Author: Bernard von Bothmer Over the past quarter century, American liberals and conservatives alike have invoked memories of the 1960s to define their respective ideological positions and to influence voters. Liberals recall the positive associations of what might be called the good Sixtiesthe Camelot years of JFK, the early civil rights movement, and the dreams of the Great Societywhile conservatives conjure images of the bad Sixtiesa time of urban riots, antiwar protests, and countercultural revolt. In Framing the Sixties, Bernard von Bothmer examines this battle over the collective memory of the decade primarily through the lens of presidential politics. He shows how four presidentsRonald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Busheach sought to advance his political agenda by consciously shaping public understanding of the meaning of the Sixties. He compares not only the way that each depicted the decade as a whole, but also their commentary on a set of specific topics: the presidency of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnsons Great Society initiatives, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. In addition to analyzing the pronouncements of the presidents themselves, von Bothmer draws on interviews he conducted with more than one hundred and twenty cabinet members, speechwriters, advisers, strategists, historians, journalists, and activists from across the political spectrumfrom Julian Bond, Daniel Ellsberg, Todd Gitlin, and Arthur Schlesinger to James Baker, Robert Bork, Phyllis Schlafly, and Paul Weyrich. It is no secret that the upheavals of the 1960s opened fissures within American society that have continued to affect the nations politics and to intensify its so-called culture wars. What this book documents is the extent to which political leaders, left and right, consciously exploited those divisions by framing the memory of that turbulent decade to serve their own partisan interests.

Author: David Carrier Is writing a world art history possible? Does the history of art as such even exist outside the Western tradition? Is it possible to consider the history of art in a way that is not fundamentally Eurocentric? In this highly readable and provocative book, David Carrier, a philosopher and art historian, does not attempt to write a world art history himself. Rather, he asks the question of how an art history of all cultures could be writtenor whether it is even possible to do so. He also engages the political and moral issues raised by the idea of a multicultural art history. Focusing on a consideration of intersecting artistic traditions, Carrier negotiates the way meaning and understanding shift or are altered when a visual object from one culture, for example, is inserted into the visual tradition of another culture. A World Art History and Its Objects proposes the use of temporal narrative as a way to begin to understand a multicultural art history.