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Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past
Par John M. Owen. 2014
How the conflicts of Western history shed light on current upheavals in the Middle EastPolitical Islam has often been compared…
to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas—and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts—John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong.Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise.Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.Why, alone among industrial democracies, does the United States not have national health insurance? While many books have addressed this…
question, Dead on Arrival is the first to do so based on original archival research for the full sweep of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of political, reform, business, and labor records, Colin Gordon traces a complex and interwoven story of political failure and private response. He examines, in turn, the emergence of private, work-based benefits; the uniquely American pursuit of "social insurance"; the influence of race and gender on the health care debate; and the ongoing confrontation between reformers and powerful economic and health interests. Dead on Arrival stands alone in accounting for the failure of national or universal health policy from the early twentieth century to the present. As importantly, it also suggests how various interests (doctors, hospitals, patients, workers, employers, labor unions, medical reformers, and political parties) confronted the question of health care--as a private responsibility, as a job-based benefit, as a political obligation, and as a fundamental right. Using health care as a window onto the logic of American politics and American social provision, Gordon both deepens and informs the contemporary debate. Fluidly written and deftly argued, Dead on Arrival is thus not only a compelling history of the health care quandary but a fascinating exploration of the country's political economy and political culture through "the American century," of the role of private interests and private benefits in the shaping of social policy, and, ultimately, of the ways the American welfare state empowers but also imprisons its citizens.Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition
Par James T. Kloppenberg. 2012
A leading intellectual historian traces the origins of Barack Obama’s ideasDerided by the Right as dangerous and by the Left…
as spineless, Barack Obama puzzles observers. In Reading Obama, James T. Kloppenberg reveals the sources of Obama's ideas and explains why his principled aversion to absolutes does not fit contemporary partisan categories. Obama's commitments to deliberation and experimentation derive from sustained engagement with American democratic thought. In a new preface, Kloppenberg explains why Obama has stuck with his commitment to compromise in the first three years of his presidency, despite the criticism it has provoked.Reading Obama traces the origins of his ideas and establishes him as the most penetrating political thinker elected to the presidency in the past century. Kloppenberg demonstrates the influences that have shaped Obama's distinctive worldview, including Nietzsche and Niebuhr, Ellison and Rawls, and recent theorists engaged in debates about feminism, critical race theory, and cultural norms. Examining Obama's views on the Constitution, slavery and the Civil War, the New Deal, and the civil rights movement, Kloppenberg shows Obama's sophisticated understanding of American history. Obama's interest in compromise, reasoned public debate, and the patient nurturing of civility is a sign of strength, not weakness, Kloppenberg argues. He locates its roots in Madison, Lincoln, and especially in the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, which nourished generations of American progressives, black and white, female and male, through much of the twentieth century, albeit with mixed results.Reading Obama reveals the sources of Obama's commitment to democratic deliberation: the books he has read, the visionaries who have inspired him, the social movements and personal struggles that have shaped his thinking. Kloppenberg shows that Obama's positions on social justice, religion, race, family, and America's role in the world do not stem from a desire to please everyone but from deeply rooted—although currently unfashionable—convictions about how a democracy must deal with difference and conflict.A sweeping history of the drama, intrigue, and rivalry behind the creation of the postwar economic orderWhen turmoil strikes world…
monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White—the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn, The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history.Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Translation/Transnation #32)
Par Andrew N. Rubin. 2012
Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives…
of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts--played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. Andrew Rubin argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and he shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel--such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals--completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature. Rubin demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures. Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism--the new, transatlantic "civilizing mission" through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged.The Story of America: Essays on Origins
Par Jill Lepore. 2012
From celebrated writer Jill Lepore, a literary and political history of American origin stories In The Story of America, Harvard…
historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories—from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address—to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.The Evolution of a Nation: How Geography and Law Shaped the American States (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World #37)
Par Daniel Berkowitz, Karen B. Clay. 2012
Although political and legal institutions are essential to any nation's economic development, the forces that have shaped these institutions are…
poorly understood. Drawing on rich evidence about the development of the American states from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, this book documents the mechanisms through which geographical and historical conditions--such as climate, access to water transportation, and early legal systems--impacted political and judicial institutions and economic growth. The book shows how a state's geography and climate influenced whether elites based their wealth in agriculture or trade. States with more occupationally diverse elites in 1860 had greater levels of political competition in their legislature from 1866 to 2000. The book also examines the effects of early legal systems. Because of their colonial history, thirteen states had an operational civil-law legal system prior to statehood. All of these states except Louisiana would later adopt common law. By the late eighteenth century, the two legal systems differed in their balances of power. In civil-law systems, judiciaries were subordinate to legislatures, whereas in common-law systems, the two were more equal. Former civil-law states and common-law states exhibit persistent differences in the structure of their courts, the retention of judges, and judicial budgets. Moreover, changes in court structures, retention procedures, and budgets occur under very different conditions in civil-law and common-law states. The Evolution of a Nation illustrates how initial geographical and historical conditions can determine the evolution of political and legal institutions and long-run growth.Religion in American Politics: A Short History
Par Frank Lambert. 2008
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not…
keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy relations between religion and politics from the founding to the twenty-first century. Lambert examines how antebellum Protestant unity was challenged by sectionalism as both North and South invoked religious justification; how Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" competed with the anticapitalist "Social Gospel" during postwar industrialization; how the civil rights movement was perhaps the most effective religious intervention in politics in American history; and how the alliance between the Republican Party and the Religious Right has, in many ways, realized the founders' fears of religious-political electoral coalitions. In these and other cases, Lambert shows that religion became sectarian and partisan whenever it entered the political fray, and that religious agendas have always mixed with nonreligious ones. Religion in American Politics brings rare historical perspective and insight to a subject that was just as important--and controversial--in 1776 as it is today.Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up
Par Stanton T. Friedman. 2005
Exposing the U.S. government's biggest-kept secret: a fifty-eight-year UFO cover-up.Top Secret/Majic is the result of nuclear physicist and renowned UFO investigator…
Stanton T. Friedman's twenty-one year search for the truth about the mysterious Operation Majestic 12, President Truman's top-secret UFO investigation team. In this updated edition of his landmark book, he tells the incredible tale of the July 1947 recovery of a crashed flying saucer near Roswell, New Mexico, and the establishment by President Truman of a truly all-star cast to deal with the saucer and its non-human inhabitants. The first four Directors of Central Intelligence, the first Secretary of Defense, and several outstanding scientists and military leaders were part of the team. Through painstaking research and startling evidence—including documents that have never before been published.This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks.…
Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.This book focuses on the Union Army from April 14 - July 21, 1861. The book traces command and recruiting…
problems, carefully studies the first Bull Run, and then analyzes the battle and relates its results to the actions of Union leaders.“LACK OF PREPAREDNESS for war was a United States tradition in the nineteenth century. Without the military background of the formidable continental powers, this nation stubbornly refused to maintain a large, efficient armed force during peacetime. When conflict occurred, the government paid a stiff price for this attitude and was forced to create a military machine almost from the ground up.The author tells in detail of the period between the fall of Fort Sumter and the First Battle of Bull Run. The book falls into three divisions: the first, describing command and recruiting problems, along with personality sketches, at the war’s beginning; the second, setting down a careful study of the first Bull Run, seen through Northern eyes; the third, analyzing the battle and relating its result to the potentialities and actions of Union leaders.Strategy and tactics during these first, crucial days are carefully treated. Winfield Scott’s plans, Robert Patterson’s misadventure in the Shenandoah Valley, and the ultimate rout of Irvin McDowell’s forces make up the bulk of the book. Samuel Heintzelman, David Hunter, Daniel Tyler, Dixon Miles, Erasmus Keyes, Ambrose Burnside, Israel Richardson and other major leaders have their day in court.”-Introduction.The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman, and Marilyn Monroe
Par Helene Stapinski, Bonnie Siegler. 2023
In this &“necessary and beautifully told story of struggle, compassion and serendipity&” (Forbes), the publisher of DC Comics comes to…
the rescue of a family trying to flee Nazi Berlin, their lives linking up with a dazzling cast of 20th-century icons, all eagerly pursuing the American Dream.Family lore had it that Bonnie Siegler&’s grandfather crossed paths in Midtown Manhattan late one night in 1954 with Marilyn Monroe, her white dress flying up around her as she filmed a scene for The Seven Year Itch. An amateur filmmaker, Jules Schulback had his home movie camera with him, capturing what would become the only surviving footage of that legendary night. Bonnie wasn&’t sure she quite believed her grandfather&’s story…until, cleaning out his apartment, she found the film reel. The discovery would prompt her to investigate all of her grandfather&’s seemingly tall tales—and lead her in pursuit of a remarkable piece of forgotten history that reads like fiction but is all true. A &“fast-moving American epic with a cast of refugees and starlets, publishers and bootleggers, comic-book creators and sports legends&” (The Washington Post), The American Way follows two very different men—Jules Schulback and his unlikely benefactor, DC Comics publisher (and sometimes pornographer) Harry Donenfeld—on an exuberant true-life adventure linking glamorous old Hollywood, the birth of the comic book, and one family&’s experiences during the Holocaust. It&’s an &“amazing&” story told &“with grace, verve, and compassion&” (The Jerusalem Post) of two strivers living through an extraordinary moment in American history, their lives intersecting with a glittering array of stars in a &“colorful&” and &“punchy&” (The New York Times Book Review) tale of hope and reinvention, of daring escapes and fake identities, of big dreams and the magic of movies, and what it means to be a real-life Superman.The Dilworth Story.: The Biography of Richard Dilworth, Pioneer Developer of the Diesel Locomotive
Par Franklin M. Reck. 2023
Biography of Richard Dilworth, the man generally credited as the mechanical genius behind the development of the first successful passenger…
and freight diesel locomotives. Illustrated throughout with black and white photos.Guns on the Western Waters: The Story of River Gunboats
Par H. Allen Gosnell. 2023
H. Allen Gosnell's Guns on the Western Waters present a full, accurate treatment of the important gunboat operations in the…
western theater of the Civil War or naval history. Gosnell provides descriptions of the major types of Union and Confederate gunboats with a brief but authoritative essay on the strategy and tactics of river warfare. He shows that the extremely heavy guns mounted on the shallow-draft vessels proved to be both terrible and effective weapons in certain aspects of the war. The guns played major roles, for example, in the Red River campaign, the Vicksburg campaign, and the attacks on Forts Henry and Donelson. Employing a concise, graphic style, Grosnell also draws on firsthand accounts to describe many of the dramatic episodes in which the boats figured. The book contains photographs of the principal gunboats and the soldiers who fought on them, and maps illustrating the important river and bayou operations in the West.-Print ed.Sand in Their Shoes: The Story of American Steel Foundries
Par Franklin M. Reck. 2023
Fascinating history of American Steel Foundries, manufacturer of railroad couplers, trucks, and draft gear that cushion the shocks as well…
as cast armor for tanks, hydraulic presses, and numerous other specialized steel items. With corporate timeline. Illustrated throughout with pen and ink sketches.Historic Houses of New Jersey: [Illustrated Edition]
Par W. Jay Mills. 2023
One of the standard works on notable early houses in the state.“UNTIL now the State possessing the most inexhaustible supply…
of colonial, Revolutionary, and republican souvenirs has been almost neglected. Indeed, few of the original thirteen States can be compared with New Jersey in the number and importance of its landmarks. Her society, too, was as intellectual as that which sprang from the rocks of Puritanism, and it formed a brilliant pageant, rivalling the glittering line of the cavaliers. There is scarcely an acre of soil in the northern part of the State not once pressed by the foot of the Revolutionary soldier, and there are few of the many hundreds of dwellings which have survived the march of a century that did not shelter at one time or another some of the heroes of ‘76, or the colonial dames and daughters who played scarcely less potent parts in the drama of our struggle for freedom. This is the only book to tell the true story of the old houses of New Jersey, and such a record possesses deep significance for every American, as it has much more than a local or State interest.Of the glowing and passionate pictures of early days little more than the frames and the sentiment lingering about them now remain. It has been the author’s pleasure to fill in the frames with the portraits and the scenes that history and tradition, as contained in family recollection, in unpublished letters, and in local records suggest. Anecdote and gossip have supplied him with many a side-light on the great figures and their stirring times, and their chronicler will be satisfied if his story shall make more real the facts with which fancy delights to play.”Frontier Defence on the Upper Ohio, 1777-1778
Par Reuben Gold Thwaites. 2023
But the barbaric enemy facing the frontier differed greatly from the well-equipped, well-drilled professional army from Europe that confronted the…
armed men of the tidewater. The stealthy foes of the border aimed their heaviest blows at the homes, wives, and children of the settlers; no life was safe from them, no person secure. Through long and bitter experience, the backwoodsmen had come to understand the art of defense by concentration within neighborhood blockhouses and log forts. But a new danger presented itself. The Indians were now guided and stimulated by the nation’s white enemies, so that to their native cunning were added the superior intelligence and more astute methods of the English. The situation soon became desperate.The British authorities at Detroit were especially active in urging the Indians to war against the Americans. Permissory orders to that effect were received by Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton early in June, 1777. With consummate skill he roused the barbarians to frenzy; under his stimulus they prepared to hurl themselves upon the American frontier. The invading parties were provided by Hamilton with proclamations prepared both by Governor Carleton and himself, calling on the Western inhabitants to submit to King George and take refuge within the British posts, where a land bounty would be given them for loyal service. This project was adroitly devised to mingle terror and mercy, in the hope that the colonists’ rebellion would speedily be crushed on the Western borders; and that the Easterners, finding themselves between two fires, would be obliged to yield. The effect of these proclamations, scattered by Indian raiders throughout the American backwoods settlements, was considerable. In some cases they were suppressed by American officers, but the Loyalist disaffection in the trans-Alleghany is largely attributable to this source.The Civil War Letters of David R. Garrette,: Detailing the Adventures of the 6th Texas Cavalry, 1861-1865
Par David R. Garrette. 2023
With annotations and background information from the great grandson of David Garrett, this book details the adventures of the 6th…
Texas Cavalry (1861-1865) during the Civil War. It contributes to the soldier's viewpoint of the war; though beset by incredible hardships that soldier yet managed to find time to write the folks back home. The book includes a facsimile letter as well as maps, historic photographic images and genealogical information.Sibley's New Mexico Campaign
Par Martin Hardwick Hall. 2023
This long out-of-print and hard-to-find classic tells the story of the Texas invasion of New Mexico during the American Civil…
War. In early 1862, Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley marched thirty-four hundred coarse Texas farmboys, cowhands, and frontiersmen into New Mexico and up the Rio Grande Valley. Although seriously bloodied, they repulsed Union troops at the Battle of Valverde. As the poorly supplied Texans pushed northward, New Mexicans stripped the land bare of food, fodder, and livestock. East of Santa Fe at Glorieta, Union volunteers defeated Sibley's Confederates and burned their quartermaster trains, and the starving Texans retreated back down the Rio Grande to El Paso.-Print ed.The Story of Wisconsin
Par Reuben Gold Thwaites. 2023
This is a short history that profiles the Badger State, which became part of the U.S. in 1848 but had…
settlements decades earlier. It also looks at the Native American history of the state.“Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853-1913) was a librarian, historian and editor. He attended public schools, and, after moving to Oshkosh in 1866, put himself through a "college course" while teaching school and working on local farms. He worked for a time on various newspapers in the Oshkosh area, and in 1874 enrolled in Yale University as a graduate student in history and economics.Returning to Wisconsin two years later, Thwaites settled in Madison, where he served for a time as managing editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. In 1885 he became assistant to Lyman C. Draper (q.v.), corresponding secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and when Draper retired in Jan., 1887, Thwaites succeeded him as executive officer of the Society; he served in this capacity from 1887 until his death. His energy in historical undertakings, and his ability as an administrator made the Society one of the leading organizations of its kind in the country, and made Thwaites "the best known non-political man in Wisconsin."Thwaites' own scholarly reputation rested primarily upon his skill as an editor of historical documents. Among the more important projects completed by Thwaites and his corps of assistants during his years with the Society were The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (73 vols.), Lewis and Clark Journals (8 vols.), Early Western Travels (32 vols.), and Collections of the State Historical Society (vols. 11-20).”-Wisconsin Hist.