download or read book Workplace Politics Pocketbook written by David Bancroft-Turner and published by Management Pocketbooks. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the number one cause of stress and its adverse effects cost the economy billions. Workplace politics has bad press, with the vast majority of people linking it to behaviour without integrity. But, according to David Bancroft-Turner - managing director of the Academy for Political Intelligence, one of the UK's leading authorities on organisational politics - it is possible for individuals to develop and apply a set of skills and behaviours that will counter the negative effects of workplace politics and create a positive work environment for the benefit of all concerned. His Workplace Politics Pocketbook explains how this is done. He identifies the four main types of political 'animal' - the clever fox, the wise owl, the innocent sheep and the determined mule - describing their behaviour patterns and explaining how to develop the essential skills of political astuteness. The book emphasises the importance of understanding how our beliefs about people and the organisation we work for affect the political climate. A reader questionnaire helps put this into perspective. In conclusion, Bancroft-Turner looks at the important questions when developing a political intelligence master plan.
Download or read book Inventing the American Way The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement written by Wendy L. Wall Assistant Professor of History Queen's University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-12-19 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of World War II, Americans developed an unusually deep and all-encompassing national unity, as postwar affluence and the Cold War combined to naturally produce a remarkable level of agreement about the nation's core values. Or so the story has long been told. Inventing the "American Way" challenges this vision of inevitable consensus. Americans, as Wendy Wall argues in this innovative book, were united, not so much by identical beliefs, as by a shared conviction that a distinctive "American Way" existed and that the affirmation of such common ground was essential to the future of the nation. Moreover, the roots of consensus politics lie not in the Cold War era, but in the turbulent decade that preceded U.S. entry into World War II. The social and economic chaos of the Depression years alarmed a diverse array of groups, as did the rise of two "alien" ideologies: fascism and communism. In this context, Americans of divergent backgrounds and beliefs seized on the notion of a unifying "American Way" and sought to convince their fellow citizens of its merits. Wall traces the competing efforts of business groups, politicians, leftist intellectuals, interfaith proponents, civil rights activists, and many others over nearly three decades to shape public understandings of the "American Way." Along the way, she explores the politics behind cultural productions ranging from The Adventures of Superman to the Freedom Train that circled the nation in the late 1940s. She highlights the intense debate that erupted over the term "democracy" after World War II, and identifies the origins of phrases such as "free enterprise" and the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that remain central to American political life. By uncovering the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, this book sheds new light on a period that proved pivotal for American national identity and that remains the unspoken backdrop for debates over multiculturalism, national unity, and public values today.
Download or read book Political Psychology written by Jon A. Krosnick and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, research in political psychology has illuminated the psychological processes underlying important political action, both by ordinary citizens and by political leaders. As the world has become increasingly engaged in thinking about politics, this volume reflects exciting new work by political psychologists to understand the psychological processes underlying Americans’ political thinking and action. In 13 chapters, world-class scholars present new in-depth work exploring public opinion, social movements, attitudes toward affirmative action, the behavior of political leaders, the impact of the 9/11 attacks, and scientists’ statements about global warming and gasoline prices. Also included are studies of attitude strength that compare the causes and consequences of various strength-related constructs. This volume will appeal to a wide range of researchers and students in political psychology and political science, and may be used as a text in upper-level courses requiring a scholarly and contemporary review of major issues in the field.
Download or read book Political Control of the Economy written by Edward R. Tufte and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speculations about the effects of politics on economic life have a long and vital tradition, but few efforts have been made to determine the precise relationship between them. Edward Tufte, a political scientist who covered the 1976 Presidential election for Newsweek, seeks to do just that. His sharp analyses and astute observations lead to an eye-opening view of the impact of political life on the national economy of America and other capitalist democracies. The analysis demonstrates how politicians, political parties, and voters decide who gets what, when, and how in the economic arena. A nation's politics, it is argued, shape the most important aspects of economic life--inflation, unemployment, income redistribution, the growth of government, and the extent of central economic control. Both statistical data and case studies (based on interviews and Presidential documents) are brought to bear on four topics. They are: 1) the political manipulation of the economy in election years, 2) the new international electoral-economic cycle, 3) the decisive role of political leaders and parties in shaping macroeconomic outcomes, and 4) the response of the electorate to changing economic conditions. Finally, the book clarifies a central question in political economy: How can national economic policy be conducted in both a democratic and a competent fashion?
Download or read book The Political Process and Economic Change written by Bruno S. Frey and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, 10 international scholars examine the complex relationship between the economy and the polity from a scientific rather than an ideological point of view. In so doing, they present an overview of the exciting new work now being done, the main ideas and controversies now prevalent, and the new approaches to the study of political economy now being pursued.
Download or read book Beyond the New Deal Order written by Gary Gerstle and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-12-27 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since introducing the concept in the late 1980s, historians have been debating the origins, nature, scope, and limitations of the New Deal order—the combination of ideas, electoral and governing strategies, redistributive social policies, and full employment economics that became the standard-bearer for political liberalism in the wake of the Great Depression and commanded Democratic majorities for decades. In the decline and break-up of the New Deal coalition historians found keys to understanding the transformations that, by the late twentieth century, were shifting American politics to the right. In Beyond the New Deal Order, contributors bring fresh perspective to the historic meaning and significance of New Deal liberalism while identifying the elements of a distinctively "neoliberal" politics that emerged in its wake. Part I offers contemporary interpretations of the New Deal with essays that focus on its approach to economic security and inequality, its view of participatory governance, and its impact on the Republican party as well as Congressional politics. Part II features essays that examine how intersectional inequities of class, race, and gender were embedded in New Deal labor law, labor standards, and economic policy and brought demands for employment, economic justice, and collective bargaining protections to the forefront of civil rights and social movement agendas throughout the postwar decades. Part III considers the precepts and defining narratives of a "post" New Deal political structure, while the closing essay contemplates the extent to which we may now be witnessing the end of a neoliberal system anchored in free-market ideology, neo-Victorian moral aspirations, and post-Communist global politics. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Angus Burgin, Gary Gerstle, Romain Huret, Meg Jacobs, Michael Kazin, Sophia Lee, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joe McCartin, Alice O'Connor, Paul Sabin, Reuel Schiller, Kit Smemo, David Stein, Jean-Christian Vinel, Julian Zelizer.
Download or read book Building a Housewife s Paradise written by Tracey Deutsch and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the history of food distribution in the United States explores the roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.
Download or read book Arsenal of Democracy written by Julian E. Zelizer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-12-29 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been a truism that prior to George W. Bush, politics stopped at the water's edge -- that is, that partisanship had no place in national security. In Arsenal of Democracy, historian Julian E. Zelizer shows this to be demonstrably false: partisan fighting has always shaped American foreign policy and the issue of national security has always been part of our domestic conflicts. Based on original archival findings, Arsenal of Democracy offers new insights into nearly every major national security issue since the beginning of the cold war: from FDR's masterful management of World War II to the partisanship that scarred John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, from Ronald Reagan’s fight against Communism to George W. Bushrues controversial War on Terror. A definitive account of the complex interaction between domestic politics and foreign affairs over the last six decades, Arsenal of Democracy is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of national security.
Download or read book Hiding Politics in Plain Sight written by Patricia Strach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As late as the 1980s, breast cancer was a stigmatized disease, so much so that local reporters avoided using the word "breast" in their stories and early breast cancer organizations steered clear of it in their names. But activists with business backgrounds began to partner with corporations for sponsored runs and cause-marketing products, from which a portion of the proceeds would benefit breast cancer research. Branding breast cancer as "pink"--hopeful, positive, uncontroversial--on the products Americans see every day, these activists and corporations generated a pervasive understanding of breast cancer that is widely shared by the public and embraced by policymakers. Clearly, they have been successful: today, more Americans know that the pink ribbon is the symbol of breast cancer than know the name of the vice president. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight examines the costs of employing market mechanisms--especially cause marketing--as a strategy for change. Patricia Strach suggests that market mechanisms do more than raise awareness of issues or money to support charities: they also affect politics. She shows that market mechanisms, like corporate-sponsored walks or cause-marketing, shift issue definition away from the contentious processes in the political sphere to the market, where advertising campaigns portray complex issues along a single dimension with a simple solution: breast cancer research will find a cure and Americans can participate easily by purchasing specially-marked products. This market competition privileges even more specialized actors with connections to business. As well, cooperative market activism fundamentally alters the public sphere by importing processes, values, and biases of market-based action into politics. Market activism does not just bring social concerns into market transactions, it also brings market biases into public policymaking, which is inherently undemocratic. As a result, industry and key activists work cooperatively rather than contentiously, and they define issues as consensual rather than controversial, essentially hiding politics in plain sight.
Download or read book Trucking Country written by Shane Hamilton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond Piggly Wiggly written by Lisa C. Tolbert and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patented in 1917, Piggly Wiggly was by far the most influential self-service store of the early twentieth century. Before 1940 it was the only self-service chain with a national distribution network, but it was neither the first nor the only version. Beyond Piggly Wiggly reveals the importance of Piggly Wiggly in the invention of self-service and goes beyond the history of a single firm to explore the role of small business entrepreneurs who invented the first self-service stores in a grassroots social process. During the 1920s and 1930s a minority of enterprising grocers experimented with a wide variety of (sometimes wacky) design ideas for automating shopping. They created specialized stores designed as enclosed retail systems that went far beyond open display techniques to construct unique physical and psychological advantages for automating salesmanship. Beyond Piggly Wiggly offers the first perspective on the national scale of experimentation and connects the southern Jim Crow origins of self- service to the national history of this mass retailing method. Empirical analysis of store arrangements demonstrates how small stores that have previously been overlooked or undervalued as quaint anomalies were integral to the creation of supermarkets. Ultimately, self-service was more than a business decision; it was a fundamentally new social practice.
Download or read book The Full Employment Horizon in 20th Century America written by Michael Dennis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.
Download or read book The Fiscalization of Social Policy written by Joshua T. McCabe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earned income tax credit (EITC) and child tax credit (CTC) are tax credits for low-income families that paradoxically exclude the poorest families. This book challenges the conventional wisdom on American exceptionalism and offers the first and only comparative analysis of the politics on these important anti-poverty tax credits.
Download or read book Land of Necessity written by Alexis McCrossen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-19 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. In Land of Necessity, historians and anthropologists unravel the interplay of the national and transnational and of scarcity and abundance in the region split by the 1,969-mile boundary line dividing Mexico and the United States. This richly illustrated volume, with more than 100 images including maps, photographs, and advertisements, explores the convergence of broad demographic, economic, political, cultural, and transnational developments resulting in various forms of consumer culture in the borderlands. Though its importance is uncontestable, the role of necessity in consumer culture has rarely been explored. Indeed, it has been argued that where necessity reigns, consumer culture is anemic. This volume demonstrates otherwise. In doing so, it sheds new light on the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, while also opening up similar terrain for scholarly inquiry into consumer culture. The volume opens with two chapters that detail the historical trajectories of consumer culture and the borderlands. In the subsequent chapters, contributors take up subjects including smuggling, tourist districts and resorts, purchasing power, and living standards. Others address home décor, housing, urban development, and commercial real estate, while still others consider the circulation of cinematic images, contraband, used cars, and clothing. Several contributors discuss the movement of people across borders, within cities, and in retail spaces. In the two afterwords, scholars reflect on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a particular site of trade in labor, land, leisure, and commodities, while also musing about consumer culture as a place of complex political and economic negotiations. Through its focus on the borderlands, this volume provides valuable insight into the historical and contemporary aspects of the big “isms” shaping modern life: capitalism, nationalism, transnationalism, globalism, and, without a doubt, consumerism. Contributors. Josef Barton, Peter S. Cahn, Howard Campbell, Lawrence Culver, Amy S. Greenberg, Josiah McC. Heyman, Sarah Hill, Alexis McCrossen, Robert Perez, Laura Isabel Serna, Rachel St. John, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Evan R. Ward
Download or read book Middle Class Union written by Mark W. Robbins and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Middle Class Union argues that the period following World War I was a pivotal moment in the development of middle-class consumer politics in the 20th century. At this time, middle-class Americans politically mobilized to define for society what was fair in the growing consumer marketplace. They projected themselves as guardians of the producerist values of hard work, honesty, and thrift, and called for greater adherence to them among the working and elite classes. In this era and in later periods, they flexed their muscles as consumers, and claimed to defend the values of the nation. Combining social history with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of consumption and symbolic space, Middle Class Union illustrates how acts of consumption, representations of the middle class in literary, journalistic, and artistic discourses, and ground-level organizing combined to enable white-collar activists to establish themselves as both the middle class and the backbone of the nation. This book contributes to labor history by examining the nexus of class and consumption to show how many white-collar workers drew on their consumer identity to express an anti-labor politics, later facilitating the struggles of unions throughout the post–World War I years. It also contributes to political history by emphasizing how these middle-class activists laid important groundwork for both 1920s business conservatism and New Deal liberalism. They exerted their political influence well before the post–World War II period, when a self-interested and powerful middle-class consumer identity is more widely acknowledged to have taken hold.
Download or read book From Main Street to Mall written by Vicki Howard and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The geography of American retail has changed dramatically since the first luxurious department stores sprang up in nineteenth-century cities. Introducing light, color, and music to dry-goods emporia, these "palaces of consumption" transformed mere trade into occasions for pleasure and spectacle. Through the early twentieth century, department stores remained centers of social activity in local communities. But after World War II, suburban growth and the ubiquity of automobiles shifted the seat of economic prosperity to malls and shopping centers. The subsequent rise of discount big-box stores and electronic shopping accelerated the pace at which local department stores were shuttered or absorbed by national chains. But as the outpouring of nostalgia for lost downtown stores and historic shopping districts would indicate, these vibrant social institutions were intimately connected to American political, cultural, and economic identities. The first national study of the department store industry, From Main Street to Mall traces the changing economic and political contexts that transformed the American shopping experience in the twentieth century. With careful attention to small-town stores as well as glamorous landmarks such as Marshall Field's in Chicago and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, historian Vicki Howard offers a comprehensive account of the uneven trajectory that brought about the loss of locally identified department store firms and the rise of national chains like Macy's and J. C. Penney. She draws on a wealth of primary source evidence to demonstrate how the decisions of consumers, government policy makers, and department store industry leaders culminated in today's Wal-Mart world. Richly illustrated with archival photographs of the nation's beloved downtown business centers, From Main Street to Mall shows that department stores were more than just places to shop.
