Perspectives on Modern America Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

by Sitkoff, Harvard

• ISBN13: 9780195128659
• ISBN10: 0195128656
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-09-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, Harvard Sitkoff brings together some of America's most distinguished scholars to survey and analyze the twentieth century. The impressive list of contributors includes Paul Boyer, Lizabeth Cohen, Sara M. Evans,Jacqueline Jones, William E. Leuchtenburg, and Charles Payne. Each contributor has written a broadly interpretive essay on a key aspect of American life and how it has changed over the past one hundred years, offering vivid end-of-the-century snapshots of our past troubles and triumphs-of thepeople, ideas, events, and developments that mattered most. The essays address a wide range of political, social, and economic issues including the history of liberalism and conservatism; the labor movement and the distribution of wealth; immigration and ethnicity; the status of women and AfricanAmericans; changes in the South and the West; consumer culture; the federal government; foreign policy; religion; and American cultural and intellectual life. The book includes astute portraits of such historical turning points as the Progressive era, the Great Depression and Second World War,American society in the 1960s, and the Reagan revolution. It also includes thoughtful essays on the growth and decline of organized labor, the limits of the American welfare state, the persistent systems of inequality, and the means employed to resist oppression. Offering a challenging andenlightening assessment of the past one hundred years, Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century is an essential text for undergraduates in twentieth-century American history and will also appeal to general readers.

Table of Contents

Contributors	vii
Introduction	1	(8)
Harvard Sitkoff
The Twentieth-Century Presidency	9	(24)
William E. Leuchtenburg
Piety and Property: Conservatism and Right-Wing Movements in the Twentieth Century	33	(22)
Lisa McGirr
Twentieth-Century Liberalisms: Transformations of an Ideology	55	(25)
Cheryl Greenberg
The Republic as Empire: American Foreign Policy in the ``American Century''	80	(21)
Robert J. McMahon
Work Places: The Economy and the Changing Landscape of Labor, 1900--2000	101	(24)
Kevin Boyle
The History and Politics of Poverty in Twentieth-Century America	125	(20)
Jacqueline Jones
Citizens and Consumers in the Century of Mass Consumption	145	(17)
Lizabeth Cohen
American Women in the Twentieth Century	162	(15)
Sara M. Evans
``You duh Man!'' African Americans in the Twentieth Century	177	(25)
Charles Payne
From the Benighted South to the Sunbelt: The South in the Twentieth Century	202	(25)
Nancy MacLean
Democracy, Citizenship, and Race: The West in the Twentieth Century	227	(20)
Peggy Pascoe
The Chameleon with Nine Lives: American Religion in the Twentieth Century	247	(28)
Paul Boyer
Immigration and Ethnicity in the American Century	275	(21)
Gary Gerstle
The Iron Cage and Its Alternatives in Twentieth-Century American Thought	296	(18)
Jackson Lears
Index	314