The twentieth century has been popularly seen as "the American
Century," as publisher Henry Luce dubbed it, a long period in which
the United States had amassed the economic resources, the political
and military strength, and the moral prestige to assume global
leadership. By century's end, the trajectory of American politics,
the sense of ever waxing federal power, and the nation's place in
the world seemed less assured. Americans of many stripes came to
contest the standard narratives of nation building and
international hegemony that generations of historians dutifully
charted. In this volume, a group of distinguished junior and senior
historians-including John McGreevy, James Campbell, Elizabeth
Borgwardt, Eric Rauchway, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, and James
Kloppenberg- revisit and revise many of the chestnuts of American
political history. First and foremost, the contributors challenge
the teleological view of the inexorable transformation of the
United States into a modern nation. To be sure, chain stores
replaced mom-and-pop businesses, interstate highways knit together
once isolated regions, national media shaped debate from coast-to
coast, and the IRS, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the Social
Security Administration and other instruments of national power
became daily presences in the lives of ordinary Americans. But the
local and the parochial did not inexorably give way to the national
and eventually to global integration. Instead, the contributors to
this volume illustrate the ongoing dialectic between centrifugal
and centripetal forces in the development of the twentieth century
United States. The essays analyze a host of ways in which local
places are drawn into a wider polity and culture. At the same time,
they reveal how national and international structures and ideas
repeatedly create new kinds of local movements and local energies.
The authors also challenge the tendency to view American politics
as a series of conflicts between liberalism and conservatism, which
Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. and Jr. codified as the idea that American
national politics routinely experienced roughly fifteen year
periods of liberal reform followed by similar intervals of
conservative reaction. For generations, American political history
remained the story of reform, the rise and fall, triumphs and
setbacks of successive waves of reformers-Jacksonian Democrats and
abolitionists, Populists and Progressives, New Dealers and Great
Society poverty warriors-and, recently, equally rich scholarship
has explored the origins and development of American conservatism.
The contributors do not treat the left and right as separate
phenomena, as the dominant forces of different eras. Instead they
assert the liberal and the conservative are always and essentially
intertwined, mutually constituted and mutually constituting. Modern
American liberalism operates amid tenacious, recurring forces that
shape and delimit the landscape of social reform and political
action just as conservatives layered their efforts over the
cumulative achievements of twentieth century liberalism,
necessarily accommodating themselves to shifts in the instruments
of government, social mores and popular culture. These essays also
unravel a third traditional polarity in twentieth century U.S.
history, the apparent divide between foreign policy and domestic
politics. Notwithstanding its proud anti-colonial heritage and its
enduring skepticism about foreign entanglements, the United States
has been and remains a robustly international (if not imperial)
nation. The authors in this volume-with many formative figures in
the ongoing internationalization of American history represented
among them-demonstrate that international connections (not only in
the realm of diplomacy but also in matters of migration, commerce,
and culture) have transformed domestic life in myriad ways and, in
turn, that the American presence in the world has been shaped by
its distinctive domestic political culture. Blurring the boundaries
between political, cultural, and economic history, this collective
volume aims to raise penetrating questions and challenge readers'
understanding of the broader narrative of twentieth-century U.S.
history.
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