Writing in "Life" magazine in February 1941, Henry Luce memorably announced the arrival of "The American Century". The phrase caught on, as did the belief that America's moment was at hand. Yet as Andrew J. Bacevich makes clear, that century has now ended the victim of strategic miscalculation, military misadventures, and economic decline. To take stock of the short American Century and place it in historical perspective, Bacevich has assembled a richly provocative range of perspectives. What di...
Nebraska's Carl Milton Aldrich and the Arbor Day Song
by Rachel Brupbacher
Lost Restaurants of Portland, Oregon (Lost)
by Theresa Griffin Kennedy
Freedom on the Border (Kentucky Remembered: An Oral History)
by Catherine Fosl
Most scholarship on the civil rights movement has focused on the Deep South, even though border states like Kentucky also had segregation laws and a history of racialized violence. African American Kentuckians challenged racial segregation, too, but they adapted their approaches as needed, from familiar protest models in the state's larger cities to more unique strategies in isolated rural communities, where they constituted only a tiny fraction of the population. In ""Freedom on the Border"", 1...
In the summer of 1964 medical professionals, mostly white and northern, organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide care and support for civil rights activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized and sometimes radicalized by their firsthand view of disenfranchised co...
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse - Wenger calls it ""religious freedom talk"" - that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often...
Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now. Viewpoints on American Culture
Mark Wayne Nelson details the efforts of one of America's most underappreciated public servants. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Marriner S. Eccles, a Mormon from Utah, to join his administration.As a Republican businessman, Eccles seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of leading crusader for a fairer and more economically sound distribution of the nation's wealth. From his first position in the Treasury Department, though, he emerged as the central mover in revolutionizing the mortga...
In the Beginning (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman)
by Michael Lienesch
Reaching back to the origins of antievolutionism in the 1920s, and continuing to the promotion of intelligent design today, Michael Lienesch skillfully analyzes the creationism movement, one of the most formidable political movements of the twentieth century. With fresh insights, Lienesch retells the story of the 1925 Scopes 'monkey"" trial and reinterprets its meaning. In tracking the movement from that time to today, he explores the rise of creation science in the 1960s, the alliance with the...
John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Speech (Voices of Freedom)
by Karen Price-Hossell
Grand Expectations (Oxford History of the United States, X)
by James T. Patterson
Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quarter-century of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 62 percent of the oil, 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had three-fourths of the world's gold supplies. English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the post-War era enjoyed "the greatest pros...
Enactments introduces readers to the field of psychohistory, examines the continuous interplay of psychoanalytic process with the irrational forces that shape history, and systematizes a highly diverse field into six usable models.
On June 11, 1963, in a dramatic gesture that caught the nation's attention, Governor George Wallace physically blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama's campus. His intent was to defy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent on behalf of the Kennedy administration to force Alabama to accept court-ordered desegregation. After a tense confrontation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Wallace backed down, allowing Vivian Malone and James Ho...
In the new edition of this major work, Seyom Brown brings his authoritative account of United States foreign policy completely up-to-date with analyses of the Truman administration to the Clinton administration. Most notably, Brown provides an insightful overview of the last three presidencies, beginning with an expanded treatment of the Reagan years to the first major scholarly assessment of Bush's foreign policies to Clinton's early ambivalence toward grappling with the dilemmas of the post-Co...
On November 9, 1989, a mob of jubilant Berliners dismantled the wall that had divided their city for nearly forty years; this act of destruction anticipated the momentous demolition of the European communist system. Within two years, the nations of the former Eastern Bloc toppled their authoritarian regimes, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, fading quietly into the shadows of twentieth century history and memory. By the end of 1991, the United States and other Western nations celebrated the...