The names of most of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet members are well known. Anyone familiar with FDR’s administration will remember Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, and James Farley. One member of that circle, however, has remained a virtual unknown: Harry H. Woodring, the recalcitrant Secretary of War who was forced by Roosevelt to resign from the cabinet. It is doubtful that the story of any of Roosevelt’s cabinet members is more in...
Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman)
by Colin A Palmer
Colin Palmer, one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. At the center of the story is Cheddi Jagan, who was the colony's first premier following the institution of universal adult suffrage in 1953. Informed by the first use of many British, U.S., and Guyanese archival sources, Palmer's work details Jagan's rise and fall, from his initial electoral victory in the spring of...
The disintegration of former colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East after World War II profoundly affected the international balance of power, irrevocably altering the political map of the world. The United States was in a unique position to influence the outcome of the struggles for independence in the Third World. In Colonialism and Cold War, Robert J. McMahon looks closely at one area where American diplomacy played an important role in the end of the European imperial order: I...
In a memoir of growing up in Washington, D.C., during the 1940s and 1950s, the author of "Gentleman's Blood" and "Hail to the Chiefs" gives a sharp-eyed look at history, as well as insights into her own life.
From Truman to Trump, the deep corruption of our political leaders unveiled. Many critiques of the Trump era contrast it with the latter half of the twentieth century, when the United States seemed governed more by statesmen than by special interests. Without denying the extraordinary vigor of President Trump's assault on traditional ethical and legal norms, Jonathan Marshall challenges the myth of a golden age of American democracy. Drawing on a host of original archival sources, he tells a sho...
The first oral history centering on the unique experiences of black porters and railroad attendants during the railroad's heyday is by turns dramatic, inspiring, comic, and heartwrenching. First person accounts document both the glamour of the railroad era and the bitter realities of being a black worker on a white railroad.
In The Right to Rule: American Exceptionalism in a Multipolar World Order, Hugh De Santis explores the evolution of American exceptionalism and its effect on the nation's relations with the external world. De Santis argues that the self-image of a superior, providential society is based on the myth that the United States is unique rather than a nation with political, economic, and religious values that are inherited from seventeenth-century England. American exceptionalism has underpinned the na...
The life of a major figure in twentieth-century economic history whose impact has long been clouded by dubious allegations "Harry Dexter White has always been the mystery man at the center of America's international economic policy in the 1930s and 1940s. James Boughton helps demystify him in this rich, enlightening, and most interesting volume."-Douglas Irwin, author of Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy Although Harry Dexter White (1892-1948) was arguably the most im...
In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival. But the cost of a bus ticket was more than a week's wages in a lumber camp, and the mountaineer paid dearly in loss of kin, culture, homeplace, and freedom. Numerous scholarly works have addressed this migration that brought more than one million mountaineer...
World War II made enormous and unprecedented demands upon the nation's civil service administration. The task of recruiting millions of new employees of almost every skill in the midst of military and industrial drains upon manpower and the necessity of maintaining efficiency and morale jarred personnel agencies loose from peacetime routine. Both the older establishments such as the War and Navy departments and the new war service agencies such as the Office of Price Administration were affected...
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation-that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation-the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and...
In the Interest of Democracy (Trade Unions Past, Present and Future, #13)
by Quenby Olmsted Hughes
Until recently, there has been little concrete evidence linking the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to the U.S. government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this book, based upon recently opened archival collections, the author investigates this controversial and complicated early Cold War relationship. Contrary to arguments that the AFL's international activities were entirely controlled by the U.S. government to the detriment of the independent intern...