How States Shaped Postwar America

How States Shaped Postwar America PDF

Author: Nicholas Dagen Bloom

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 022649831X

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The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and ’70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action—How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.

Food Power

Food Power PDF

Author: Bryan L. McDonald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0190600683

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Debates during the postwar years about how food power could help the United States achieve goals such as stability, prosperity, and security were part of a larger conversation about the role of food in the security of states, communities, and individuals.0America helped build a new, postwar food system based on the steadying influence of American agricultural surpluses that helped maintain stable prices and food availability. This system averted a global-scale food crisis for almost three decades. The end of this food system in the early 1970s ushered in a much more unstable period in global food relations. 'Food power' argues that efforts to both interpret America's role in the world during the mid-twentieth century and to address contemporary food problems can be strengthened by understanding more fully the ways postwar American policymakers and experts sought to shape the politics of security and prosperity by linking people and places around the world through food.

Soft Power and Its Perils

Soft Power and Its Perils PDF

Author: Takeshi Matsuda

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780804700405

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An examination of the cultural aspects of U.S.-Japan relations during the postwar Occupation and the early Cold War

Memory and Power in Post-War Europe

Memory and Power in Post-War Europe PDF

Author: Jan-Werner Müller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-08-29

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521000703

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How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigates how memory is officially recast, personally reworked and often violently re-instilled after wars, and, above all, the ways memory shapes present power constellations. The chapters combine theoretical innovation in their approach to the study of memory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1989.

The Business of Black Power

The Business of Black Power PDF

Author: Laura Warren Hill

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1580464033

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Explores business development in the Black power era and the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement. The Business of Black Power emphasizes the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement and explores the myriad forms of business development in the Black power era. This volume charts a new course forBlack power studies and business history, exploring both the business ventures that Black power fostered and the impact of Black power on the nation's business world. Black activists pressed business leaders, corporations, and various levels of government into supporting a range of economic development ventures, from Black entrepreneurship, to grassroots experiments in economic self-determination, to indigenous attempts to rebuild inner-city markets in thewake of disinvestment. They pioneered new economic and development strategies, often in concert with corporate executives and public officials. Yet these same actors also engaged in fierce debates over the role of business in strengthening the movement, and some African Americans outright rejected capitalism or collaboration with business. The ten scholars in this collection bring fresh analysis to this complex intersection of African American and business history to reveal how Black power advocates, or those purporting a Black power agenda, engaged business to advance their economic, political, and social goals. They show the business of Black power taking place in thestreets, boardrooms, journals and periodicals, corporations, courts, and housing projects of America. In short, few were left untouched by the influence of this movement. Laura Warren Hill is assistant professor of history at Bloomfield College. Julia Rabig is a lecturer at Dartmouth College.

A Consumers' Republic

A Consumers' Republic PDF

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-12-24

Total Pages: 578

ISBN-13: 0307555364

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In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream. Material goods came to embody the promise of America, and the power of consumers to purchase everything from vacuum cleaners to convertibles gave rise to the power of citizens to purchase political influence and effect social change. Yet despite undeniable successes and unprecedented affluence, mass consumption also fostered economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. In charting the complex legacy of our “Consumers’ Republic” Lizabeth Cohen has written a bold, encompassing, and profoundly influential book.

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America PDF

Author: Joel Dinerstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 022659906X

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Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

A Righteous Smokescreen

A Righteous Smokescreen PDF

Author: Sam Lebovic

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0226816087

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"In the years immediately after World War II, the United States broadcast to the world not just its power but its values. Sam Lebovic here focuses on one of those professed ideals: the free flow of information. That trope became a proxy for America's special brand of imperial democracy, and it both abetted and constituted the spread of American culture and values worldwide. By studying visa and passport policy, funding for educational exchange and school construction, the purchase of land for embassies, the rights of international correspondents, and other mundane matters, Lebovic reveals globalization as a consequence of "quotidian world-ordering," not of high-minded abstractions like liberal internationalism"--

No Coward Soldiers

No Coward Soldiers PDF

Author: Waldo E. Martin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005-02-28

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9780674015074

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In this exploration of the 20th-century civil rights and black power eras, Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle. In freedom songs, in the exuberance of an Aretha Franklin concert, in Faith Ringgold’s exploration of race and sexuality, the personal and social became the political.