Radical Visions And American Dreams

Radical Visions And American Dreams Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Radical Visions And American Dreams book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

Radical Visions and American Dreams

Richard H. Pells
Radical Visions and American Dreams Book PDF

Author : Richard H. Pells
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 452 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : History
ISBN : 0252067436

Get Book

Radical Visions and American Dreams by Richard H. Pells Pdf

The Great Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic catastrophe to many American writers and artists. Attracted to Marxist ideals, they interpreted the crisis as a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise that reflected the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, and they advocated more sweeping social changes than those enacted under the New Deal. In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America. By placing cultural developments against the background of the New Deal, the influence of the American Communist Party, and the coming of World War II, Pells explains how these artists and intellectuals wanted to transform American society, yet why they wound up defending the American Dream. A new preface enhances this classic work of American cultural history.

The Great Depression

Robert S. McElvaine
The Great Depression Book PDF

Author : Robert S. McElvaine
Publisher : Crown
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1993-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812923278

Get Book

The Great Depression by Robert S. McElvaine Pdf

One of the classic studies of the Great Depression, featuring a new introduction by the author with insights into the economic crises of 1929 and today. In the twenty-five years since its publication, critics and scholars have praised historian Robert McElvaine’s sweeping and authoritative history of the Great Depression as one of the best and most readable studies of the era. Combining clear-eyed insight into the machinations of politicians and economists who struggled to revive the battered economy, personal stories from the average people who were hardest hit by an economic crisis beyond their control, and an evocative depiction of the popular culture of the decade, McElvaine paints an epic picture of an America brought to its knees—but also brought together by people’s widely shared plight. In a new introduction, McElvaine draws striking parallels between the roots of the Great Depression and the economic meltdown that followed in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. He also examines the resurgence of anti-regulation free market ideology, beginning in the Reagan era, and argues that some economists and politicians revised history and ignored the lessons of the Depression era.

Seeking the American Dream

Robert C. Hauhart
Seeking the American Dream Book PDF

Author : Robert C. Hauhart
Publisher : Springer
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2016-04-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781137540256

Get Book

Seeking the American Dream by Robert C. Hauhart Pdf

Historically, the United States has been viewed by generations of immigrants as the land of opportunity, where through hard work one can prosper and make a better life. The American Dream is perhaps the United States’ most common export. For many Americans, though, questions remain about whether the American Dream can be achieved in the twenty-first century. Americans, faced with global competition and increased social complexity, wonder whether their dwindling natural resources, polarized national and local politics, and often unregulated capitalism can support the American Dream today. This book examines the ideas and experiences that have formed the American Dream, assesses its meaning for Americans, and evaluates its prospects for the future.

Lewis Mumford

Shuxue Li
Lewis Mumford Book PDF

Author : Shuxue Li
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 303911557X

Get Book

Lewis Mumford by Shuxue Li Pdf

Lewis Mumford's achievements as an architectural critic, literary critic and urbanist are well known. However, his contribution to the American studies movement and to cultural studies in general has almost been forgotten in recent years. By situating Mumford's work in its contemporary intellectual context and by considering some of its legacies for the study of 'culture and civilization' - especially in the nascent field of American studies - this book considers Mumford as an 'author', drawing out some of the expressive, political and methodological significance of this term. In an attempt to counter frequent arguments that Mumford's works are inconsistent, repetitive and derivative, the author argues that, taken as a whole, they demonstrate a consistent inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary critical project, and that Mumford's thought is comparable with that of Marx and Weber. The book traces this critical project through Mumford's works from the early twentieth century and also through his formal process of writing. The author aims to show that Mumford's project was neither provincial nor reactionary, as some have argued, but was instead a dynamic juxtaposition of past and present that enabled him to imagine a future where humans might fulfil their potential in a more perfectly republican, even utopian, urban space.

Visions of Progress

Doug Rossinow
Visions of Progress Book PDF

Author : Doug Rossinow
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2009-11-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812220957

Get Book

Visions of Progress by Doug Rossinow Pdf

Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

A World of Hope, a World of Fear

Mark L. Kleinman
A World of Hope a World of Fear Book PDF

Author : Mark L. Kleinman
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0814208444

Get Book

A World of Hope, a World of Fear by Mark L. Kleinman Pdf

Historian Kleinman juxtaposes the intellectual and professional lives of two the key figures in US history after World War II to explore a fatal division in American liberal thinking about domestic politics and international relations during and after the war. Wallace, who started in agriculture and served as vice president, did not rule out a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union; Niebuhr, an internationally respected protestant theologian and political commentator, categorically rejected dealing with any communists at home or abroad. He argues that Wallace's defeat in the 1942 campaign for president perpetuated the climate of fear that only melted during the Vietnam War. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970-1990

Günter H. Lenz
A Critical History of the New American Studies 1970 1990 Book PDF

Author : Günter H. Lenz
Publisher : Dartmouth College Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2016-12-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781512600049

Get Book

A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970-1990 by Günter H. Lenz Pdf

Starting in 2005, Gunter H. Lenz began preparing a book-length exploration of the transformation of the field of American Studies in the crucial years between 1970 and 1990. As a commentator on, contributor to, and participant in the intellectual and institutional changes in his field, Lenz was well situated to offer a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of that seminal era. Building on essays he wrote while these changes were ongoing, he shows how the revolution in theory, the emergence of postmodern socioeconomic conditions, the increasing globalization of everyday life, and postcolonial responses to continuing and new forms of colonial domination had transformed American Studies as a discipline focused on the distinctive qualities of the United States to a field encompassing the many different "Americas" in the Western Hemisphere as well as how this complex region influenced and was interpreted by the rest of the world. In tracking the shift of American Studies from its exceptionalist bias to its unmanageable global responsibilities, Lenz shows the crucial roles played by the 1930s' Left in the U.S., the Frankfurt School in Germany and elsewhere between 1930 and 1960, Continental post-structuralism, neo-Marxism, and post-colonialism. Lenz's friends and colleagues, now his editors, present here his final backward glance at a critical period in American Studies and the birth of the Transnational.

Music for the Common Man

Elizabeth B. Crist
Music for the Common Man Book PDF

Author : Elizabeth B. Crist
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2009-01-12
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780199888801

Get Book

Music for the Common Man by Elizabeth B. Crist Pdf

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Sal?n M?xico, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals. Much as been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, but very little on concert music of the era. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.

Modernist America

Richard Pells
Modernist America Book PDF

Author : Richard Pells
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 514 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2011-03-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780300171730

Get Book

Modernist America by Richard Pells Pdf

America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement--to make the modern world seem more intelligible."Modernist America" brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.

American Crucible

Gary Gerstle
American Crucible Book PDF

Author : Gary Gerstle
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 544 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2017-02-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400883097

Get Book

American Crucible by Gary Gerstle Pdf

This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt’s vision of a hybrid and superior “American race,” strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in “Anglo-Saxon” culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan’s and Clinton’s attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic.

Fighting Authoritarianism

Britt Haas
Fighting Authoritarianism Book PDF

Author : Britt Haas
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780823278015

Get Book

Fighting Authoritarianism by Britt Haas Pdf

During the Great Depression, young radicals centered in New York City developed a vision of and for America, molded by their understanding of recent historical events, in particular the Great War and the global economic collapse, as well as by the events unfolding both at home and abroad. They worked to make their vision of a free, equal, democratic society based on peaceful coexistence a reality. Their attempts were ultimately unsuccessful but their voices were heard on a number of important issues, including free speech, racial justice, and peace. A major contribution to the historiography of the era of the Great Depression, Fighting Authoritarianism provides a new and important examination of U.S. youth activism of the 1930s, including the limits of the New Deal and how youth activists continually pushed FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other New Dealers to do more to address economic distress, more inclusionary politics, and social inequality. In this study, author Britt Haas questions the interventionist versus isolationist paradigm in that young people sought to focus on both domestic and international affairs. Haas also explores the era not as a precursor to WWII, but as a moment of hope when the prospect of institutionalizing progress in freedom, equality, and democracy seemed possible. Fighting Authoritarianism corrects misconceptions about these young activists’ vision for their country, heavily influenced by the American Dream they had been brought up to revere: they wanted a truly free, truly democratic, and truly equal society. That meant embracing radical ideologies, especially socialism and communism, which were widely discussed, debated, and promoted on New York City college campuses. They believed that in embracing these ideologies, they were not turning their backs on American values. Instead, they believed that such ideologies were the only way to make America live up to its promises. This study also outlines the careers of Molly Yard, Joseph Lash, and James Wechsler, how they retracted (and for Yard and Lash, reclaimed) their radical past, and how New York continued to hold a prominent platform in their careers. Lash and Wechsler both worked for the New York Post, the latter as editor until 1980. Examining the Depression decade from the perspective of young activists highlights the promise of America as young people understood it: a historic moment when anything seemed possible.

American Hungers

Gavin Jones
American Hungers Book PDF

Author : Gavin Jones
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2009-10-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400831913

Get Book

American Hungers by Gavin Jones Pdf

Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.

Why America Needs a Left

Eli Zaretsky
Why America Needs a Left Book PDF

Author : Eli Zaretsky
Publisher : Polity
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2012-03-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780745644844

Get Book

Why America Needs a Left by Eli Zaretsky Pdf

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left - especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism - proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. Written in an accessible way for the general reader and the undergraduate student, this book provides a fresh perspective on American politics and political history. It has often been said that the idea of a left originated in the French Revolution and is distinctively European; Zaretsky argues, by contrast, that America has always had a vibrant and powerful left. And he shows that in those critical moments when the country returns to itself, it is on its left/liberal bases that it comes to feel most at home.

Blue-Collar Hollywood

John Bodnar
Blue Collar Hollywood Book PDF

Author : John Bodnar
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2006-09-26
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780801885372

Get Book

Blue-Collar Hollywood by John Bodnar Pdf

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion—sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative—from the realities of their own lives. In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre—among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood—this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy. Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

Michael Dennis
The Full Employment Horizon in 20th Century America Book PDF

Author : Michael Dennis
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781350179158

Get Book

The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America by Michael Dennis Pdf

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.