Download or read book The Myth of the American Dream Dream or Nightmare written by Kristina von Kölln and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,9, Technical University of Braunschweig, language: English, abstract: This essay will focus on the origin of the American Dream and its key elements on the one hand, and try to prove its veracity on the other hand. Even though the term ‘The American Dream’ became a well-known saying describing an assumed very specific phenomenon, its meaning is as vague as it is ambivalent. It is, nevertheless, a crucial part of the American national identity and a symbol of a nation’s self-conception. One could argue that Thomas Jefferson already lay the foundation of the most famous myth of all time by declaring “these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent,” and are thus entitled to “preservation of life, & liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson 243). More than a century later, James Truslow Adams rewrote Jefferson’s words in his novel The Epic of America by saying, “The American dream, the dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement." (Adams 404). While Adams focused on the hope for a better and happier future for everyone, regardless of their social, ethnical or religious decent, Richard Nixon stressed the material aspect in his First Inaugural Address in 1969, by defining "full employment, better housing, excellence in education; in rebuilding our cities and improving our rural areas; in protecting our environment and enhancing the quality of life" (Lawler and Schaefer 84) as key elements of the American Dream. Martin Luther King dreamed of freedom and equality for all American citizens and that they ”will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (King qtd. in Kirck 82) and two decades later, during his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Ronald Reagan reminded his people of their uniqueness as "too great a nation to limit (them)selves to small dreams." (Reagan qtd. in Grafton 109) Although often merely political calculation during election campaigns, those previously mentioned variations of the most famous dreams of all times illustrate two things; On the one hand that each generation interprets the American Dream in its very own way, and on the other hand, it’s fundamental value for the American society.
Download or read book America Dream Or Nightmare written by Peter Freese and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Dream Global Nightmare written by Ziauddin Sardar and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propelled by its mythology, America pursues its dream relentlessly. Here, the authors expose the dark side of that fantasy: death, suffering, perpetual fear, an increasing divide between rich and poor, a squandering of the human future, and the relentless building of more and more pretexts for future wars.
Download or read book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by One World. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Download or read book Is the American Dream a Myth written by Kate Burns and published by Greenhaven Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the concept of the American dream from different perspectives using both primary and secondary sources.
Download or read book Is the American Dream a Myth written by Kate Burns and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines different points of view in the debate over the meaning of the American dream, covering such issues as affirmative action, home ownership, and immigration.
Download or read book Behold America written by Sarah Churchwell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of 2018 The unknown history of two ideas crucial to the struggle over what America stands for In Behold, America, Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans' fierce battle for the nation's soul. It follows the stories of two phrases--the "American dream" and "America First"--that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. At a time when many ask what America's future holds, Behold, America is a revelatory, unvarnished portrait of where we have been.
Download or read book The American Dream written by and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Dream American Nightmare written by Kathryn Hume and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.
Download or read book Radical Sufficiency written by Christine Firer Hinze and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the means through which we can achieve economic well-being for all. In this timely book, Christine Firer Hinze looks back at the influential teachings of priest-economist Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945), who supported worker justice and defended a living wage for all Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Advancing Ryan’s efforts to articulate a persuasive plan for social reform, Hinze advocates for an action-oriented livelihood agenda that situates US working families’ economic pursuits within a comprehensive commitment to sustainable “radical sufficiency” for all. Documenting the daily lives and economic struggles of past and present US Catholic working-class families, Hinze explores the larger impulses and patterns—economic, cultural, political, moral, and spiritual—that affect the work these people perform in homes, in communities, and at paid jobs. Their story entwines with the larger history of the American dream and working people's pursuit of a dignified livelihood. Surveying this history with an eye to the dynamics of power and difference, Hinze rethinks Ryan’s ethics and Catholic social teaching to develop a new conception of a decent livelihood and its implications for contemporary policy and practice. The result is a critical Catholic economic ethic capable of addressing the situations of workers and families in the interdependent global economy of the twenty-first century. Radical Sufficiency offers transformative strategies and strategic policy directions for achieving the radical Christian goal of dignified work and a good livelihood for all.
Download or read book The american dream and the american nightmare in literature by William D Howells and Henry James written by Carolina Hein and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-06-19 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the origin of the American Dream, with the American Nightmare and with the two novels "The Rise of Silas Lapham" written by William D. Howell (1885) and "The American" by Henry James (1877). The term paper mainly concentrates on the main characters and their social life and shows that the protagonists, who live the way that the term “American Dream” implies, experience the seamy side of the American Dream. The American Dream has a long history which goes back several hundred years. For some people the American Dream might stand for property, for others it might be the image of freedom and equality. By all means, the American Dream promises a more comfortable life and the realization of the deepest dreams. But reality can turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare. Searching for a well paid job to raise their standards of living, people acknowledge that it is difficult to move up the economic ladder. Longing for equal opportunity, people face discrimination due to their race or social class. This term paper deals with the origin of the American Dream and two novels The Rise of Silas Lapham written by William D. Howell, originally published in 1885, and The American by Henry James published in 1877. The term paper mainly concentrates on the main characters and their social life and shows that the protagonists, who live the way that the term “American Dream” implies, experience the seamy side of the American Dream. Before Europeans had moved to the new continent, the first immigrants living in America were Asians (Jordan, Winthrop D./Leon F. Litwack. The United States, Conquering a Continent Volume 1. California: North West, 2003: 1). In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered an unknown continent which was named “America” after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Reports of America visitors connected the impression of America with “a paradise on earth” and the “El Dorado” and thus attracted people (Freese, Peter. The American Dream and the American Nightmare: General Aspects and Literary Examples. Paderborner Universitätsreden 7. Paderborn: Universität-Gesamthochschule, 1987: 8). Terrible and dangerous life situations, daily suffered by men and women during the “Protestant Reformation”, forced victims of “religious persecution” to flee the countries (Freese 1987: 10). Searching for protection, they moved from the “Old World” to the “New World” (15).
Download or read book Politicians and Rhetoric written by J. Charteris-Black and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-03 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the rhetoric of speeches by major British or American politicians and shows how metaphor is used systematically to create political myths of monsters, villains and heroes. Metaphors are shown to interact with other figures of speech to communicate subliminal meanings by drawing on the unconscious emotional association of words.
Download or read book The American Dream written by Janice Hartman and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Born to succeed The American Dream written by Hildegard Schnell and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2006-10-18 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen, course: Proseminar: An Introduction to American Civilization, language: English, abstract: “We were brought up to succeed, weren’t we?” (Arthur Miller “The Price”, 109). Is this true? Were we really brought up only to succeed in order to achieve material aplenty and is this what the American Dream is all about: Success as the reason for living? In my research paper I will try to find an answer to these questions by looking at the origin of the concept of the American Dream, the critical interpretation of the American Dream referring to itschange of values. Furthermore, I am going to discuss the influence of the American Dream on popular imagination and, as a conclusion, I will briefly state the effect it has on political rhetoric. So, the main purpose of my paper is to show that the notion of the American Dream has not always been identified with materialism but with success primarily as a God given task intended for self-salvation. Therefore, I will point out how this aspect of a success in religious and moral terms changed into an aspect of material success only. Further, I will show, according to this change that the aspect of material success promotes selfish individuals instead of a “Great Society” in which the American Dream is realized in the community since there is “nothing whatever in a fortune merely in itself” (Adams “The Epic of America”, 416). While the American Dream stands on the one hand for a land of opportunity where everyone is given the chance of attaining something according to one’s ability, the American Dream stands on the other hand for a struggle to succeed without much social or emotional support that eventually turns into an American nightmare.
Download or read book The American Dream Background and development written by Carolina Bricks and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-University Paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1, , language: English, abstract: Probably everybody has heard about it, being legendary and part of many people's lives: the American Dream. But is it really a dream? A myth, an Illusion, we wake up from – disappointing and simply untrue? Or is it reality? This question is answered through many points dealing with the issue. This paper defines the term "American Dream" and shows how the dream might have developed, examines the biographies of famous representatives, such as Martin Luther King and deals with the resulting massive immigration to the US in the past and today, giving deep insights into America ́s history and showing the present day American Dream.
Download or read book The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complete edition of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in and describing the decadent period of 1920's America, Fitzgerald's lyrical verse is a tragically simple love story that is strangely profound. This is a haunting classic that stays with the reader.
Download or read book The American Dream written by Jim Cullen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first "narrative history" traces the thread that binds the dreams and aspirations of most Americans together, exploring shared history and sacred texts--the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence--in search of the origins of these ideas.
