Soul music and country music propel American popular culture. Using ethnomusicological tools, Shonekan examines their socio-cultural influences and consequences: the perception of and resistance to hegemonic structures from within their respective constituencies, the definition of national identity, and the understanding of the 'American Dream.'
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. “Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America.”—Newsday ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, Southern Living Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always—or even often—been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before”—as, time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail.
In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash. Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.
This latest collection of Chicken Soup for the Soul comes to readers from the heartland, the Grand Ole Opry and the Contry Music Capital of the World. This treasury identifies the common threads that weave the tapestry of the human spirit- the traditions of family and faith at the heart of America.
Readers will get an inside look at the personal stories behind their favorite country songs as songwriters get up close and personal with exclusive stories about how and why they wrote them. Songs tell a story, and now many of country music’s most famous singers and songwriters are sharing more of the story! These artists reveal the inspiration, influence, and background, and when and why they wrote their most famous songs, in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music. Book includes great photos of the songwriters and lyrics of many of the songs. A great gift for anyone who loves country music!
The “unrivaled” history of America’s divided politics, now in a fully updated edition that examines the rise of Trump—and what comes next (New Republic). When it was published in 2015, Andrew Hartman’s history of the culture wars was widely praised for its compelling and even-handed account of how they came to define American politics at the close of the twentieth century. But it also garnered attention for Hartman’s declaration that the culture wars were over—and that the left had won. In the wake of Trump’s rise, driven by an aggressive fanning of those culture war flames, Hartman has brought A War for the Soul of America fully up to date, detailing the ways in which Trump’s success, while undeniable, represents the last gasp of culture war politics—and how the reaction he has elicited can show us early signs of the very different politics to come. “As a guide to the late twentieth-century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled . . . . Incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas . . . . Reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.” —New Republic
The author of Losing Your Mind to Find Your Soul, and A Father's Daughter book series contemplates our life purpose, trauma, love, destiny, spiritual transformations and the meaning of life. He exposes the corruption and greed that consumes society, reflecting on our lives, pondering our happiness, and whether the lifestyle most of us live by makes us happy or merely an illusion. With introspection, most feel bound and shackled with barely any freedom to do what we enjoy as our time is consumed by the mundane. He delves deeper into healing, overcoming problems, discussing the meaning of life, and societal issues, and pursuing dreams and aspirations.
“Take it from someone who has been on the inside, who understands the fight we are currently in, and who knows what must be done to save our country. Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s latest book, The War for America’s Soul, leverages the former White House strategist’s expertise, driven by his determination to preserve what made America great in the first place.” — MARK LEVIN Our country is at war with itself. On one side are American patriots, dedicated to freedom under the Constitution; on the other side are leftists campaigning not just to win elections, but to radically transform the nation. In this political war for the soul of our country, America’s patriots need a strategist with a blueprint for victory. Luckily, we have such a man in Dr. Sebastian Gorka—a former strategist for President Trump and now a nationally syndicated radio host and a fearless culture warrior. In his essential new book, The War for America’s Soul, Dr. Gorka shows how America’s elite—in both parties—betrayed our heartland, sabotaged the American dream, and accepted national decline as inevitable. It took a candidate with remarkable vision, dauntless courage, and unbreakable determination to change the narrative. That man was Donald Trump. A candidate who owed no favors to special interests, Trump articulated a new American nationalism that has been an extraordinary force for economic and political renewal.
In The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood, Chris Altieri contends that the forma mentis of the founders of the political society often viewed--by its members and by those external to it--as the non plus ultra of modernity, i.e., the United States of America, is really steeped in the more ancient tradition of thinking that began in Athens and continued through the Christian centuries. Engaging the twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Cavell--in critical conversation with the founding fathers--the author shows that a broad conversation regarding the constitution of society is constitutively present in the public discourse of the people that began to recognize itself during the imperial crisis of the late eighteenth-century British America; that the participants in that conversation have at least an inchoate awareness of society as at once cosmic and anthropological; and that that political society is therefore an apt field of study in and for the general science of order.