BiblioVault - Books about 1945-

Farewell to Prosperity

Wealth, Identity, and Conflict in Postwar America

Lisle A. Rose

University of Missouri Press, 2014

Farewell to Prosperity is a provocative, in-depth study of the Liberal and Conservative forces that fought each other to shape American political culture and character during the nation’s most prosperous years. The tome’s central theme is the bitter struggle to fashion post–World War II society between a historic Protestant Ethic that equated free-market economics and money-making with Godliness and a new, secular Liberal temperament that emerged from the twin ordeals of depression and world war to stress social justice and security.

Liberal policies and programs after 1945 proved key to the creation of mass affluence while encouraging disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and social groups to seek equal access to power. But liberalism proved a zero-sum game to millions of others who felt their sense of place and self progressively unhinged. Where it did not overturn traditional social relationships and assumptions, liberalism threatened and, in the late sixties and early seventies, fostered new forces of expression at radical odds with the mindset and customs that had previously defined the nation without much question.

When the forces of liberalism overreached, the Protestant Ethic and its millions of estranged religious and economic proponents staged a massive comeback under the aegis of Ronald Reagan and a revived Republican Party. The financial hubris, miscalculations, and follies that followed ultimately created a conservative overreach from which the nation is still recovering. Post–World War II America was thus marked by what writer Salman Rushdie labeled in another context “thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics.” This “politics” and its meaning form the core of the narrative.

Farewell to Prosperity is no partisan screed enlisting recent history to support one side or another. Although absurdity abounds, it knows no home, affecting Conservative and Liberal actors and thinkers alike.

[more]

Fear Your Future

How the Deck Is Stacked against Millennials and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse

Philip Klein

Templeton Press, 2019

It’s become fashionable to demean millennials as the “snowflake” generation. Raised during the peace and prosperity of the ‘90s, they’re often perceived as carrying an entitlement mentality and being incapable of handling adversity. But Philip Klein sees them differently. Given the economic headwinds they faced at the start of their working lives, millennials have shown commendable fortitude. And as Klein argues, they will need to maintain this character strength going forward because further challenges loom in their future.

The aftershocks of the Great Recession, the skyrocketing cost of living, and the titanic weight of student loan debt have made the American Dream seem to be forever retreating toward the horizon. As if that weren’t enough, millennials will face the largest federal debt in history as boomers retire and extract trillions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare—far more than they contributed.

In this concise, data-driven book, Klein begins the work of brightening the future for millennials by analyzing the problem compassionately yet objectively. There are real reasons to worry about what lies ahead if nothing changes. But the facts laid out in Klein’s book can steer the conversation to realistic solutions.

[more]

Flash Effect

Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America

David J. Tietge

Ohio University Press, 2002

The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them.

Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion and patriotism to express their policies for governance at the onset of the Cold War and to explain them to the American public.

Professor Tietge details our cultural attitudes about science in the early years of the Cold War, when on the heels of a great technological victory Americans were faced with the possibility of destruction by the very weapons that had saved them.

In Flash Effect we learn how, by symbolizing the scientist as both a father figure and a savior—and by celebrating the technological objects of his labor—the campaign to promote science took hold in the American consciousness. The products of that attitude are with us today more than ever.

[more]

Flood in Florence, 1966

A Fifty-Year Retrospective

Paul Conway and Martha O’Hara Conway

Michigan Publishing Services, 2018

On November 4, 1966, the Arno River in Florence, Italy, flooded its banks, breaching the basements and first floors of museums, libraries, and private residences and burying centuries of books, manuscripts, and works of art in muck and muddy water. Flood in Florence, 1966documents a symposium held to mark the 50th anniversary of a natural disaster that served as an impetus for the modern library and museum conservation professions. The proceedings feature illustrated, first-person remembrances of the flood; papers on book conservation, the conservation of works of art, disaster preparedness and response, and the continuing needs for education and training; and a keynote that points toward a future where original artifacts and digital technologies intersect. Providing new insights on a touchstone event by three generations of preservation and conservation professionals, the proceedings deepen our understanding of major advances in conservation practice and shed light on some of the most important lessons from those advances for future generations and the digital age.

[more]

Flowers in the Dustbin

Culture, Anarchy, and Postwar England

Neil Nehring

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Flowers in the Dustbin looks at the volatile relations between literature, rock music, and youth subcultures in postwar England. Neil Nehring traces the continuities between the original avant-garde of the twenties and thirties and the postwar youth culture, arguing that anarchism never really disappeared from the world. The author shows that British youth groups like the Mods, the Rockers, Punks, and Teddy Boys and the music that inspired them appear increasingly more acute than their literary counterparts, belying conventional assumptions about the relative powers of "high" and "low" culture. By examining literary texts as part of a larger sampling of cultural forms and their uses in everyday life, Flowers in the Dustbin provides a striking illustration of the significance the field of cultural studies holds for studies in English.

[more]

Follow Your Conscience

The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties

Peter Cajka

University of Chicago Press, 2021

What is your conscience? Is it, as Peter Cajka asks in this provocative book, “A small, still voice? A cricket perched on your shoulder? An angel and devil who compete for your attention?” Going back at least to the thirteenth century, Catholics viewed their personal conscience as a powerful and meaningful guide to align their conduct with worldly laws. But, as Cajka shows in Follow Your Conscience, during the national cultural tumult of the 1960s, the divide between the demands of conscience and the demands of the law, society, and even the church itself grew increasingly perilous. As growing numbers of Catholics started to consider formerly stout institutions to be morally hollow—especially in light of the Vietnam War and the church’s refusal to sanction birth control—they increasingly turned to their own consciences as guides for action and belief. This abandonment of higher authority had radical effects on American society, influencing not only the broader world of Christianity, but also such disparate arenas as government, law, health care, and the very vocabulary of American culture. As this book astutely reveals, today’s debates over political power, religious freedom, gay rights, and more are all deeply infused by the language and concepts outlined by these pioneers of personal conscience.

[more]

For Might and Right

Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy

Michael Brenes

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

How did the global Cold War influence American politics at home? For Might and Right traces the story of how Cold War defense spending remade participatory politics, producing a powerful and dynamic political coalition that reached across party lines. This "Cold War coalition" favored massive defense spending over social welfare programs, bringing together a diverse array of actors from across the nation, including defense workers, community boosters, military contractors, current and retired members of the armed services, activists, and politicians. Faced with neoliberal austerity and uncertainty surrounding America's foreign policy after the 1960s, increased military spending became a bipartisan solution to create jobs and stimulate economic growth, even in the absence of national security threats.

Using a rich array of archival sources, Michael Brenes draws important connections between economic inequality and American militarism that enhance our understanding of the Cold War's continued impact on American democracy and the resilience of the military-industrial complex, up to the age of Donald Trump.

[more]

Forgotten Wars

Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

Harvard University Press, 2007

In September 1945, after the fall of the atomic bomb--and with it, the Japanese empire--Asia was dominated by the British. Governing a vast crescent of land that stretched from India through Burma and down to Singapore, and with troops occupying the French and Dutch colonies in southern Vietnam and Indonesia, Britain's imperial might had never seemed stronger.

Yet within a few violent years, British power in the region would crumble, and myriad independent nations would struggle into existence. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper show how World War II never really ended in these ravaged Asian lands but instead continued in bloody civil wars, anti-colonial insurrections, and inter-communal massacres. These years became the most formative in modern Asian history, as Western imperialism vied with nascent nationalist and communist revolutionaries for political control.

Forgotten Wars, a sequel to the authors' acclaimed Forgotten Armies, is a panoramic account of the bitter wars of the end of empire, seen not only through the eyes of the fighters, but also through the personal stories of ordinary people: the poor and bewildered caught up in India's Hindu-Muslim massacres; the peasant farmers ravaged by warfare between British forces and revolutionaries in Malaya; the Burmese minorities devastated by separatist revolt. Throughout, we are given a stunning portrait of societies poised between the hope of independence and the fear of strife. Forgotten Wars vividly brings to life the inescapable conflicts and manifold dramas that shaped today's Asia.

[more]

France’s Long Reconstruction

In Search of the Modern Republic

Herrick Chapman

Harvard University Press, 2018

At the end of World War II, France’s greatest challenge was to repair a civil society torn asunder by Nazi occupation and total war. Recovery required the nation’s complete economic and social transformation. But just what form this “new France” should take remained the burning question at the heart of French political combat until the Algerian War ended, over a decade later. Herrick Chapman charts the course of France’s long reconstruction from 1944 to 1962, offering fresh insights into the ways the expansion of state power, intended to spearhead recovery, produced fierce controversies at home and unintended consequences abroad in France’s crumbling empire.

Abetted after Liberation by a new elite of technocratic experts, the burgeoning French state infiltrated areas of economic and social life traditionally free from government intervention. Politicians and intellectuals wrestled with how to reconcile state-directed modernization with the need to renew democratic participation and bolster civil society after years spent under the Nazi and Vichy yokes. But rather than resolving the tension, the conflict between top-down technocrats and grassroots democrats became institutionalized as a way of framing the problems facing Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.

Uniquely among European countries, France pursued domestic recovery while simultaneously fighting full-scale colonial wars. France’s Long Reconstruction shows how the Algerian War led to the further consolidation of state authority and cemented repressive immigration policies that now appear shortsighted and counterproductive.

[more]

Freedom’s Ring

Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave

Jacqueline Foertsch

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Freedom’s Ring begins with the question of how the American ideal of freedom, which so effectively defends a conservative agenda today, from globally exploitative free trade to anti-French “freedom fries” during the War in Iraq, once bolstered the progressive causes of Freedom Summer, the Free Speech Movement, and more militant Black Power and Women’s Liberation movements with equal efficacy. Focused as it is on the faring of freedom throughout the liberation era, this book also explores attempts made by rights movements to achieve the often competitive or cross-canceling American ideal of equality–economic, professional, and otherwise. Although many struggled and died for it in the civil rights era, freedoms such as the vote, integrated bus rides, and sex without consequences via the Pill, are ultimately free–costing officialdom little if anything to fully implement—while equality with respect to jobs, salaries, education, housing, and health care, will forever be the much more expensive nut to crack. Freedom’s Ring regards the politics of freedom, and politics in general, as a low-cost substitute for and engrossing distraction from substantive economic problem-solving from the liberation era to the present day.

[more]

From Padi States to Commercial States

Reflections on Identity and the Social Construction Space in the Borderlands of Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar

Frédéric Bourdier, Maxime Boutry, Jacques Ivanoff, and Olivier Ferrari

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

"Zomia" is a term coined in 2002 to describe the broad swath of mountainous land in Southeast Asia that has always been beyond the reach of lowland governments despite their technical claims to control. This book expands the anthropological reach of that term, applying it to any deterritorialised people, from cast-out migrants to modern resisters-in the process finding new ways to understand the realities of peoples and ethnicities that refuse to become part of the modern state.

[more]

From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park

Activism, Culture, and American Studies

Paul Lauter

Duke University Press, 2001

Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.
With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is—for better or for worse—too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.

[more]

The Future of the Family

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Russell Sage Foundation, 2004

High rates of divorce, single-parenthood, and nonmarital cohabitation are forcing Americans to reexamine their definition of family. This evolving social reality requires public policy to evolve as well. The Future of the Family brings together the top scholars of family policy—headlined by editors Lee Rainwater, Tim Smeeding, and, in his last published work, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to take stock of the state of the family in the United States today and address the ways in which public policy affects the family and vice versa. The volume opens with an assessment of new forms of family, discussing how reduced family income and lower parental involvement can disadvantage children who grow up outside of two-parent households. The book then presents three vastly dissimilar recommendations—each representing a different segment of the political spectrum—for how family policy should adapt to these changes. Child psychologist Wade Horn argues the case of political conservatives that healthy two-parent families are the best way to raise children and therefore should be actively promoted by government initiatives. Conversely, economist Nancy Folbre argues that government's role lies not in prescribing family arrangements but rather in recognizing and fostering the importance of caregivers within all families, conventional or otherwise. Will Marshall and Isabel Sawhill borrow policy prescriptions from the left and the right, arguing for more initiatives that demand personal responsibility from parents, as well as for an increase in workplace flexibility and the establishment of universal preschool programs. The book follows with commentary by leading policy analysts Samuel Preston, Frank Furstenberg Jr., and Irwin Garfinkel on the merits of the conservative and liberal arguments. Each suggests that marriage promotion alone is not enough to ensure a happy, healthy, and prosperous future for American children who are caught up in the vortex of family change. They agree that government investments in children, however, can promote superior developmental outcomes and even potentially encourage traditional families by enlarging the pool of "marriageable" individuals for the next generation. No government action can reverse trends in family formation or return America to the historic nuclear family model. But understanding social change is an essential step in fashioning effective policy for today's families. With authoritative insight, The Future of the Family broadens and updates our knowledge of how public policy and demography shape one another.

[more]