U.S. History After 1865

Dancing in the Dark shows how our worst economic crisis, as it eroded American individualism and punctured the American dream, produced in the 1930s some of the greatest writing, photography, and mass entertainment ever seen in this country.

As the Depression engulfed the United States in the early 1930s, fear and anxiety spread that Mexicans were taking jobs and welfare benefits away from "real" Americans. Massive efforts were launched to get rid of the Mexicans--eventually more than a million were shipped back to Mexico. This book appraises the impact of the forced relocation on both sides of the border.

The civil rights movement that loomed over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin--in Russian--to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929.

We all know Dorothea Lange's iconic photos--the "Migrant Mother" holding her child, the gaunt men forlornly waiting in breadlines--but few know the arc of her extraordinary life. In this sweeping account, renowned historian Linda Gordon charts Lange's journey from polio-ridden child to wife and mother, to San Francisco portrait photographer, to chronicler of the Great Depression and World War II. Gordon uses Lange's life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, re-creating the bohemian world of San Francisco, the Dust Bowl, and the Japanese American internment camps. She explores Lange's growing radicalization as she embraced the democratic power of the camera, and she examines Lange's entire body of work, reproducing more than one hundred images, many of them previously unseen and some of them formerly suppressed. Lange reminds us that beauty can be found in unlikely places, and that to respond to injustice, we must first simply learn how to see it.

At a time when liberalism is in disarray, this vastly illuminating book locates the origins of its crisis. Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal--which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America's economy--gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights.

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, "a towering figure in the study of American and European history" (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power.

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.

In this volume, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the transformation of some of the United States' most significant social policies. Tracing changing ideals of fairness from the 1920s to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs, or "gendered imagination" shaped seemingly neutral social legislation to limit the freedom and equality of women. Law and custom generally sought to protect women from exploitation, and sometimes from employment itself; but at the same time, they assigned the most important benefits to wage work. Most policy makers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women would not be breadwinners.

In Radical Visions and American Dreams, Richard Pells discusses the work of Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, and Orson Welles, among others. He analyzes developments in liberal reform, radical social criticism, literature, the theater, and mass culture, and especially the impact of Hollywood on depression-era America.