Newcomers
Newcomers

Author: Matthew L. Schuerman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 022647626X

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Gentrification is transforming cities, small and large, across the country. Though it’s easy to bemoan the diminished social diversity and transformation of commercial strips that often signify a gentrifying neighborhood, determining who actually benefits and who suffers from this nebulous process can be much harder. The full story of gentrification is rooted in large-scale social and economic forces as well as in extremely local specifics—in short, it’s far more complicated than both its supporters and detractors allow. In Newcomers, journalist Matthew L. Schuerman explains how a phenomenon that began with good intentions has turned into one of the most vexing social problems of our time. He builds a national story using focused histories of northwest Brooklyn, San Francisco’s Mission District, and the onetime site of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, revealing both the commonalities among all three and the place-specific drivers of change. Schuerman argues that gentrification has become a too-easy flashpoint for all kinds of quasi-populist rage and pro-growth boosterism. In Newcomers, he doesn’t condemn gentrifiers as a whole, but rather articulates what it is they actually do, showing not only how community development can turn foul, but also instances when a “better” neighborhood truly results from changes that are good. Schuerman draws no easy conclusions, using his keen reportorial eye to create sharp, but fair, portraits of the people caught up in gentrification, the people who cause it, and its effects on the lives of everyone who calls a city home.

The Rise of the Creative Class
The Rise of the Creative Class

Author: Richard Florida

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781541617759

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World-renowned urbanist Richard Florida's bestselling classic on the transformation of our cities in the twenty-first century-now updated with a new preface In his modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class, urbanist Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class reshaping the twenty-first century's economy, geography, and workplace. This Creative Class is made up of engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets and programmer, whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive, stagnate or decline. Florida offers a detailed occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, examines its global impact, and explores the factors that shape "quality of place" in our changing cities and suburbs. Now updated with a new preface that considers the latest developments in our changing cities, The Rise of the Creative Class is the definitive edition of this foundational book on our contemporary economy.

We Do Our Part
We Do Our Part

Author: Charles Peters

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0679645667

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The legendary editor who founded the Washington Monthly explores “the resentful, unequal, uncaring parts of today’s American culture that Trump has inflamed and that have made Trump possible—and how to cope with them” (The Atlantic). Foreword by Jon Meacham With clarity and wit, the legendary editor Charles Peters explains the chasm that defines us today: the split between the educated elite and the working-class, rural, and religious voters who live in what's condescendingly—but tellingly—known as flyover country. The beginning of the end of Trumpism will come when blue-state sophisticates confront their role in creating the political, economic, and cultural resentments that propelled the forty-fifth president into office. Too many Democrats lost touch with the average American, Peters argues, when the liberal elite became more concerned with being smarter, having better taste, and making more money than with understanding why workers were earning less and hated being regarded with contempt. It was this hatred of being looked down on as bigoted boobs in polyester that united working-class, rural, and evangelical voters, and helped set the stage for the culturally populist backlash of 2016 and beyond. In We Do Our Part, Peters shows us where we have been and where we are going, drawing on his invaluable perspective as a man who has seen America's better days and still believes in the promise that lies ahead. Praise for We Do Our Part “[Peters] weaves a synthesis of mainstream and progressive, centrist and popular thought that would re-anchor the Democratic Party, both in its own traditions and in outreach to the restless, angry swath of the country that elected President Trump. . . . Peters is an American original.”—The Washington Post “A great book about modern American history.”—Chris Matthews, Hardball

How Washington Really Works
How Washington Really Works

Author: Charles Peters

Publisher:

Published: 1983

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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Analyzes the informal value systems, political situations and use of power in Washington that effect the governing of our nation.

The People’s Constitution
The People’s Constitution

Author: John F. Kowal

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 493

ISBN-13: 1620975629

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The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change. The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy. From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.

The Emerging Democratic Majority
The Emerging Democratic Majority

Author: John B. Judis

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2004-02-10

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0743254783

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ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND A WINNER OF THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY'S ANNUAL POLITICAL BOOK AWARD Political experts John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira convincingly use hard data -- demographic, geographic, economic, and political -- to forecast the dawn of a new progressive era. In the 1960s, Kevin Phillips, battling conventional wisdom, correctly foretold the dawn of a new conservative era. His book, The Emerging Republican Majority, became an indispensable guide for all those attempting to understand political change through the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the country in Republican hands, The Emerging Democratic Majority is the indispensable guide to this era. In five well-researched chapters and a new afterword covering the 2002 elections, Judis and Teixeira show how the most dynamic and fastest-growing areas of the country are cultivating a new wave of Democratic voters who embrace what the authors call "progressive centrism" and take umbrage at Republican demands to privatize social security, ban abortion, and cut back environmental regulations. As the GOP continues to be dominated by neoconservatives, the religious right, and corporate influence, this is an essential volume for all those discontented with their narrow agenda -- and a clarion call for a new political order.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

Author: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1541788486

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A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

It Was All a Lie
It Was All a Lie

Author: Stuart Stevens

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593080971

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today “A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." —The New York Times Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

I Am Martin Eisenstadt
I Am Martin Eisenstadt

Author: Martin Eisenstadt

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2009-10-27

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1429966424

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In the days after the 2008 presidential election, we heard that Sarah Palin thought Africa was one big country. We heard that the leak came from Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser. And then, within forty-eight hours, we heard that he was a fraud, a fake, and that Martin Eisenstadt didn't exist. Maybe he doesn't. But in a world where "news" can spread like wildfire on the Internet and a hoax can tell you more about politics than the facts, Martin Eisenstadt—whose blog and think tank fooled the world—has something to tell us. With the savviness of Primary Colors and the playfulness of Forrest Gump, his book is a mix of political intrigue, campaign-trail escapades, and cyberspace detective work. From debate preparation with Sarah Palin to his mother's basement (yes, he still lives at home), from Liberation of Iraq softball games to Saturday Night Live; from his campaign for casinos in the Green Zone to happy hour in Washington, we follow a neocon pundit on his travels. This is his version of the election campaign. Martin Eisenstadt: Hoaxster? Hero? You decide.

Washington Goes to War
Washington Goes to War

Author: David Brinkley

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2020-09-30

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0593319451

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David Brinkley, one of America's most respected and celebrated news commentators, turns his journalistic skills to a personal account of the tumultuous days of World War II in the sleepy little Southern town that was Washington, D.C. Carrying us from the first days of the war through Roosevelt's death and the celebration of VJ Day, Brinkley surrounds us with fascinating people. Here are the charismatic President Roosevelt and the woman spy, code name "Cynthia." Here, too, are the diplomatic set, new Pentagon officials, and old-line society members--aka "Cave Dwellers." We meet the brashest and the brightest who actually ran the government, and the countless men and women who came to support the war effort in any way they could--all seeking to share in the adventure of their generation.