American Individualism

American Individualism PDF Author: Herbert Hoover
Publisher: Garden City, Doubleday
ISBN:
Category : Individualism
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
In this book, Hoover expounds and vigorously defends what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argues that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character.

American Individualism

American Individualism PDF Author: Herbert Hoover
Publisher: Garden City, Doubleday
ISBN:
Category : Individualism
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
In this book, Hoover expounds and vigorously defends what has come to be called American exceptionalism: the set of beliefs and values that still makes America unique. He argues that America can make steady, sure progress if we preserve our individualism, preserve and stimulate the initiative of our people, insist on and maintain the safeguards to equality of opportunity, and honor service as a part of our national character.

American Individualism

American Individualism PDF Author: Margaret Hoover
Publisher: Crown Forum
ISBN: 0307718166
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
A Fox News analyst argues for a redefinition of conservatism that will modernize outdated Republican ideas and enable a younger generation to embrace the party, defining her views about Individualism while contending that universal, conservative beliefs can be adapted to revitalize Republican political strength.

The Myth of American Individualism

The Myth of American Individualism PDF Author: Barry Alan Shain
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691029122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality PDF Author: Lawrence M. Eppard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611462355
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequalityexplores and critiques the widespread perception in the United States that one’s success or failure in life is largely the result of personal choices and individual characteristics. As the authors show, the distinctively individualist ideology of American politics and culture shapes attitudes toward poverty and economic inequality in profound ways, fostering social policies that de-emphasize structural remedies. Drawing on a variety of unique methodologies, the book synthesizes data from large-scale surveys of the American population, and it features both conversations with academic experts and interviews with American citizens intimately familiar with the consequences of economic disadvantage. This mixture of approaches gives readers a fuller understanding of “skeptical altruism,” a concept the authors use to describe the American public’s hesitancy to adopt a more robust and structurally-oriented approach to solving the persistent problem of economic disadvantage.

The Roots of American Individualism

The Roots of American Individualism PDF Author: Alex Zakaras
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politics Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture. Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

Awakening to Race

Awakening to Race PDF Author: Jack Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226817148
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

American Ideal

American Ideal PDF Author: Paul M. Rego
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739126073
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book takes Theodore Roosevelt seriously as a man of ideas, a thinker who was deeply committed to addressing the problems of his generation. It also is a study of TR as a leader, one who used rhetoric and example to convince his fellow citizens that it was possible to reconcile the American traditionof individualism with a Progressive-inspired concern for the social good.

Rugged Individualism

Rugged Individualism PDF Author: David Davenport
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817920269
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Today, American "rugged individualism" is in a fight for its life on two battlegrounds: in the policy realm and in the intellectual world of ideas that may lead to new policies. In this book, the authors look at the political context in which rugged individualism flourishes or declines and offer a balanced assessment of its future prospects. They outline its path from its founding—marked by the Declaration of Independence—to today, focusing on different periods in our history when rugged individualism was thriving or was under attack. The authors ultimately look with some optimism toward new frontiers of the twenty-first century that may nourish rugged individualism. They assert that we cannot tip the delicate balance between equality and liberty so heavily in favor of equality that there is no liberty left for individual Americans to enjoy.

American Individualisms

American Individualisms PDF Author: A. Kusserow
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973989
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
What are hard and soft individualisms? In this detailed ethnography of three communities in Manhattan and Queens, Kusserow interviews parents and teachers (from wealthy to those on welfare) on the types of hard and soft individualisms they encourage in their children and students. American Individualisms explores the important issue of class differences in the socialization of individualism in America. It presents American individualism not as one single homogeneous, stereotypic life-pattern as often claimed to be, but as variable, class-differentiated models of individualism instilled in young children by their parents and preschool teachers in Manhattan and Queens. By providing rich descriptions of the situational, class-based individualisms that take root in communities with vastly different visions of the future, Kusserow brings social inequality back into previously bland and generic discussions of American individualism.

American Spirit

American Spirit PDF Author: Roger Smith
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 147596529X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The first European immigrants came to the American colonies to escape incessant wars, oppressive governments, lack of opportunity, and tyrannical religious authorities. The dangerous and mysterious new world couldn’t rectify all the ills of the old world, but it offered something that resonated with their Christian faith—hope for a better life for their loved ones. They miraculously built a government that preserved more freedom and opportunity for the American people than any government in history. The United States can continue as a beacon of hope if its citizens focus on the common goodness of their past that binds them instead of the differences that divide them. American Spirit presents this refreshing perspective through an exciting mosaic of adventure, despair, hope, faith, and love. Smith’s incredible research and vivid writing style as he follows multiple generations of immigrants seeking freedom in America make this book an essential read. Smith’s novel is historical fiction that intrigues, engages, and lingers, long after the last page is turned. — Joe Kilgore, US Review of Books The Civil War is an ugly period of American history. Uglier still, are the many times inaccurate accounts of the war were told. Roger Smith has taken a giant step forward in setting the record straight. Reading this book will open your mind. It is much more than just another war story. — Dan Mackintosh, Pacific Book Review