Why American History Is Not What They Say

Why American History Is Not What They Say PDF Author: Jeff Riggenbach
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610163044
Category : Textbook bias
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
"Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation's high schools and colleges"--Page 4 of cover.

Why American History Is Not What They Say

Why American History Is Not What They Say PDF Author: Jeff Riggenbach
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610163044
Category : Textbook bias
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
"Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation's high schools and colleges"--Page 4 of cover.

America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776-1976

America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776-1976 PDF Author: William Appleman Williams
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints

Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints PDF Author: Alan Knight
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496230906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
In Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints Alan Knight offers a distinct perspective on several overarching themes in Latin American history, spanning approximately two centuries, from 1800 to 2000. Knight’s approach is ambitious and comparative—sometimes ranging beyond Latin America and combining relevant social theory with robust empirical detail. He tries to offer answers to big questions while challenging alternative answers and approaches, including several recently fashionable ones. While the individual essays and the book as a whole are roughly chronological, the approach is essentially thematic, with chapters devoted to major contentious themes in Latin American history across two centuries: the sociopolitical roots and impact of banditry; the character and evolution of liberalism; religious conflict; the divergent historical trajectories of Peru and Mexico; the nature of informal empire and internal colonialism; and the region’s revolutionary history—viewed through the twin prisms of British perceptions and comparative global history.

Capture the Flag

Capture the Flag PDF Author: Arnaldo Testi
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814783228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Now an acclaimed European professor of American history brings a fresh perspective to the American flag, exploring its political, social, and cultural significance across the broad swath of its history. Mining a rich vein of materials from history, literature, music, and popular culture, Arnaldo Testi analyzes the symbolic importance of the flag to the national consciousness of this "nation of immigrants" and sees in it the very contradictions that make up our history: secularism and sacredness, freedom and empire, inclusiveness and aggressive self-confidence.

A Companion to Woodrow Wilson

A Companion to Woodrow Wilson PDF Author: Ross A. Kennedy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118445406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 923

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Book Description
A Companion to Woodrow Wilson presents a compilation of essays contributed by various scholars in the field that cover all aspects of the life and career of America’s 28th president. Represents the only current anthology of essays to introduce readers to the scholarship on all aspects of Wilson's life and career Offers a 'one stop' destination for anyone interested in understanding how the scholarship on Wilson has evolved and where it stands now

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet PDF Author: Bill Kauffman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516730
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us—if he is known at all—as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman's rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers' intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy. In Martin's view, the Constitution was the tool of a counterrevolution aimed at reducing the states to ciphers and at fortifying a national government whose powers to tax and coerce would be frightening. Martin delivered the most forceful and sustained attack on the Constitution ever levied—a critique that modern readers might find jarringly relevant. And Martin's post-convention career, though clouded by drink and scandal, found him as defense counsel in two of the great trials of the age: the Senate trial of the impeached Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase and the treason trial of his friend Aaron Burr. Kauffman's Luther Martin is a brilliant and passionate polemicist, a stubborn and admirable defender of a decentralized republic who fights for the principles of 1776 all the way to the last ditch and last drop. In remembering this forgotten founder, we remember also the principles that once animated many of the earliest—and many later—American patriots.

When Presidents Lie

When Presidents Lie PDF Author: Eric Alterman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780143036043
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Assesses the impact of governmental and presidential lies on American culture, revealing how such lies become ever more complex and how such deception creates problems far more serious than those lied about in the beginning.

The Myth of the Welfare State

The Myth of the Welfare State PDF Author: Jack D. Douglas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351479040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 855

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Book Description
The Myth of the Welfare Stale is a basic and sweeping explanation of the rise and fall of great powers, and of the profound impacts of these megastates on ordinary lives. Its central theme is the rise of bureaucratic collectivization in American society. It is Douglas's conviction, which he supports with a wealth of detail, that statist bureaucracies produce siagnation, often exacerbated by inflation, which in turn produces the waning of state power.Douglas has his own set of ""isms"" that require concerted attention: mass mediated rationalism, scientism, technologism, credentialism, and expertism. People who make policies have little, if any, awareness of the actual way social processes evolve: agricultural policy is set by people who know little of farming, arid manufacturing policy is set by people who have never set foot on a factory floor. In light of this ""soaring average ignorance,"" it is little wonder that policy-making has Alice-in-Wonderland characteristics and effects.Douglas sees the notion of a welfare state as a contradiction in terms; its widespread insinuation into the culture is made possible by its weak mythological form and benign-sounding characteristics. In fact, welfare states in whatever form they appear have failed in their purpose: to redistribute income or increase real wealth. The megastates are the source of social instability and economic downturn. They grow like a tidal drift. They start out to correct the historical grievances of the laissez-faire states, only to increase the problems they seek to correct. In this, the welfare state is a weakened form of the totalitarian state, producing similarly unhappy results.Professor Douglas has produced a work of ""anti-policy"" - arguing that freedom leavened by an ordinary sense of self-interest and social concern can overcome the shortfalls of the megastates and their myth-making, self-serving, propensities.

Truth in History

Truth in History PDF Author: Oscar Handlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351301020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description
Like scholars in other fields, historians have long occupied themselves in self-justification. In a society which calibrates all measures by a single standard, the proof of scientific worth became relevance, which in turn was interpreted as a search not for truth but for political correctness. In a blistering professional critique of this tendency in academic scholarship, perhaps the first of its kind, Oscar Handlin offers an analysis that, if anything, has grown more pertinent over the past decade. In seventeen chapters, written with the brilliant assurance of a master craftsman, Handlin shows why the turn to partisanship and meaning has undermined the calling of historical research. As his new introduction makes clear, partisanship has taken the best and brightest from the field into different callings. Both widely heralded upon its initial appearance as well as attacked with vigor, Truth in History emanates from a half-century's experience of reading, writing, teaching, researching, and publishing in history and related disciplines. The passage of time has only confirmed the concerns of Handlin and the accuracy of his predictions for the field. This book will be valuable for sociologists, economists, political scientists, and historians. It is a must read for those who contemplate a life of scholarship in liberal arts.

Sweet Land of Liberty

Sweet Land of Liberty PDF Author: Tom Sancton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sancton examines how the French left perceived and used the image of the United States against the backdrop of major historical developments in both countries between the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Along the way, he weaves in the voices of scores of French observers—including those of everyday French citizens as well as those of prominent thinkers and politicians such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, and Georges Clemenceau—as they looked to the democratic ideals of their American counterparts in the face of rising authoritarianism on the European continent. Louis Napoleon’s bloody coup in December 1851 disbanded France’s Second Republic and ushered in an era of increased political oppression, effectively forging together a disparate group of dissidents who embraced the tradition of the French Revolution and advocated for popular government. As they pursued their opposition to the Bonapartist regime, the French left looked to the American example as both a democratic model and a source of ideological support in favor of political liberty. During the 1850s, however, the left grew increasingly wary of the United States, as slavery, rapacious expansionism, and sectional frictions tarnished its image and diminished its usefulness. The Civil War, Sancton argues, marked a critical turning point. While Napoleon III considered joint Anglo-French recognition of the Confederacy and launched an ill-fated invasion of Mexico, his opponents on the left feared the collapse of the great American experiment in democracy and popular government. The Emancipation Proclamation, the Union victory, and Lincoln’s assassination ignited powerful pro-American sentiment among the French left that galvanized their opposition to the imperial regime. After the fall of the Second Empire and the founding of the conservative Third Republic in 1870, the relevance of the American example waned. Moderate republicans no longer needed the American model, while the more progressive left became increasingly radicalized following the bloody repression of the Commune in 1871. Sancton argues that the corruption and excesses of Gilded Age America established the groundwork for the anti-American fervor that came to characterize the French left throughout much of the twentieth century. Sweet Land of Liberty counters the long-held assumption that French workers, despite the distress caused by a severe cotton famine in the South, steadfastly supported the North during the Civil War out of a sense of solidarity with American slaves and lofty ideas of liberty. On the contrary, many workers backed the South, hoped for an end to fighting, and urged French government intervention. More broadly, Sancton’s analysis shows that the American example, though useful to the left, proved ill-adapted to French republican traditions rooted in the Great Revolution of 1789. For all the ritual evocations of Lafayette and the “traditional Franco-American friendship,” the two republics evolved in disparate ways as each endured social turmoil and political upheaval during the second half of the nineteenth century.