"A vivid and masterful account of the terrible discord and violence of those years." —C. Vann Woodward

Victorious in a great and "good" war, the United States in 1945 bestrode the world unchallenged, but by 1960 that dominance was eroding. For fifteen tense and troubled years, between the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, the United States struggled to direct its domestic life and its role in a rapidly changing world.

These years are as rich as any in American history: rich in incident—from the Cuban Missile Crisis and the civil rights struggle to the antiwar movement and the opening of China; rich in personality—from Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, and the Beatles. Years of Discord is a story of turning points of power and decline, conflict and idealism, of a time that has found in John Morton Blum its ablest chronicler.

"In this incisive, judicious and eminently readable book, a master historian tels the story of those tangled and turbulent years just behind us—years that shook and remolded the republic." —Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

"Once again, John Morton Blum has brought to life a critical period of American history. An illuminating account of the amazing Sixties, and an invaluable contribution to the history of our times." —Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post

With the end of the Cold War, the United States has an unprecedented opportunity to create a new policy toward Africa freed from the constraints of East-West geopolitics.

In "Free at Last?," Michael Claugh provides a comprehensive overview of U.S.-Africa relations from World War II to the present: he surveys past American initiatives to illustrate how U.S. policy, intent on containing Soviet expansion, benefited African rulers at the expense of African civil society. He also discusses the declining importance of U.S. strategic and economic interests in Africa and how this is counterbalanced by the growing interest of American constituencies focused on such issues as humanitarian relief, human rights, and the environment.

Clough proposes abandoning traditional, government-to- government diplomatic approaches in favor of a radical new strategy modeled on the successes achieved in combating famine in Ethiopia and ending apartheid in South Africa. Offering an unconventional look at U.S. policy, "Free at Last?" is absorbing and essential reading for anyone concerned with both U.S.- Africa relations and the future of U.S. policy toward the Third World.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt promised a new deal for the American people, he gave hope to millions of Americans impoverished by the Great Depression. The Roosevelt administration's relief programs, implemented in a period of crisis characterized by the Black Friday stock market crash, widespread bank failures, and massive unemployment, marked the turning point in the making of modern America. Yet in spite of extensive aid provided on federal and state levels, the enormity of the economic problems throughout the country left much of the president's pledge unfulfilled. In this interpretive overview, Roger Biles discusses the factors contributing to the Great Depression and analyzes the federal government's emerging role in public welfare. Focusing on various segments of society, he assesses New Deal programs in terms of their impact on the lives of the American people, including the working class, women, African Americans, and urban dwellers. While drawing on scholarship of the past twenty years, he offers fresh insights into the social effects of Roosevelt's policies and stimulates new thinking on the question of whether the reforms preserved the foundations of American federalism or represented a second American revolution. In conclusion Biles weighs the New Deal's successes and failures, both of which he finds to be part of the same story, a story that can only be understood with an appreciation for the context of the Depression years. A New Deal for the American People explores that context with sensitivity. This clearly written and highly readable study will engage both specialists and general readers interested in a balanced account of one of the most important programs of twentieth-century America, Roosevelt's New Deal.

In exploring the antiwar movement, tax and foreign economic policies, environmental and health care questions, and the space program, these essays demonstrate how domestic issues were critically affected by the Vietnam War and provide a fuller understanding of Johnson's vital but flawed legacy to the nation.

The real inventor of the steam engine. The creator of the bra. The man who invented modern banking. The creator of the computer operating system. These and scores of others are the characters that populate Harold Evans's rollicking, brilliant history of the men and women who made America great. Vast and beautifully designed with hundreds of duotones and photos throughout (many never before published), the book is itself a creation as grand as those it describes. Evans reveals the surprising truths behind many of the creations that made our modern world, as well as the lessons we can learn by studying the great entrepreneurs and innovators of the past two centuries.

A historical investigation into the political and ideological foundations of the "miseducation of the Negro" in America, this timely and provocative volume explores the men and ideas that helped shape educational and societal apartheid from the Civil War to the new millennium. It is a study of how big corporate power uses private wealth to legislate, shape unequal race relations, broker ideas, and define "acceptable" social change. Drawing on little-known biographies of White power brokers who shaped Black education, William Watkins explains the structuring of segregated education that has plagued the United States for much of the 20th century. With broad and interdisciplinary appeal, this book is written in a language accessible to lay people and scholars alike.

This title features history captured in the hearts and minds, words and deeds, of those who made history at its most essential level: on the battlefields and on the home-front of World War II. With more than 450 photographs, the book is the story of the war, told from the point of view of four American towns.

Prior to World War II, the protection of individuals fell generally under the jurisdiction of national governments, but the rise of fascism and the gross wartime violations of human rights established human rights as an area of transnational and global concern. A Most Uncertain Crusade traces the emergence of human rights as an international political issue-one especially important to American policymakers after World War II. Focusing on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within nongovernmental organizations, Rowland Brucken explains how American human rights policy developed after the war - from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's Wilsonian ideals to Eisenhower's eloquent celebrations of freedom and democracy.

Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering both the causes of the nation's public amnesia and the depth of the quiet remembering that endured. Focused on the primary players in this drama-patients and their families, friends, and community, public health experts, and health care professionals-historian Nancy K. Bristow draws on multiple perspectives to highlight the complex interplay between social identity, cultural norms, memory, and the epidemic. Bristow has combed a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, novels, newspapers, magazines, photographs, government documents, and health care literature. She shows that though the pandemic caused massive disruption in the most basic patterns of American life, influenza did not create long-term social or cultural change, serving instead to reinforce the status quo and the differences and disparities that defined American life. As the crisis waned, the pandemic slipped from the nation's public memory. The helplessness and despair Americans had suffered during the pandemic, Bristow notes, was a story poorly suited to a nation focused on optimism and progress. For countless survivors, though, the trauma never ended, shadowing the remainder of their lives with memories of loss. This book lets us hear these long-silent voices, reclaiming an important chapter in the American past.

Traditional accounts of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company, as well as more recent best-selling books on the subject, still accept without question charges of unethical and anti-competitive behaviour by the American oil industry. In this synthesis of cultural, business, gender and intellectual history, Roger and Diana Davids Olien explore how this negative image of the petroleum industry was created -and how this image in turn helped shape policy toward the industry in ways that were sometimes at odds with both the goals or reformers and the public interest. By turning a critical eye on sources that have often been accepted at face value and examining the self-interests of oil industry critics, the authors seek to produce a more balanced, complex picture of the industry. Their case study of the impact of technology offers an example of how business must be understood through its cultural context and offers an approach to understanding problems of regulation and reform.

Comprehensive ethnographic portrait of contemporary rural Barbados focuses on patterns of work, gender relations and life cycle, community, and religion in St. Lucy Parish. Recurring theme throughout work is impact of widening social relations - throughglobalization, tourism, transnationalism, tech

Describes the wild and often violent prohibition era on the New York-Canadian border. This lighthearted look at life under prohibition uses the memories and anecdotes of former bootleggers, bystanders and customs officers.

The American women's movement was one of the most influential social movements of the twentieth century. Beginning with small numbers, the women's movement eventually involved tens of thousands of women and men. Longstanding ideas and habits came under scrutiny as activists questioned and changed the nation's basic institutions, including all branches of government, the workplace, and the family. Nancy MacLean's introduction and collection of primary sources engage students with the most up-to-date scholarship in U.S. women's history. The introduction traces the deep roots of the women's movement and demonstrates the continuity from women's activism in the labor movement and New Deal networks, the black civil rights movement, and the peace movement to the height of Second Wave feminism and into the Third Wave. The primary sources reflect the social breadth and depth of the movement. Dispelling the misconception that the American women's movement was solely a white, middle-class cause, the documents include the voices of women of all ages, classes, and ethnicities. Topics addressed range from wage discrimination, peace activism, housework and childcare, sexuality, and reproductive rights to welfare, education, socialism, violence against women, and more. Document headnotes, a chronology of the women's movement, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and index support student learning, classroom discussion, and further research.

In this engaging book, Bradford Martin illuminates a different 1980s than many remember--one whose history has been buried under the celebratory narrative of conservative ascendancy. Ronald Reagan looms large in most accounts of the period, encouraging Americans to renounce the activist and liberal politics of the 1960s and '70s and embrace the resurgent conservative wave. But a closer look reveals that a sizable swath of Americans strongly disapproved of Reagan's policies throughout his presidency. With a weakened Democratic Party scurrying for the political center, many expressed their dissatisfaction outside electoral politics. Unlike the civil rights and Vietnam-era protesters, activists of the 1980s often found themselves on the defensive, struggling to preserve the hard-won victories of the previous era. Their successes, then, were not in ushering in a new era of progressive reforms but in effecting change in areas from professional life to popular culture, while beating back an even more forceful political shift to the right.

Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.

Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.

The Ku Klux Klan has wielded considerable power both as a terrorist group and as a political force. Usually viewed as appearing in distinct incarnations, the Klans of the 20th century are now shown by Glenn Feldman to have a greater degree of continuity than has been previously suspected. Victims of Klan terrorism continued to be aliens, foreigners, or outsiders in Alabama: the freed slave during Reconstruction, the 1920s Catholic or Jew, the 1930s labor organizer or Communist, and the returning black veteran of World War II were all considered a threat to the dominant white culture.

Feldman offers new insights into this "qualified continuity" among Klans of different eras, showing that the group remained active during the 1930s and 1940s when it was presumed dormant, with elements of the "Reconstruction syndrome" carrying over to the smaller Klan of the civil rights era.

In addition, Feldman takes a critical look at opposition to Klan activities by southern elites. He particularly shows how opponents during the Great Depression and war years saw the Klan as an impediment to attracting outside capital and federal relief or as a magnet for federal action that would jeopardize traditional forms of racial and social control. Other critics voiced concerns about negative national publicity, and others deplored the violence and terrorism.

This in-depth examination of the Klan in a single state, which features rare photographs, provides a means of understanding the order's development throughout the South. Feldman's book represents definitive research into the history of the Klan and makes a major contribution to our understanding of both that organization and the history of Alabama.