Catch HUP author Philip Kasinitz (Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age, co-published with the Russell Sage Foundation) speaking about his work on second-generation immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library's Dweck Center (directions) this Saturday, May 10, at 4pm.
Do it, say Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, co-editors of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, in a new op-ed piece for our friends at the History News Network.
The standard explanation for the rise of conservatism in the US is the "backlash theory," which posits a hard-right turn among important segments of the American electorate in response to the sudden liberalization of American culture that took place during the 1960s. But a new book edited by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer shows us that it's not quite as simple as all that. In Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, a select group of top scholars make the case that it's the 1970s, not the 60s, that is the crucial decade for the rise of conservatism. Essays like Bethany E. Moreton's "Make Payroll, Not War," Alice O'Connor's "Financing the Counterrevolution," and Jeremi Suri's "Détente and Its Discontents" show us in detail how the forces of conservatism responded to the events of the day and rose to the top of American politics. Popmatters calls Rightward Bound "a highly important and useful study, and one that offers scholars a new way of grasping conservatism." If you want to go a little deeper than the backlash theory, Rightward Bound is the place to start.
As a follow-up to Friday's post on American Catholicism, Katherine A. Powers of the Boston Globe has reviewed O'Toole's book, calling it "a penetrating, deftly worked summary of organizational and liturgical developments, formal and informal, in the American Catholic Church with emphasis on the role and influence of the laity." The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America is out now from HUP.
A quick round-up of coverage of Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr., coinciding with the sad anniversary of Dr. King's assassination in Memphis. We've got reviews from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and a revealing interview with Rieder in Pine Magazine.
A plug for The Sixties Unplugged in the March 16 edition of the Boston Globe's "Shelf Life" column. The book's full title is The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, and let's just say it's not your average wistful remembrance of the "glory days." Instead DeGroot aims to present a fuller portrait of those turbulent years, one that acknowledges the fact that the "Ballad of the Green Beret" outsold "Give Peace a Chance" and that the
Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by the crew-cut Young Americans
for Freedom.
The always-witty New York magazine reviews the new HBO series "John Adams," opining in the process that "anyone who’s dipped into the thousand letters that passed between John and Abigail during their 54 years of marriage knows that Abigail was at least as smart as James Madison." Well what they didn't tell you was that those very letters are available in toto from your friends at HUP, in a brand-new edition titled My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. The book has been a smash; check out the HUP page for extra features including audio interviews and essays from the editors.
Check out this interview with HUP author Steven Mintz on Judith Warner's "Domestic Disturbances" blog, hosted at the New York Times website. Mintz is the author of the widely-acclaimed Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, winner of the prestigious Merle Curti Award, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.
So says Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer, in an op-ed co-authored with his colleague Sean Wilentz in Sunday's Washington Post "Opinion" section. Zelizer is the co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, a penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history drawn by some of the foremost scholars of a period whose historical interpretation is taking shape before our eyes.
With There Will Be Blood potentially set to rein in several awards at a certain upcoming ceremony, Ernest Freeberg takes to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to ask us to pour a little oil out for Upton Sinclair, who wrote the book--1927's Oil!--that inspired the film, a bit too loosely, in Freeberg's opinion.
Continuing his engagement with an American radical tradition we often seem all too willing to forget, Freeberg has written Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (coming May 2008), a wonderfully accessible history of American socialist leader Debs' 1920 campaign to go from the jailhouse to the White House, during which he garnered a million votes and unleashed a nationwide protest, by no means confined to the "radical left," against the government's ruthless suppression of dissenting views during the First World War (or "The Great War," as it was known at the time). Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime.
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