The Rise Of A Prairie Statesman

Author : Thomas J. Knock
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 603 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781400880416

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The Rise of a Prairie Statesman by Thomas J. Knock Pdf

The first major biography of the 1972 U.S. presidential candidate and unsung champion of American liberalism The Rise of a Prairie Statesman is the first volume of a major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became America's most eloquent and prescient critic of the Vietnam War. In this masterful book, Thomas Knock traces George McGovern's life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city's streets. Drawing extensively on McGovern's private papers and scores of in-depth interviews, Knock shows how McGovern's importance to the Democratic Party and American liberalism extended far beyond his 1972 presidential campaign, and how the story of postwar American politics is about more than just the rise of the New Right. He vividly describes McGovern's harrowing missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 bomber pilot, and reveals how McGovern's combat experiences motivated him to earn a PhD in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress. When President Kennedy appointed him director of Food for Peace in 1961, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of the program's school lunch initiative that soon was feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world. As a senator, he delivered his courageous and unrelenting critique of Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam—a conflict that brought their party to disaster and caused a new generation of Democrats to turn to McGovern for leadership. A stunning achievement, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman ends in 1968, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, when the "Draft McGovern" movement thrust him into the national spotlight and the contest for the presidential nomination, culminating in his triumphal reelection to the Senate and his emergence as one of the most likely prospects for the Democratic nomination in 1972..

Author : Wikipedia contributors
Publisher : e-artnow sro
Page : 2555 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2024-07-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Focus On: 100 Most Popular American Autobiographers by Wikipedia contributors Pdf

Author : Bruce Kuklick
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022-11-22
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226822457

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Fascism Comes to America by Bruce Kuklick Pdf

A deeply relevant look at what fascism means to Americans. From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of politicians, who have used the language of fascism to smear opponents, and he looks at the discussions of pundits, the analyses of academics, and the displays of fascism in popular culture, including fiction, radio, TV, theater, and film. Kuklick argues that fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult. For example, every political position has been besmirched as fascist. As a result, the term does not describe a phenomenon so much as it denounces what one does not like. Finally, in displaying fascism for most Americans, entertainment—and most importantly film—has been crucial in conveying to citizens what fascism is about. Fascism Comes to America has been enhanced by many illustrations that exhibit how fascism was absorbed into the US public consciousness.

Author : Catherine McNicol Stock
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-09-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812252453

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Nuclear Country by Catherine McNicol Stock Pdf

Both North Dakota and South Dakota have long been among the most reliably Republican states in the nation: in the past century, voters have only chosen two Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, and in 2016 both states preferred Donald Trump by over thirty points. Yet in the decades before World War II, the people of the Northern Plains were not universally politically conservative. Instead, many Dakotans, including Republicans, supported experiments in agrarian democracy that incorporated ideas from populism and progressivism to socialism and communism and fought against "bigness" in all its forms, including "bonanza" farms, out-of-state railroads, corporations, banks, corrupt political parties, and distant federal bureaucracies—but also, surprisingly, the culture of militarism and the expansion of American military power abroad. In Nuclear Country, Catherine McNicol Stock explores the question of why, between 1968 and 1992, most voters in the Dakotas abandoned their distinctive ideological heritage and came to embrace the conservatism of the New Right. Stock focuses on how this transformation coincided with the coming of the military and national security states to the countryside via the placement of military bases and nuclear missile silos on the Northern Plains. This militarization influenced regional political culture by reinforcing or re-contextualizing long-standing local ideas and practices, particularly when the people of the plains found that they shared culturally conservative values with the military. After adopting the first two planks of the New Right—national defense and conservative social ideas—Dakotans endorsed the third plank of New Right ideology, fiscal conservativism. Ultimately, Stock contends that militarization and nuclearization were the historical developments most essential to the creation of the rural New Right throughout the United States, and that their impact can best be seen in this often-overlooked region's history.

Author : Walter Nugent
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780806163000

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Color Coded by Walter Nugent Pdf

The now–staunchly red state of Texas was deep blue in 1950 and had virtually no functioning Republican Party. California, on the other hand, was reliably red. Today, both states have jumped to the opposite end of the political spectrum. Texas is one of the most conservative states, while California has become one of today’s most liberal bastions. These are the most dramatic cases, but notable shifts in voting patterns have occurred throughout the western states in recent decades—shifts so varied and complex that they have, until now, eluded the attention focused on the drastic examples of the South and Northeast. Bringing clarity to the remarkably mixed yet poorly understood map of America’s red, blue, and purple western half, Color Coded presents the first comprehensive history of political change and stability in the region between 1950 and 2016. The West, in Walter Nugent’s analysis, includes nineteen states: the thirteen that the U.S. Census Bureau calls the Western Region—roughly from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, as well as off-shore Alaska and Hawaii—plus the six Great Plains states from North Dakota south to Texas. Consulting official voting results of more than 5,300 state and national elections, as well as newspaper reports, oral histories, public documents, and other sources, Nugent reveals the ever-shifting patterns that have defined western politics in modern times. Geography, culture, history, political trajectories, and the charisma of key political actors have all played their part in these changes—and will, Nugent asserts, continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A powerful, exhaustively researched study of modern political organization, party development, and shifting voter blocs in the West, Color Coded deftly charts, as well, the profound red-blue tensions that have defined modern America. Returns for the 5,300-plus elections on which the book is based, covering the nineteen western states between 1950 and 2016, are compiled in the book's appendix.

Author : Robert Kagan
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 689 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2023-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780593535196

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The Ghost at the Feast by Robert Kagan Pdf

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A comprehensive, sweeping history of America’s rise to global superpower—from the Spanish-American War to World War II—by the acclaimed author of Dangerous Nation “With extraordinary range and research, Robert Kagan has illuminated America’s quest to reconcile its new power with its historical purpose in world order in the early twentieth century.” —Dr. Henry Kissinger At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was one of the world’s richest, most populous, most technologically advanced nations. It was also a nation divided along numerous fault lines, with conflicting aspirations and concerns pulling it in different directions. And it was a nation unsure about the role it wanted to play in the world, if any. Americans were the beneficiaries of a global order they had no responsibility for maintaining. Many preferred to avoid being drawn into what seemed an ever more competitive, conflictual, and militarized international environment. However, many also were eager to see the United States taking a share of international responsibility, working with others to preserve peace and advance civilization. The story of American foreign policy in the first four decades of the twentieth century is about the effort to do both—“to adjust the nation to its new position without sacrificing the principles developed in the past,” as one contemporary put it. This would prove a difficult task. The collapse of British naval power, combined with the rise of Germany and Japan, suddenly placed the United States in a pivotal position. American military power helped defeat Germany in the First World War, and the peace that followed was significantly shaped by a U.S. president. But Americans recoiled from their deep involvement in world affairs, and for the next two decades, they sat by as fascism and tyranny spread unchecked, ultimately causing the liberal world order to fall apart. America’s resulting intervention in the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era, for the United States and for the world. Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility.

Author : Jon C. Teaford
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2002-05-03
Category : History
ISBN : 0801868890

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The Rise of the States by Jon C. Teaford Pdf

In The Rise of the States, noted urban historian Jon C. Teaford explores the development of state government in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the so-called renaissance of states at the end of the twentieth. Arguing that state governments were not lethargic backwaters that suddenly stirred to life in the 1980s, Teaford shows instead how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century. While previous historical scholarship focused on the states, if at all, as retrograde relics of simpler times, Teaford describes how states actively assumed new responsibilities, developed new sources of revenue, and created new institutions. Teaford examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post–World War II years, and the post–reapportionment era beginning in the late 1960s. State governments, he explains, played an active role not only in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Not all states chose the same solutions to common problems. For Teaford, the diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

Author : Aram Goudsouzian
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2019-03-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781469651101

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The Men and the Moment by Aram Goudsouzian Pdf

The presidential election of 1968 forever changed American politics. In this character-driven narrative history, Aram Goudsouzian portrays the key transformations that played out over that dramatic year. It was the last "Old Politics" campaign, where political machines and party bosses determined the major nominees, even as the "New Politics" of grassroots participation powered primary elections. It was an election that showed how candidates from both the Left and Right could seize on "hot-button" issues to alter the larger political dynamic. It showcased the power of television to "package" politicians and political ideas, and it played out against an extraordinary dramatic global tableau of chaos and conflict. More than anything else, it was a moment decided by a contest of political personalities, as a group of men battled for the presidency, with momentous implications for the nation's future. Well-paced, accessible, and engagingly written, Goudsouzian's book chronicles anew the characters and events of the 1968 campaign as an essential moment in American history, one with clear resonance in our contemporary political moment.

Author : Jon K. Lauck,Catherine McNicol Stock
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2020-04-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780700629312

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The Conservative Heartland by Jon K. Lauck,Catherine McNicol Stock Pdf

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats’ so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest’s history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II—a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region’s complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest’s political complexity—and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.

Author : Jeffrey A. Engel,Thomas J. Knock
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190650773

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When Life Strikes the President by Jeffrey A. Engel,Thomas J. Knock Pdf

What happens when life, so to speak, strikes the President of the United States? How do presidents and their families cope with illness, personal loss, and scandal, and how have such personal crises affected a president's ability to lead, shaped presidential decision-making in critical moments, and perhaps even altered the course of events? In asking such questions, the essays in this volume -- written by twelve leading scholars noted for their expertise on their respective subjects -- reveal alternately the frailty, the humanity, and the strength of character of some of America's most controversial presidents. Three of them deal with the death of children--the impact of the loss of a young son on Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge. Another shows how, when his father suffered a stroke, John F. Kennedy lost his most important adviser as the crisis in Cuba loomed. Three essays tell stories about notorious, self-inflicted scandals during the presidencies of Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Several of them focus on the effects of disability or illness in the Oval Office -- on Woodrow Wilson's stroke at the end of World War I; Franklin Roosevelt's paralysis while leading the country through the Great Depression and World War II; Ronald Reagan's struggles and changed priorities in the wake of an assassination attempt; and the bearing of depression and personality disorders of one kind or another on the actions Jackson, John Tyler, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon during their crucial years in office. While illuminating a considerable span of American history and providing new and significant analyses of American politics and foreign policy, these fascinating essays remind us about the personal side of presidential leadership, and that tomorrow is promised to no one.

Author : Marc C. Johnson
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780806169743

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Tuesday Night Massacre by Marc C. Johnson Pdf

While political history has plenty to say about the impact of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, four Senate races that same year have garnered far less attention—despite their similarly profound political effect. Tuesday Night Massacre looks at those races. In examining the defeat in 1980 of Idaho’s Frank Church, South Dakota’s George McGovern, John Culver of Iowa, and Birch Bayh of Indiana, Marc C. Johnson tells the story of the beginnings of the divisive partisanship that has become a constant feature of American politics. The turnover of these seats not only allowed Republicans to gain control of the Senate for the first time since 1954 but also fundamentally altered the conduct of American politics. The incumbents were politicians of national reputation who often worked with members of the other party to accomplish significant legislative objectives—but they were, Johnson suggests, unprepared and ill-equipped to counter nakedly negative emotional appeals to the “politically passive voter.” Such was the campaign of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the organization founded by several young conservative political activists who targeted these four senators for defeat. Johnson describes how such groups, amassing a great amount of money, could make outrageous and devastating claims about incumbents—“baby killers” who were “soft on communism,” for example—on behalf of a candidate who remained above the fray. Among the key players in this sordid drama are NCPAC chairman Terry Dolan; Washington lobbyist Charles Black, a top GOP advisor to several presidential campaigns and one-time business partner of Paul Manafort; and Roger Stone, self-described “dirty trickster” for Richard Nixon and confidant of Donald Trump. Connecting the dots between the Goldwater era of the 1960s and the ascent of Trump, Tuesday Night Massacre charts the radicalization of the Republican Party and the rise of the independent expenditure campaign, with its divisive, negative techniques, a change that has deeply—and perhaps permanently—warped the culture of bipartisanship that once prevailed in American politics.

Author : Mitchell K. Hall
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 829 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2018-01-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9798216125211

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Opposition to War [2 volumes] by Mitchell K. Hall Pdf

How have Americans sought peaceful, rather than destructive, solutions to domestic and world conflict? This two-volume set documents peace and antiwar movements in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Although national leaders often claim to be fighting to achieve peace, the real peace seekers struggle against enormous resistance to their message and have often faced persecution for their efforts. Despite a well-established pattern of being involved in wars, the United States also has a long tradition of citizens who made extensive efforts to build and maintain peaceful societies and prevent the destructive human and material costs of war. Unarmed activists have most consistently upheld American values at home. Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of U.S. Peace and Antiwar Movements investigates this historical tradition of resistance to involvement in armed conflict—an especially important and relevant topic today as the nation has been mired in numerous military conflicts throughout most of the current century. The book examines a largely misunderstood and underappreciated minority of Americans who have committed themselves to finding peaceful resolutions to domestic and international conflicts—individuals who have proposed and conducted an array of practical and creative methods for peaceful change, from the transformation of individual behavior to the development of international governing and legal systems, for more than 250 years. Readers will learn how individuals working alone or organized into societies of various size have steadfastly campaigned to stop war, end the arms race, eliminate the underlying causes of war, and defend the civil liberties of Americans when wartime nationalism most threatens them.

Author : Timothy N. Thurber
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2022-03-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000548822

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The Nixon Presidency by Timothy N. Thurber Pdf

The Nixon Presidency is a concise and accessible survey of domestic policy, foreign affairs, and politics during the thirty-seventh president’s time in office. Richard Nixon was the most polarizing president of the twentieth century and one who continues to fascinate observers of American political life. Admirers saw him as the personification of the American dream of upward mobility and their ally against threats at home and abroad. Detractors considered him a deceitful, sinister figure who threatened democracy, was wrapped up in Watergate, and perpetuated an immoral war in Vietnam. As time passes, new questions and insights into the Nixon era arise and various phenomena, such as the expansion of the welfare state, the growth of the administrative state, the evolution of the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the deepening polarization in politics and the broader society, cast Nixon’s presidency in a new light. This book uses Nixon as a prism through which to view American history at home and abroad and shows how Nixon’s influence remains evident half a century after he left office. The text is supported by primary source documents, which makes it ripe for classroom use and key for students of American history, the American presidency, and the sixties.

Author : Marc C. Johnson
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2023-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780806193427

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Mansfield and Dirksen by Marc C. Johnson Pdf

The U.S. Senate is so sharply polarized along partisan and ideological lines today that it’s easy to believe it was always this way. But in the turbulent 1960s, even as battles over civil rights and the war in Vietnam dominated American politics, bipartisanship often prevailed. One key reason: two remarkable leaders who remain giants of the Senate—Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, the longest-serving majority leader in Senate history, so revered for his integrity, fairness, and modesty that the late Washington Post reporter David Broder called him “the greatest American I ever met.” The political and personal relationship of these party leaders, extraordinary by today’s standards, is the lens through which Marc C. Johnson examines the Senate in that tumultuous time. Working together, with the Democrat often ceding public leadership to his Republican counterpart, Mansfield and Dirksen passed landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation, created Medicare, and helped bring about a foundational nuclear arms limitation treaty. The two leaders could not have been more different in personality and style: Mansfield, a laconic, soft-spoken, almost shy college history professor, and Dirksen, an aspiring actor known for his flamboyance and sense of humor, dubbed the “Wizard of Ooze” by reporters. Drawing on extensive Senate archives, Johnson explores the congressional careers of these iconic leaders, their intimate relationships with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and their own close professional friendship based on respect, candor, and mutual affection. A study of politics but also an analysis of different approaches to leadership, this is a portrait of a U.S. Senate that no longer exists—one in which two leaders, while exercising partisan political responsibilities, could still come together to pass groundbreaking legislation—and a reminder of what is possible.

Author : Michael Kazin
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2022-03-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780374717797

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What It Took to Win by Michael Kazin Pdf

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of Kirkus Reviews' ten best US history books of 2022 A leading historian tells the story of the United States’ most enduring political party and its long, imperfect and newly invigorated quest for “moral capitalism,” from Andrew Jackson to Joseph Biden. One of Kirkus Reviews' 40 most anticipated books of 2022 One of Vulture's "49 books we can't wait to read in 2022" The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest mass political organization. Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, it has played a central role in defining American society, whether it was exercising power or contesting it. But what has the party stood for through the centuries, and how has it managed to succeed in elections and govern? In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the party’s long-running commitment to creating “moral capitalism”—a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. As the party evolved towards a more inclusive egalitarian vision, it won durable victories for Americans of all backgrounds. But it also struggled to hold together a majority coalition and advance a persuasive agenda for the use of government. Kazin traces the party’s fortunes through vivid character sketches of its key thinkers and doers, from Martin Van Buren and William Jennings Bryan to the financier August Belmont and reformers such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Sidney Hillman, and Jesse Jackson. He also explores the records of presidents from Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Throughout, Kazin reveals the rich interplay of personality, belief, strategy, and policy that define the life of the party—and outlines the core components of a political endeavor that may allow President Biden and his co-partisans to renew the American experiment.