Browse

The Great Recession, institutional dysfunction, a growing divide between urban and rural prospects, and failed efforts to effectively address immigration have paved the way for a populist backlash that disrupts the postwar bargain between political elites and citizens. Whether today's populism represents a corrective to unfair and obsolete policies or a threat to liberal democracy itself remains up for debate. Yet this much is clear: these challenges indict the triumphalism that accompanied liberal democratic consolidation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To respond to today's crisis, good leaders must strive for inclusive economic growth while addressing fraught social and cultural issues, including demographic anxiety, with frank attention. Although reforms may stem the populist tide, liberal democratic life will always leave some citizens unsatisfied. This is a permanent source of vulnerability, but liberal democracy will endure so long as citizens believe it is worth fighting for.

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.

How did the U.S. government make use of a “Buddhist policy” in Southeast Asia during the Cold War despite the American principle that the state should not meddle with religion? To answer this question, this book's author delved deep into an unprecedented range of U.S. and Thai sources and conducted numerous oral history interviews with key informants. The author uncovers a riveting story filled with U.S. national security officials, diplomats, and scholars seeking to understand and build relationships within the Buddhist monasteries of Southeast Asia. This fascinating narrative provides a new look at how the Buddhist leaderships of Thailand and its neighbors became enmeshed in Cold War politics and in the U.S. government's clandestine efforts to use a predominant religion of Southeast Asia as an instrument of national stability to counter communist revolution.

This book tells the story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, dedicated Communists and members of the Rosenberg spy ring, who stole information from the United States during World War II, which proved crucial to building the first advanced weapons systems in the USSR. On the brink of arrest, they escaped with the KGB's help and eluded American intelligence for decades. Based on extensive interviews with Barr and new archival evidence, the book explains why Barr and Sarant became spies, how they obtained military secrets, and how FBI blunders led to their escape. It chronicles their pioneering role in the Soviet computer industry, including their success in convincing Nikita Khrushchev to build a secret Soviet Silicon Valley. The book is full of detail of Barr's and Sarant's intriguing and exciting personal lives, their families, as well as their integration into Russian society. The book follows the two spies through to Sarant's death and Barr's unbelievable return to the United States.

This book depicts a forgotten history that explores how army veterans returning to reservation life after World War I transformed Native American identity. Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, the book demonstrates how the relationship between Native American tribes and the United States was reinvented in the years following World War I. During that conflict, 12,000 Native American soldiers served in the U.S. Army. They returned home to their reservations with newfound patriotism, leveraging their veteran cachet for political power and claiming all the benefits of citizenship—even supporting the termination policy that ended the U.S. government's recognition of tribal sovereignty.

This study focuses on the U.S. government-assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA's space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and by the rocketeers' families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, this book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country's own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

World War II created and the Cold War sustained a ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain, and the terms on which that decades-long conflict ended would become the foundation of a new world order. This book explores the dramatic reconfiguring of western foreign policy that was necessitated by the interlinked crises of the 1970s and the resulting global shift toward open markets, a movement that was eagerly embraced and encouraged by the U.S./U.K. partnership. This book's revisionist argument questions long-perceived views of post-World War II America and its position in the world, especially after Vietnam. The book details the challenges the economic transition of the 1970s and 1980s engendered as the United States and Great Britain together actively pursued their shared ideal of an international assemblage of market-based democratic states. The book also addresses the crises that would sorely test the system in subsequent decades, from human rights violations and genocide in the Balkans and Africa to 9/11 and militant Islamism in the Middle East to the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008.

This book tells the fascinating but little-known story of the battles between landlords and tenants in the United State’s largest city, from 1917 through 1929. These conflicts were triggered by the post-war housing shortage, which prompted landlords to raise rents, drove tenants to go on rent strikes, and spurred the state legislature, a conservative body dominated by upstate Republicans, to impose rent control in New York, a radical and unprecedented step that transformed landlord-tenant relations. The book traces the tumultuous history of rent control in New York from its inception to its expiration as it unfolded in New York, Albany, and Washington, D.C. At the heart of this story are such memorable figures as Al Smith, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as a host of tenants, landlords, judges, and politicians who have long been forgotten. The book also explores the heated debates over landlord-tenant law, housing policy, and other issues that are as controversial today as they were a century ago.

This book reveals the untold story of the murder of Civil Rights worker Viola Liuzzo, shot to death by members of the violent Birmingham Ku Klux Klan at the end of Martin Luther King's historic Voting Rights March in 1965. The case drew national attention and was solved almost instantly because one of the Klansman present during the shooting was Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover FBI informant. At the time, Rowe's information and subsequent testimony were heralded as a triumph of law enforcement, but his history of collaboration with both the Klan and the FBI was far more complex. Based on previously unexamined FBI and Justice Department records, the book demonstrates that in their ongoing efforts to protect Rowe's cover, the FBI knowingly became an accessory to some of the most grotesque crimes of the Civil Rights era—including a vicious attack on the Freedom Riders and perhaps even the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The story of a renegade informant and an intelligence system ill-prepared to deal with threats from within, it offers a cautionary tale about what can happen when secret police power goes unchecked.

In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Showin 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, “including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment was not a legitimate conversation on public issues but an attack on her reputation. This book recounts details of the McCarthy–Hellman case, and demonstrates how the idiom of libel and the autobiographical impulse became intertwined in twentieth-century America. It offers a many-faceted examination of Hellman's infamous suit, exploring what it tells us about tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language, and what can and cannot be said in public in America.

The definitive biography of radical activist, poet, editor, and public intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969), based on unrestricted access to the Eastman family archive. Considered one of the “hottest radicals” of his time, Eastman edited two of the most important modernist magazines, The Masses and The Liberator, campaigned for women’s suffrage, sexual freedom, and peace, and published several volumes of poetry and two books on laughter. A fierce critic of Joseph Stalin, Eastman befriended and translated Leon Trotsky and remained unafraid to express unpopular views, drawing criticism from both conservatives and the Left. Maintaining that he had never changed his political opinions and that, instead, the world around him had changed, Eastman completed his public turn to the right by becoming a contributor to Reader’s Digest. A stubborn, lifelong admirer of Lenin as well as a defender of the Vietnam War, Eastman, who now called himself a “libertarian conservative,” died in Bridgetown, Barbados, on March 25, 1969. Set against the backdrop of several decades of political and ideological turmoil, this biography interweaves Eastman’s singular life with stories of the fascinating people he knew, loved, and admired, including Charlie Chaplin, Florence Deshon, Claude McKay, and Leon Trotsky.

Late in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up a national network of local organizations that joined farmers with public administrators, adult-educators, and social scientists. The aim was to localize and unify earlier New Deal programs concerning soil conservation, farm production control, tenure security, and other reforms, and by 1941 some 200,000 farm people were involved. Even so, conservative anti-New Dealers killed the successful program the next year. This book re-examines the era's agricultural policy and tells the neglected story of the New Deal agrarian leaders and their visionary ideas about land, democratization, and progressive social change.

This book looks at how the Progressive Era redefined the playing field for conservatives and liberals alike. During the 1912 presidential campaign, Progressivism emerged as an alternative to what was then considered an outmoded system of government. A century later, a new generation of conservatives criticizes Progressivism as having abandoned America's founding values and miring the government in institutional gridlock. This book examines a broad range of issues, including Progressives' interpretation of the Constitution, their expansion and redistribution of individual rights, and reforms meant to shift power from political parties to ordinary citizens.

What happens when the world of venture capitalism collides with the world of espionage? The answer lies inside the executive suite at Itek Corporation during the Cold War years from 1957 to 1965. Itek was manufacturing the world's most sophisticated satellite reconnaissance cameras, and the information these cameras provided about Soviet missiles and military activity was critical to U.S. security. This work examines, in detail, the challenges Itek faced not only as a contractor for the most important national security program of the time—the CIA's Project CORONA spy satellite—but also as a start-up company competing with established industrial giants. This version of the story of the Itek Corporation fills important gaps in the history of American intelligence, business history and management studies. Additionally, it addresses a variety of themes such as the compatibility of secrecy and capitalism, the struggle between profits and patriotism, and the workings of power and connections in America. The book explores how Itek executives contended with myriad business problems that were compounded by the need to raise capital without revealing the complete truth about the company's highly secret business. It also presents information about Laurance Rockefeller's venture capital operations and his role in financing Itek, based on the financier's private Itek papers. The book is both a case study of a company at the heart of the American intelligence-industrial complex during the Cold War and an examination of the impact of the CIA on the capitalist system it was created to defend.

This innovative history of supermarkets describes the role of food and agriculture during and after the Cold War. American business leaders and political figures deployed American supermarkets around the world as explicitly anticommunist "weapons" in the Cold War economic contest with the Soviet Union. Modern supermarkets, built upon industrial agriculture supply chains, penetrated world political and economic spheres during the Cold War Farms Race, embodying a pervasive rhetoric of exceptional American food abundance, a counterrevolutionary ideology of capitalist economic development, and a moral claim to the justifiability of U.S. economic power on the world stage. The farmers who produced the food for supermarket supply chains were enlisted in the Farms Race in ways that shaped how agricultural development schemes proceeded in the latter half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, notions of U.S. food power were reconfigured into global systems of market power coordinated by multinational agribusiness corporations. The stage was set for our present moment, in which transnational supermarkets operate as powerful institutions of nonstate governance in the global food economy.