Download or read book The Age of American Unreason written by Susan Jacoby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scathing indictment of American modern-day culture examines the current disdain for logic and evidence fostered by the mass media, religious fundamentalism, poor public education, a lack of fair-minded intellectuals, and a lazy, credulous public, condemning our addiction to infotainment, from TV to the Web, and assessing its repercussions for the country as a whole. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
Download or read book American Science in an Age of Anxiety written by Jessica Wang and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America's future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies. This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.
Download or read book Prospects for the American Age written by Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi and published by Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The introduction, “Power Structure in the New World Order (Argument of the Book),” highlights the main theme around which the study revolves, namely the “new world order.” It presents the hypothesis of the study regarding this new order, along with several questions including: what are the factors that indicate the coming of a new world order?; what are the most influential forces in that order?; how is that order structured?; and what are the most important and influential factors in the world order? The introduction also presents the main premise of the book — that the United States of America may be considered the dominant pole in the new world order, and that the world will continue to exist in an American age that is expected to extend for at least a further five decades. The qualitative supremacy of the United States of America has proven inescapable according to the data, statistics and information presented in this book, as well as the scales and variables of comparison adopted by the author in terms of economics, military advancement, energy resources, transportation, education, culture, and technological progress. According to these standards, the structure of the new world order may be described as a hierarchy, with the United States of America alone at the top, followed by a second tier comprising Russia, China and the European Union, a third tier consisting of Japan, India and Brazil, followed by the rest of world. The introduction to this book may be considered a basic foundation for the analysis presented in the following seven chapters, which examine the emergence, current status, and future of the new world order in its various dimensions. Under the heading, “The New World Order: Features and Concepts,” the first chapter of Al-Suwaidi’s new book presents a theoretical paradigm for the concept of the new world order in its various dimensions. It presents two main themes: the first deals with concepts relating to the world order, drawing on literature that examines the evolution of the world order from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the present day. It also presents various different views and arguments concerning the nature of the world order, and the distribution of power within it. The first theme also explores the political, military, economic, cultural, educational, technological and energy-related dimensions of the world order, and their importance in determining the relative powers of actors in the new world order. Moreover it explains how the United States of America has succeeded in utilizing all these tools to achieve its ends, and how it leads this world order according to a universal strategic vision aimed at maintaining US supremacy vis-à-vis other major powers. The first theme also presents an objective assessment of the different frameworks which are employed in analyzing the concept of the new world order. The second theme of this chapter discusses the main features of the new world order, which play a significant role in the interactions that occur within it, and which define it with regard to previous historical eras of the global system. Chapter II, “Factors Influencing the Structure of the New World Order,” examines the factors and patterns of influence and interaction within the world order. These factors include: relations among civilizations, relative power in international relations, economic factors, military superiority, technological development, levels of knowledge, challenges and variables, and the behavior of major powers. Chapter III, “The World Order: Decisive Historic Junctures,” aims to draw a comprehensive analytical map to help in understanding the historical transformations of the world order and, ultimately, the nature of contemporary global realities. The historical review presented in this chapter features an element that may make it unique; it tackles the historical evolution of the world order from the emergence of the Ottoman state in the East through the ages of the Spanish, Portuguese and other empires of the West. It is an effort to present a balanced, scholarly chronicle of the world order, without neglecting the influence of the East on international relations throughout history. Chapter IV, “The Economy, Trade and Energy in the New World Order,” focuses on the role of economic factors in deciding the structure of the new world order and the hierarchy of powers within it. It reveals that despite the spectacular rise of the Chinese economy during the past two decades, it is still about half that of the United States, and China still falls within the ranks of developing countries in terms of its average GDP per capita. While the US economy is characterized by flexibility and high reliance on innovation and internal forces for growth, China depends on foreign investment and employing low-cost labor in export-oriented industries. This could make China more vulnerable to adverse economic shocks in the future. The author also expects that developments in the energy sector will greatly affect the ranking of powers in the new world order. The United States of America will increasingly become self-dependent in terms of energy, utilizing its various innovations in the field of shale gas and oil extraction, and its gradual shift toward unconventional energy sources from the western hemisphere (the Americas), giving it a strong comparative advantage in the future. Chapter V, “Public Opinion Regarding the New World Order: A Sample Survey of UAE Citizens,” resents the findings of a public opinion survey in the UAE concerning the new world order. The survey focuses on nationality, age, gender and educational level as explanatory variables of differences in public opinion toward the new world order. In Chapter VI, “Prospective Structural Changes and their Consequences for the New World Order,” the author discusses the potential structural, strategic changes in the new world order in the coming five decades; stressing that unipolarity will have a variety of impacts on the world. The author anticipates that US influence in international financial institutions will increase, and that over the next decade Washington will reduce its dependence on oil from regions plagued by risk and instability.
Download or read book Rethinking American History in a Global Age written by Thomas Bender and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-14 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities? Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.
Download or read book The American Age written by Walter LaFeber and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the publisher. In the second edition, LaFeber has revised nearly every chapter in the book. In the early chapters, there is more attention to the origins of foreign policy institutions and practices, including precedents for the executive agreement, and new discussions of U.S. relations with Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The more recent chapters feature fresh insights of Potsdam, the origins of the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis{u2014}all based on new evidence drawn from Soviet archives. The new edition amply covers the momentous events that brought the Cold War to an end and thrust the United States into the uncertain position of the world's only superpower.
Download or read book The Age of Entitlement written by Christopher Caldwell and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
Download or read book Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution written by Ira D. Gruber and published by . This book was released on 2014-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution
Download or read book Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution written by Michal Jan Rozbicki and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding. Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty—one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital—a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms—at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.
Download or read book The Age of Acquiescence written by Steve Fraser and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.
Download or read book The Circus Age written by Janet M. Davis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-10-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that everyone could go to the show. In this entertaining and provocative book, Janet Davis links the flowering of the early-twentieth-century American railroad circus to such broader historical developments as the rise of big business, the breakdown of separate spheres for men and women, and the genesis of the United States' overseas empire. In the process, she casts the circus as a powerful force in consolidating the nation's identity as a modern industrial society and world power. Davis explores the multiple "shows" that took place under the big top, from scripted performances to exhibitions of laborers assembling and tearing down tents to impromptu spectacles of audiences brawling, acrobats falling, and animals rampaging. Turning Victorian notions of gender, race, and nationhood topsy-turvy, the circus brought its vision of a rapidly changing world to spectators--rural as well as urban--across the nation. Even today, Davis contends, the influence of the circus continues to resonate in popular representations of gender, race, and the wider world.
Download or read book The Age of Dignity written by Ai-jen Poo and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Time’s 100 most influential people “shines a new light on the need for a holistic approach to caregiving in America . . . Timely and hopeful” (Maria Shriver). In The Age of Dignity, thought leader and activist Ai-jen Poo offers a wake-up call about the statistical reality that will affect us all: Fourteen percent of our population is now over sixty-five; by 2030 that ratio will be one in five. In fact, our fastest-growing demographic is the eighty-five-plus age group—over five million people now, a number that is expected to more than double in the next twenty years. This change presents us with a new challenge: how we care for and support quality of life for the unprecedented numbers of older Americans who will need it. Despite these daunting numbers, Poo has written a profoundly hopeful book, giving us a glimpse into the stories and often hidden experiences of the people—family caregivers, older people, and home care workers—whose lives will be directly shaped and reshaped in this moment of demographic change. The Age of Dignity outlines a road map for how we can become a more caring nation, providing solutions for fixing our fraying safety net while also increasing opportunities for women, immigrants, and the unemployed in our workforce. As Poo has said, “Care is the strategy and the solution toward a better future for all of us.” “Every American should read this slender book. With luck, it will be the future for all of us.” —Gloria Steinem “Positive and inclusive.” —The New York Times “A big-hearted book [that] seeks to transform our dismal view of aging and caregiving.” —Ms. magazine
Download or read book American Road written by Pete Davies and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Davies recounts these treacherous travels in a brisk and readable style . . . he has put history, sociology, politics, and human nature into well-tuned balance. The Boston Globe
Download or read book JFK written by Fredrik Logevall and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revelatory biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president. “An utterly incandescent study of one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE • NAMED BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR BY The Times (London) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Sunday Times (London), New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, Kirkus Reviews By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history. And while hagiographic portrayals of his dazzling charisma, reports of his extramarital affairs, and disagreements over his political legacy have come and gone in the decades since his untimely death, these accounts all fail to capture the full person. Beckoned by this gap in our historical knowledge, Fredrik Logevall has spent much of the last decade searching for the “real” JFK. The result of this prodigious effort is a sweeping two-volume biography that properly contextualizes Kennedy amidst the roiling American Century. This volume spans the first thirty-nine years of JFK’s life—from birth through his decision to run for president—to reveal his early relationships, his formative experiences during World War II, his ideas, his writings, his political aspirations. In examining these pre–White House years, Logevall shows us a more serious, independently minded Kennedy than we’ve previously known, whose distinct international sensibility would prepare him to enter national politics at a critical moment in modern U.S. history. Along the way, Logevall tells the parallel story of America’s midcentury rise. As Kennedy comes of age, we see the charged debate between isolationists and interventionists in the years before Pearl Harbor; the tumult of the Second World War, through which the United States emerged as a global colossus; the outbreak and spread of the Cold War; the domestic politics of anti-Communism and the attendant scourge of McCarthyism; the growth of television’s influence on politics; and more. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 is a sweeping history of the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as well as the clearest portrait we have of this enigmatic American icon.
Download or read book The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality written by Dennis L. Gilbert and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the latest data on income, wealth, earnings, and residential segregation by income, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, Tenth Edition describes a consistent pattern of growing inequality in the United States since the early 1970s. Focusing on the socioeconomic core of the American class system, author Dennis L. Gilbert examines how changes in the economy, family life, globalization, and politics are contributing to increasing class inequality. New to this Edition “The Class Basis of Trump's Victory” looks at why for the first time since before the 1932 election, the Republican presidential candidate won a greater proportion of the working class vote than the Democratic opponent. Addresses the role of technology and other factors in the decline of manufacturing employment and how the trend is crucial for understanding growing inequality and changes in working class family life. Offers international comparisons to show how the U.S. compares with other wealthy nations on social mobility and poverty, and questions our conception of the U.S. as a uniquely open society.
Download or read book The Age of Gold written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—the epic story of the California Gold Rush, “a fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history" (David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams). The California Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.” The discovery of gold on the American River in 1848 triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. It drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth, accelerated America’s imperial expansion, and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. H.W. Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.
Download or read book The Brazen Age written by David Reid and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia. From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs. Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in black-and-white: Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife. But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War. With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.
Download or read book Citizen Sailors written by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.
