Bøger i Politics and Culture in Modern America serien

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters tells the story of the battle for access to leisure space in cities across the United States. This detailed and eloquent history shows how African Americans fought to enter segregated amusement areas not only in pursuit of happiness but in connection to a wider movement for racial equality.

The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac chronicles the rise of sexual privacy as a fulcrum of American cultural politics, focusing on the history of gay rights in the San Francisco Bay Area from World War II to the dawn of the culture wars in the 1970s and exploring how government policies shaped the cultural politics of the moderate suburbs.

In his narrative history of black Republicans in the twentieth century, Joshua Farrington reevaluates the relationship between black politicians, activists, and voters and the Republican Party, challenging the assumption that African Americans abandoned the "Party of Lincoln" after 1936.

In Beyond the New Deal Order, contributors bring fresh perspectives to the historic meaning and significance of the New Deal coalition from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century. The volume asks if a new order will emerge from the economic, ideological, institutional, and electoral currents shaping politics today.

Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.

Chronicling the birth of the biotechnology industry, Biotech shows how a cultural and political revolution in the 1960s resulted in a new scientific order-the practical application of biological knowledge supported by private investors expecting profitable returns eclipsed basic research supported by government agencies.

Featuring a fine-grained history of Chicago's working class, Postwar investigates what the aftermath of World War II meant to a broad swath of Americans and finds a working-class war liberalism-a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help.

People Must Live by Work traces the rise and fall of direct job creation policy-how it was put into practice, how it came within a hairbreadth of becoming a permanent feature of American economic and social administration, and why it has been largely forgotten or discounted today.

In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger explores the successes and failures of this Tennessee politician who was in the national eye for more than thirty years and whose career illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.

The story of the liberal and radical minds-including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans-who worked for conservative Henry Luce and his popular magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960.

Karen Ferguson explores the consequences of the counterintuitive and unequal relationship between the elite liberal Ford Foundation and black power activists, arguing that codeveloped initiatives in education, community development, and the arts contributed to the recreation of racial liberalism in the neo-conservative era and beyond.

Homeless explores the efforts of private and public institutions to solve the problem of homelessness by tracing the rise and fall of skid rows in America through the lens of New York's Bowery. Crowded onto skid rows, the homeless lived apart from the middle classes, who saw them as an aberrant population.

Americans are generally apprehensive about what they perceive as big government—especially when it comes to measures that target their bodies. Soda taxes, trans fat bans, and calorie counts on menus have all proven deeply controversial. Such interventions, Rachel Louise Moran argues, are merely the latest in a long, albeit often quiet, history of policy motivated by economic, military, and familial concerns. In Governing Bodies, Moran traces the tension between the intimate terrain of the individual citizen''s body and the public ways in which the federal government has sought to shape the American physique over the course of the twentieth century.Distinguishing her subject from more explicit and aggressive government intrusion into the areas of sexuality and reproduction, Moran offers the concept of the "advisory state"—the use of government research, publicity, and advocacy aimed at achieving citizen support and voluntary participation to realize social goals. Instituted through outside agencies and glossy pamphlets as well as legislation, the advisory state is government out of sight yet intimately present in the lives of citizens. The activities of such groups as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Children''s Bureau, the President''s Council on Physical Fitness, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) implement federal body projects in subtle ways that serve to mask governmental interference in personal decisions about diet and exercise. From advice-giving to height-weight standards to mandatory nutrition education, these tactics not only empower and conceal the advisory state but also maintain the illusion of public and private boundaries, even as they become blurred in practice.Weaving together histories of the body, public policy, and social welfare, Moran analyzes a series of discrete episodes to chronicle the federal government''s efforts to shape the physique of its citizenry. Governing Bodies sheds light on our present anxieties over the proper boundaries of state power.

In the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine, the feminist activist Judy Syfers proclaimed that she "would like a wife," offering a wry critique of the state of marriage in modern America. After all, she observed, a wife could provide Syfers with free childcare and housecleaning services as well as wages from a job. Outside the pages of Ms., divorced men''s rights activist Charles Metz opened his own manifesto on marriage reform with a triumphant recognition that "noise is swelling from hundreds of thousands of divorced male victims." In the 1960s and 70s, a broad array of Americans identified marriage as a problem, and according to Alison Lefkovitz, the subsequent changes to marriage law at the state and federal levels constituted a social and legal revolution.The law had long imposed breadwinner and homemaker roles on husbands and wives respectively. In the 1960s, state legislatures heeded the calls of divorced men and feminist activists, but their reforms, such as no-fault divorce, generally benefitted husbands more than wives. Meanwhile, radical feminists, welfare rights activists, gay liberationists, and immigrant spouses fought for a much broader agenda, such as the extension of gender-neutral financial obligations to all families or the separation of benefits from family relationships entirely. But a host of conservatives stymied this broader revolution. Therefore, even the modest victories that feminists won eluded less prosperous Americans—marriage rights were available to those who could afford them.Examining the effects of law and politics on the intimate space of the home, Strange Bedfellows recounts how the marriage revolution at once instituted formal legal equality while also creating new forms of political and economic inequality that historians—like most Americans—have yet to fully understand.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s looms large in recent histories of sexuality, medicine, and politics, and justly so—an unknown virus without a cure ravages an already persecuted minority, medical professionals are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to care for the sick, and a national health bureaucracy is slow to invest resources in finding a cure. Yet this widely accepted narrative, while accurate, creates the impression that the gay community lacked any capacity to address AIDS. In fact, as Katie Batza demonstrates in this path-breaking book, there was already a well-developed network of gay-health clinics in American cities when the epidemic struck, and these clinics served as the first responders to the disease. Before AIDS explores this heretofore unrecognized story, chronicling the development of a national gay health network by highlighting the origins of longstanding gay health institutions in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, placing them in a larger political context, and following them into the first five years of the AIDS crisis.Like many other minority communities in the 1970s, gay men faced public health challenges that resulted as much from their political marginalization and social stigmatization as from any disease. Gay men mistrusted mainstream health institutions, fearing outing, ostracism, misdiagnosis, and the possibility that their sexuality itself would be treated as a medical condition. In response to these problems, a colorful cast of doctors and activists built a largely self-sufficient gay medical system that challenged, collaborated with, and educated mainstream health practitioners. Taking inspiration from rhetoric employed by the Black Panther, feminist, and anti-urban renewal movements, and putting government funding to new and often unintended uses, gay health activists of the 1970s changed the medical and political understandings of sexuality and health to reflect the new realities of their own sexual revolution.

Gabriel N. Rosenberg argues that public acceptance of the political economy of agribusiness hinged on federal efforts to normalize rural heterosexuality.

A chronological collection of essays, America at the Ballot Box uses the history of presidential elections to illuminate both the fundamental character of American political democracy, and its evolution from the early Republic to the late twentieth century.

The Port Huron Statement was the most important manifesto of the New Left student movement of the 1960s. The essays in this volume-including some from original Port Huron contributors-probe the origins, content, and contemporary influence of the document that heralded the emergence of a vibrant New Left in American culture and politics.

This sophisticated history of Compton shows how increasing poverty, violence, and public education controversies made an inner-ring suburb resemble a troubled urban center over the course of the twentieth century and into the present.

Let Us Die as Free Men explores the African American fight for the desegregation of the American military between the Second World War and the Korean War. The book credits black soldiers and civilian efforts, more than Truman's executive order, for achieving integration in the context of the Cold War.

Between North and South chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction, that despite concerted white opposition to reforms produced one of the most progressive desegregation remedies in the nation.

Historian Jonathan Bell chronicles the dramatic story of postwar liberalism in California-moving from early grassroots organizing and the election of Pat Brown as governor in 1958 to the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and the campaigns against the new right in the 1970s.

At the beginning of the 1920s, no political observer would have predicted that universal suffrage would inspire the growth of a conservative women's movement to counter the power of women reformers. This book describes the birth of that movement, analyzing its enduring legacy for twentieth-century female political activists.

"A convincing revisionist account of the roles of US women in the two decades after WW II. . . . A very interesting rereading of a standard stereotype."-Choice

Faithful Republic is a collection of original essays that explores the relationship between religion and politics in the United States since the early twentieth century. Rather than focusing on the traditional question of the separation between church and state, this volume touches on many aspects of American political history.

This collection of essays by leading American historians explains how and why the fight against unionism has long been central to the meaning of contemporary conservatism.

Building the Ivory Tower examines the role of American universities as urban developers and their changing effects on cities in the twentieth century. LaDale C. Winling explores philanthropy, real estate investments, architectural landscapes, and urban politics to reckon with the tensions of university growth in our cities.

Drawing from extensive archival research, Out of the Horrors of War demonstrates that disabled citizens in the World War II era organized a national movement for economic security and full citizenship, reshaping the U.S. welfare state and laying the foundation for the disability rights movement.

Kitchen Table Politics investigates the role that the grassroots activism of middle-class, mostly Catholic homemakers played in the development of conservatism in New York State-and in the national shift toward a conservative politics of "family values."