Suburban Warriors
Suburban Warriors

Author: Lisa McGirr

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-06-02

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1400866200

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In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century. Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism. While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens—and often upsets—our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.

The Creativity Complex
The Creativity Complex

Author: Shannon Steen

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2023-07-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 047222123X

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“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement, a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly. Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Ultimately, The Creativity Complex asks how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.

The Color of America Has Changed
The Color of America Has Changed

Author: Mark Brilliant

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-11-04

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 019972198X

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From the moment that the attack on the "problem of the color line," as W.E.B. DuBois famously characterized the problem of the twentieth century, began to gather momentum nationally during World War II, California demonstrated that the problem was one of color lines. In The Color of America Has Changed, Mark Brilliant examines California's history to illustrate how the civil rights era was a truly nationwide and multiracial phenomenon-one that was shaped and complicated by the presence of not only blacks and whites, but also Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans, among others. Focusing on a wide range of legal and legislative initiatives pursued by a diverse group of reformers, Brilliant analyzes the cases that dismantled the state's multiracial system of legalized segregation in the 1940s and subsequent battles over fair employment practices, old-age pensions for long-term resident non-citizens, fair housing, agricultural labor, school desegregation, and bilingual education. He concludes with the conundrum created by the multiracial affirmative action program at issue in the United States Supreme Court's 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision. The Golden State's status as a civil rights vanguard for the nation owes in part to the numerous civil rights precedents set there and to the disparate challenges of civil rights reform in multiracial places. While civil rights historians have long set their sights on the South and recently have turned their attention to the North, advancing a "long civil rights movement" interpretation, Mark Brilliant calls for a new understanding of civil rights history that more fully reflects the racial diversity of America.

Dirty Harry's America
Dirty Harry's America

Author: Joe Street

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0813063485

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“Street provides a crucial critical and cultural service by not only studying Eastwood’s individual films in sharp detail but also by providing a close and serious analysis of the cultural and historic times of the films.”—Sam B. Girgus, author of Clint Eastwood’s America “By far the most comprehensive, sustained, and detailed discussion of the Dirty Harry phenomenon. A thorough and engaging account of how a fictitious renegade cop became an enduring icon of the angry conservative backlash that sought to halt 1960s liberalism in its tracks.”—Nick Heffernan, author of Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry became the prototype for a new kind of movie cop—an antihero in pursuit of his own vision of justice. The Dirty Harry series helped cement Eastwood and his character, Harry Callahan, as central figures in 1970s and 1980s Hollywood cinema. In Dirty Harry’s America, Joe Street argues that the movies shed critical light on the culture and politics of the post-1960s era and locates San Francisco as the symbolic cultural battleground of the time. Across the entire series, conservative anger and moral outrage confront elitist liberalism and moral relativism. Paying particular attention the films' representation of crime, family and community, sexuality, and race, Street maintains that through referencing real events and political struggles, the films themselves became active participants in the culture wars. Unapologetic carrier of right and might, Harry Callahan becomes America’s Ur-conservative: “unbending, moral, incorruptible, and most important, always right.” Long after the series, Callahan’s legacy remains strong in American political discourse, cinema, and pop culture, and he continues to shape Eastwood’s later political and cinematic career.

The Right Moment
The Right Moment

Author: Matthew Dallek

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0195174070

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Ronald Reagan's first great victory in the 1966 California governor's race is one of the pivotal stories of American political history, a victory that seemed to come from nowhere and has long since confounded his critics. Just four years earlier Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown was celebrated as the "Giant Killer" for his 1962 victory over Richard Nixon, and his liberal agenda reigned supreme. Yet in 1966 political neophyte Reagan trounced Brown by almost one million votes, marking not only the coming-of-age of Reagan's new conservatism but also the first serious blow to modern liberalism. Drawing on scores of oral histories, thousands of archival documents, and personal interviews with participants, Dallek offers a gripping new portrait of the 1960s that is far more complicated than our collective memory of that decade.

Building a Business of Politics
Building a Business of Politics

Author: Adam D. Sheingate

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190217197

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Today, politics is big business. Most of the 6 billion spent during the 2012 campaign went to highly paid political consultants. In Building a Business of Politics, a lively history of political consulting, Adam Sheingate examines the origins of the industry and its consequences for American democracy.

Law and Order
Law and Order

Author: Michael W. Flamm

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-06-14

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 0231509723

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Law and Order offers a valuable new study of the political and social history of the 1960s. It presents a sophisticated account of how the issues of street crime and civil unrest enhanced the popularity of conservatives, eroded the credibility of liberals, and transformed the landscape of American politics. Ultimately, the legacy of law and order was a political world in which the grand ambitions of the Great Society gave way to grim expectations. In the mid-1960s, amid a pervasive sense that American society was coming apart at the seams, a new issue known as law and order emerged at the forefront of national politics. First introduced by Barry Goldwater in his ill-fated run for president in 1964, it eventually punished Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats and propelled Richard Nixon and the Republicans to the White House in 1968. In this thought-provoking study, Michael Flamm examines how conservatives successfully blamed liberals for the rapid rise in street crime and then skillfully used law and order to link the understandable fears of white voters to growing unease about changing moral values, the civil rights movement, urban disorder, and antiwar protests. Flamm documents how conservatives constructed a persuasive message that argued that the civil rights movement had contributed to racial unrest and the Great Society had rewarded rather than punished the perpetrators of violence. The president should, conservatives also contended, promote respect for law and order and contempt for those who violated it, regardless of cause. Liberals, Flamm argues, were by contrast unable to craft a compelling message for anxious voters. Instead, liberals either ignored the crime crisis, claimed that law and order was a racist ruse, or maintained that social programs would solve the "root causes" of civil disorder, which by 1968 seemed increasingly unlikely and contributed to a loss of faith in the ability of the government to do what it was above all sworn to do-protect personal security and private property.

California Rising
California Rising

Author: Ethan Rarick

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-04-26

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0520248287

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"Edmund G. (Pat) Brown has long been considered one of the two or three most effective governors of California. Thanks to this exhaustively researched and vividly written study by Ethan Rarick, we can now grasp the true strength and charisma of this extraordinary governor and the highpoint of public value and performance he orchestrated in the creation of contemporary California. A seasoned reporter, Rarick left everything behind to research and write this book. He made the right decision."—Kevin Starr, University Professor of History, University of Southern California "This is an impressive and important work--exhaustively researched, elegantly written. It's not only the biography of the central figure in modern California history, Governor Pat Brown, but the story of a crucial era in California and its place in the nation's imagination. California Rising is a major document in our understanding of the man and the place he helped make."—Peter Schrag, former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and author of Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future "Ethan Rarick has written a shrewd and lively account of the life of Pat Brown, California's most constructive governor in the last half-century. What a pleasant way to learn about the history of the golden state during the key period in which state government was confronted with the economic and social challenges of rapid modernization. A very impressive book."—Nelson W. Polsby, Heller Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley "An important and enjoyable book."—Bruce Cain, coeditor of Voting at the Political Fault Line "Ethan Rarick's narrative of the life of Pat Brown is a fascinating look at the maturation of a political animal. We follow closely as Brown gladhands his way up California's political ladder and becomes his state's most progressive governor. In this meticulous study, Rarick fleshes out Brown's battles with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan throughout the 1960s. California Rising profits from Rarick's broad understanding of California and his constructive use of Brown's personal notes and correspondence."—Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War