The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past
Author: John Patrick Diggins For more than half a century, the celebrated historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has been the guiding force of American liberalism, both intellectually and in practice. The author of many critically acclaimed books, Schlesinger vigorously defended FDR's New Deal policies in his earliest writings and later served as a close advisor to President John F. Kennedy. In this volume, twenty of today's most eminent historians join forces to explore Schlesinger's unique brand of liberalism--one that has steered clear of ideological extremism and social fragmentation, favoring instead pluralism and the pragmatic use of state power. By engaging the reader in various aspects of his career and intellectual pursuits, these essays offer an exhilarating journey through American political history, from the Jackson era to multiculturalism, while demonstrating historical writing at its best. The volume opens with essays on Schlesinger as a historian and a political participant, contributed by William E. Leuchtenburg, Hugh Thomas, George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and John Morton Blum. The influence of the Jackson era is explored by Robert Remini, Sean Wilentz, and Jean V. Matthews. In a section on modern liberalism and governance, such topics as the New Deal, the Great Society, and the fate of liberalism under the Carter administration are discussed by Alan Brinkley, Kathleen D. McCarthy, Fred Siegel, Leo P. Ribuffo, and Richard C. Wade. Betty Miller Unterberger and Ronald Steel comment on liberalism and the Cold War. Louis Menand and Eugene D. Genovese explore ideological controversies within liberalism, including pragmatic liberalism and relativism and multiculturalism. In the final section, George Cotkin, Neil Jumonville, and Sir Isaiah Berlin write on three figures whom Schlesinger greatly admired: William James, Henry Steel Commager, and Edmund Wilson.Originally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Eric Davis
Eric Davis challenges classic theories of dependency and imperialism and explains the history of the Bank Misr by interrelating world market forces, Egyptian class structure, and the Egyptian nationalist movement and state apparatus.Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: David Johnston
Liberalism, the founding philosophy of many constitutional democracies, has been criticized in recent years from both the left and the right for placing too much faith in individual rights and distributive justice. In this book, David Johnston argues for a reinterpretation of liberal principles he contends will restore liberalism to a position of intellectual leadership from which it can guide political and social reforms. He begins by surveying the three major contemporary schools of liberal political thought--rights-based, perfectionist, and political liberalism--and, by weeding out their weaknesses, sketches a new approach he calls humanist liberalism. The core of Johnston's humanist liberalism is the claim that the purpose of political and social arrangements should be to empower individuals to be effective agents. Drawing on and modifying the theories of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, and others, Johnston explains how this purpose can be realized in a world in which human beings hold fundamentally different conceptions of the ends of life. His humanist liberalism responds constructively to feminist, neo-Marxist, and other criticisms while remaining faithful to the core values of the liberal tradition.
Author: Jim Phillips
This book analyses the 1984-5 miners strike by focusing on its vital Scottish dimensions, especially the role of workplace politics and community mobilisation.
Author: John T. Ellisor
Historians have traditionally viewed the Creek War of 1836 as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that, in fact, the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after peace was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisors study also broadly illuminates southern society just prior to the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War, which raged over three states, was fueled not only by Native determination but also by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.
Author: Aaron A. Abeyta
Through epistolary essays and poems, American Book Award- and Colorado Book Award-winning author and poet Aaron A. Abeyta captures the soul of the cultural and geographical crossroads of the driest quadrant in the nation, the Colorado headwaters, source to all the rivers in the southwestern and mid-western United States. Originating from and expanding on the themes of twenty-five years of Headwaters conferences at Western State Colorado University, these essays and poems embrace the regions past while also exploring the struggles of a present that seeks a sustainable future for the borderlands that define the very cross-cultural essence of the American experience.
Author: By Deeana Copeland Klepper
In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced as a Christian exegete determined to value Jewish literature during an era of increasing hostility toward Jews in western Europe. Nicholas's literal commentary on the Bible became one of the most widely copied and disseminated of all medieval Bible commentaries. Jewish commentary was, as a result, more widely read in Latin Christendom than ever before, while at the same moment Jews were being pushed farther and farther to the margins of European society. His writings depict Jews as stubborn unbelievers who also held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture. In The Insight of Unbelievers, Deeana Copeland Klepper examines late medieval Christian use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretation of Scripture, focusing on Nicholas of Lyra as the most important mediator of Hebrew traditions.Klepper highlights the important impact of both Jewish literature and Jewish unbelief on Nicholas of Lyra and on Christian culture more generally. By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, The Insight of Unbelievers elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe.
Author: Maurice Zeitlin
In 1974, Maurice Zeitlin published a seminal article in The American Journal of Sociology, criticizing managerial theory and evidence, which ended one era in the analysis of the large corporation's ownership and control and began a new one. He called for research on the capitalist class that would reveal its inner structure--particularly the interaction of family ties, property, and business leadership in the large corporation. But, despite the subsequent blossoming of studies of intercorporate and class power, no one else has yet done the systematic empirical analysis he outlined. This work is thus the first to explore the full panoply of intraclass relations--interorganizational, kinship, economic, and political--within an actually existing dominant class. Theoretically sensitive, methodologically precise, and historically grounded, it aims to fill in the blank spots in our knowledge about how economic classes become social classes and how the latter in turn connect with other social forms.This work is a sustained empirical analysis of Chile's dominant class. But it does more than reveal that class's specific internal structure; it also provides a coherent theory of the inner relations constituting any dominant class in a highly concentrated capitalist economy, a methodological paradigm, and an exemplary body of findings, which can closely guide the study of other dominant classes, especially in the advanced societies of the West.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Jennie Holton Fant
Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as they encounter it. Sojourns in Charleston begins after the Civil War, when northern journalists flocked south to report on the city of desolation and ruin, continues through Reconstruction, and then moves into the era when national magazine writers began to promote the region as a paradise. From there twentieth-century accounts document a wide range of topics, from the living conditions of African Americans to the creation of cultural institutions that supported preservation and tourism. The most recognizable of the writers include author Owen Wister, novelist William Dean Howells, artist Norman Rockwell, Boston poet Amy Lowell, novelist and Zionist leader Ludwig Lewisohn, poet May Sarton, British author Somerset Maugham, and French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Their varied viewpoints help weave a beautiful tapestry of narratives that reveal the fascinating and evocative history that made this great city what it is today.