Offering a fresh portrait of Lincoln that helps make sense of his many contradictions, the author describes a fervent idealist and a crafty politician with a remarkable gift for strategy.
Named on the 2013 list of University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools Abraham Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, yet his personal views on race have long been debated. Since his death, his legend has been shadowed by the mystery of his true stance toward non-whites. While Lincoln took many actions to fight slavery throughout his political career, his famously crafted speeches can be interpreted in different ways: at times his words suggest personal bigotry, but at other times he sounds like an enemy of racists. In Lincoln and Race, Richard Striner takes on one of the most sensitive subjects of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, exploring in depth Lincoln’s mixed record and writings on the issue of race. Striner gives fair hearing to two prevailing theories about Lincoln’s seemingly contradictory words and actions: Did Lincoln fight a long-term struggle to overcome his personal racism? Or were his racist comments a calculated act of political deception? Beginning with an exploration of the historical context of Lincoln’s attitudes toward race in the years before his presidency, Striner details the ambiguity surrounding the politician’s participation in the Free Soil Movement and his fight to keep slavery from expanding into the West. He explores Lincoln’s espousal of colonization—the controversial idea that freed slaves should be resettled in a foreign land—as a voluntary measure for black people who found the prospect attractive. The author analyzes some of Lincoln’s most racially charged speeches and details Lincoln’s presidential words and policies on race and the hotbed issue of voting rights for African Americans during the last years of the president’s life.\ A brief but comprehensive look into one of the most contentious quandaries about Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln and Race invites readers to delve into the mind, heart, and motives of one of America’s most fascinating and complex leaders. Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition
Dwight D. Eisenhower is one of America’s greatest and least appreciated presidents. Behind the demeanor that made Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower so popular was a cold-as-steel intelligence that kept his country prosperous and out of danger. Because his operating methods were so deeply hidden, it is only in the past few decades that historians have grasped the full extent of his achievements. Ike in Love and War shows the hidden sacrifices that made Eisenhower remarkable. It probes the mission that was driving him: the quest to reconcile his skill as a fighter with his mother’s pacifism, which led him to become the greatest peacekeeper of his age. More than other biographies, this one explores the man’s emotions. It puts the long-standing dispute about his romance with Kay Summersby in a new perspective: tragedy. Here is the story of a unique American, the passion and brilliance he kept concealed, the ambition that propelled him, the sacrifices that wore down his health, and the sheer self-mastery that made it all look easy. It never was. His achievements are timely as Americans face unprecedented dangers. This is the story of the world Ike made, the things he achieved, and the surprises that may still be in store for us as we strive to understand his life in full.
A radical reinterpretation of America’s greatest president. Where previous Lincoln biographers describe his temperament as “moderate,” “passive,” or even “conservative,”historian Richard Striner offers a stunningly original perspectivethat will shed significant new light on one of the most studied figures in American history. Striner shows Lincoln’s audacity as no other book has ever done. By emphasizing the workings of Lincoln’s mind—stressing his cunning, his overall honesty, strategic thinking—even his ability to change his mind—Striner looks anew at many topics and themes important to Lincoln’s story that either revise or add new meaning to the work of previous biographers. His insights into Lincoln’s life, but also into antebellum America, and the military and political history of the Civil War, make this book indispensable for well-read armchair historians, seasoned students of Lincoln, the Civil War, or the American presidency and newcomers alike.
Providing a unique perspective on economic history and policy, this book shows how a daring method once recommended by top economists could be adapted to help America pay for the things it needs. Written in a crisp, fast-paced style, this groundbreaking work presents an in-depth account of monetary theory and practice as the basis for its suggestion of a new system of money creation. First, the economic history of the United States is explored, with special emphasis on the years from the Civil War to the Great Depression. The proposal that follows, based on a long-lost method of money creation, is related to that context, as well as to America's current situation, both economic and political. Readers will learn how banks have created most of America's money supply since the nation's founding, but also about experiments with an alternative system in which the government plays that role. The crux of the book is an examination of the way in which the two systems could be harmonized to pay for public necessities without increasing taxes or national debt. The proposed new system of money creation would incorporate two complementary money streams—the existing banking system run by the Federal Reserve and a new stream of money created by Congress. By integrating the "Greenback" method with the fiscal and monetary status quo, the author argues, the United States could spend its way back to greatness.
The debate is as old as the American Republic and as current as this morning's headlines. Should a president employ the powers of the federal government to advance our national development and increase the influence and power of the United States around the world? Under what circumstances? What sort of balance should the president achieve between competing visions and values on the path to change? Over the course of American history, why have some presidents succeeded brilliantly in applying their power and influence while others have failed miserably? In Lincoln's Way, historian Richard Striner tells the story of America's rise to global power and the presidential leaders who envisioned it and made it happen. From Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt within the Republican Party, the legacy was passed along to FDR—the Democratic Roosevelt—who bequeathed it to Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Six presidents—three from each party—helped America fulfill its great potential. Their leadership spanned the huge gulf that exists between our ideological cultures: they drew from both conservative and liberal ideas, thus consolidating powerful centrist governance. No creed of mere "government for government's sake," their program was judicious: it used government for national necessities. But it also brought inspiring results, thus refuting the age-old American ultra-libertarian notion that "the government that governs best, governs least." In a forceful narrative blending intellectual history and presidential biography, Striner presents the legacy in full. An important challenge to conventional wisdom, Lincoln's Way offers both an intriguing way of looking at the past and a much-needed lens through which to view the present. As a result, the book could change the way we think about the future.
Hard Times presents a comprehensive account of economic depressions in America, from colonial times to the “great recession” that began in 2008. Written in crisp prose for a general audience, the book synthesizes a narrative account—presenting the known facts about how particular depressions started, the effects upon people in different walks of life, the policy debates about what (if anything) to do in order to ameliorate the situation, and how these depressions ended—with analytical commentary on the economic patterns underlying and transcending depressions and the debates among economists and policymakers in regard to their causes. While these economic downturns have created suffering and hardship, Striner also conveys how Americans have always endured and rebounded from hard times.
This book is a story of Presidential failure, a chronicle of Woodrow Wilson’s miscalculations in war, and a harrowing account of the process through which an intelligent American leader fell to pieces under a burden he could not bear. Historian Richard Striner argues persuasively that President Woodrow Wilson failed his responsibilities as a wartime leader in World War I. With the patience of a prosecuting attorney, Striner presents the facts of Wilson’s wartime situation, considers the options that were open to him, explains his decision-making process, and then critiques his failure to engage in sufficient contingency planning as events played out. Striner interweaves narration, analytical commentary, and quotations from Wilson’s advisors and contemporaries to convey the feeling of history as sensed by the people who were making it. Striner argues that as America entered the war, Wilson’s character flaws emerged, worsened by medical conditions that clinicians have diagnosed as having reached the point of dementia by 1919. This tragic story of presidential leadership failure will be of interest to all readers of America’s military history and the American presidency.
To fully understand and appreciate Abraham Lincoln’s legacy, it is important to examine the society that influenced the life, character, and leadership of the man who would become the Great Emancipator. Editors Joseph R. Fornieri and Sara Vaughn Gabbard have done just that in Lincoln’s America: 1809–1865, a collection of original essays by ten eminent historians that place Lincoln within his nineteenth-century cultural context. Among the topics explored in Lincoln’s America are religion, education, middle-class family life, the antislavery movement, politics, and law. Of particular interest are the transition of American intellectual and philosophical thought from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and the influence of this evolution on Lincoln's own ideas. By examining aspects of Lincoln’s life—his personal piety in comparison with the beliefs of his contemporaries, his success in self-schooling when frontier youths had limited opportunities for a formal education, his marriage and home life in Springfield, and his legal career—in light of broader cultural contexts such as the development of democracy, the growth of visual arts, the question of slaves as property, and French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on America, the contributors delve into the mythical Lincoln of folklore and discover a developing political mind and a changing nation. As Lincoln’s America shows, the sociopolitical culture of nineteenth-century America was instrumental in shaping Lincoln’s character and leadership. The essays in this volume paint a vivid picture of a young nation and its sixteenth president, arguably its greatest leader.
This is a definitive study of films that have been built around the themes of love, death, and the afterlife—films about lovers who meet again (and love again) in heaven, via reincarnation, or through other kinds of after-death encounters. Far more than books about mere ghosts in the movies or religion in movies, Love in the Afterlife presents a complex but highly distinctive and unique pattern—the love-death-afterlife pattern—as it was handed down by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (in the Isis and Orpheus myths, for example), developed by Freud and his followers in the duality of “Eros and Thanatos,” and then featured in popular movies from the 1920s to the recent past. Among its other qualities, Love in the Afterlife may encourage readers to look at movies differently and reflect upon the possibility that other patterns in cinema may have gone undetected for years. Furthermore, this book will show how the love-death-afterlife theme found its way into all sorts of different film types: melodramas, comedies, war films, horror films, film noir, and other genres. The book will be well illustrated and quotations from film reviews will enliven its pages. A long appendix gives production data on almost sixty individual films.
Though themes of love, death and the supernatural are mainstays in the history of cinema, this text represents the first scholarly work to address movies that explore all three. Twenty-two films are covered in short chapters, from The Mummy through What Dreams May Come. A plot synopsis is included for each film, as well as a critical analysis exploring the relationship of each to major philosophical and literary themes. Finally, an exploration of the critical response to each film addresses the genre's reception by the public.
Art Deco buildings still lift their modernist principles and streamlined chrome into the skies of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Second Place Winner of the Design and Effectiveness Award of the Washington Publishers The bold lines and decorative details of Art Deco have stood the test of time since one of its first appearances in the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. Reflecting the confidence of modern mentality—streamlined, chrome, and glossy black—along with simple elegance, sharp lines, and cosmopolitan aspirations, Art Deco carried surprises, juxtaposing designs growing out of speed (racecars and airplanes) with ancient Egyptian and Mexican details, visual references to Russian ballet, and allusions to Asian art. While most often associated with such masterworks as New York’s Chrysler Building, Art Deco is evident in the architecture of many U.S. cities, including Washington and Baltimore. By updating the findings of two regional studies from the 1980s with new research, Richard Striner and Melissa Blair explore the most significant Art Deco buildings still standing and mourn those that have been lost. This comparative study illuminates contrasts between the white-collar New Deal capital and the blue-collar industrial port city, while noting such striking commonalities as the regional patterns of Baltimore’s John Jacob Zinc, who designed Art Deco cinemas in both cities. Uneven preservation efforts have allowed significant losses, but surviving examples of Art Deco architecture include the Bank of America building in Baltimore (now better known as 10 Light Street) and the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington. Although possibly less glamorous or flamboyant than exemplars in New York or Miami, the authors find these structures—along with apartment houses and government buildings—typical of the Deco architecture found throughout the United States and well worth preserving. Demonstrating how an international design movement found its way into ordinary places, this study will appeal to architectural historians, as well as regional residents interested in developing a greater appreciation of Art Deco architecture in the mid-Atlantic region.
“No Size Fits All” is a book whose time has come––a book that offers a proposal that could revolutionize public school policies in the United States at the federal, state and local levels. The book calls upon Congress to require all public school systems that benefit from federal funding to offer parents and children a choice of alternative schools, some of which would use the time-tested Montessori, Waldorf and Sudbury methods to give American students more freedom in determining what they study and when. These alternative schools would be exempt from the broadly unpopular Common Core testing regime.
Spirituality for the Independent Thinker is a tough-minded but inspirational guide to the ways in which science, philosophy, and everyday experience converge into spiritual questions. It takes one of the greatest of all possible questions—why does anything exist instead of nothing—and draws from it a wide-awake spirituality that does not require meditation and does not lead to any bossy rules.
Spirituality for the Independent Thinker is a tough-minded but inspirational guide to the ways in which science, philosophy, and everyday experience converge into spiritual questions. It takes one of the greatest of all possible questions--why does anything exist instead of nothing--and draws from it a wide-awake spirituality that does not require meditation and does not lead to any bossy rules.
Streamlined shapes, shimmering ornament, setback skyscrapers, zigzags and ziggurats - Art Deco captured the spirit of the Jazz Age from the 1920s to the 1930s and symbolized everything that was exotic and progressive about the new century. As Richard Striner explains in this entertaining sampler, Art Deco's repertoire came from divergent sources: classical antiquity, contemporary visions of machines and speed, and futuristic fantasies. The result was an energetic, truly modern way of designing everything from buildings to movie sets to table-top radios." "Art Deco opens the doors into this jazzy, streamlined world by exploring the interwar era - its architecture, furnishings, fashions, arts, designers, and key buildings - all in an inviting format that brings this era back to life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
A radical reinterpretation of America’s greatest president. Where previous Lincoln biographers describe his temperament as “moderate,” “passive,” or even “conservative,”historian Richard Striner offers a stunningly original perspectivethat will shed significant new light on one of the most studied figures in American history. Striner shows Lincoln’s audacity as no other book has ever done. By emphasizing the workings of Lincoln’s mind—stressing his cunning, his overall honesty, strategic thinking—even his ability to change his mind—Striner looks anew at many topics and themes important to Lincoln’s story that either revise or add new meaning to the work of previous biographers. His insights into Lincoln’s life, but also into antebellum America, and the military and political history of the Civil War, make this book indispensable for well-read armchair historians, seasoned students of Lincoln, the Civil War, or the American presidency and newcomers alike.
Lincoln is the single most compelling figure in our history, but also one of the most enigmatic. Was he the Great Emancipator, a man of deep convictions who ended slavery in the United States, or simply a reluctant politician compelled by the force of events to free the slaves? In Father Abraham, Richard Striner offers a fresh portrait of Lincoln, one that helps us make sense of his many contradictions. Striner shows first that, if you examine the speeches that Lincoln made in the 1850s, you will have no doubt of his passion to end slavery. These speeches illuminate the anger, vehemence, and sheer brilliance of candidate Lincoln, who worked up crowds with charismatic fervor as he gathered a national following. But if he felt so passionately about abolition, why did he wait so long to release the Emancipation Proclamation? As Striner points out, politics is the art of the possible, and Lincoln was a consummate politician, a shrewd manipulator who cloaked his visionary ethics in the more pragmatic garb of the coalition-builder. He was at bottom a Machiavellian prince for a democratic age. When secession began, Lincoln used the battle cry of saving the Union to build a power base, one that would eventually break the slave-holding states forever. Striner argues that Lincoln was a rare man indeed: a fervent idealist and a crafty politician with a remarkable gift for strategy. It was the harmonious blend of these two qualities, Striner concludes, that made Lincoln's role in ending slavery so fundamental.
Art Deco buildings still lift their modernist principles and streamlined chrome into the skies of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Second Place Winner of the Design and Effectiveness Award of the Washington Publishers The bold lines and decorative details of Art Deco have stood the test of time since one of its first appearances in the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. Reflecting the confidence of modern mentality—streamlined, chrome, and glossy black—along with simple elegance, sharp lines, and cosmopolitan aspirations, Art Deco carried surprises, juxtaposing designs growing out of speed (racecars and airplanes) with ancient Egyptian and Mexican details, visual references to Russian ballet, and allusions to Asian art. While most often associated with such masterworks as New York’s Chrysler Building, Art Deco is evident in the architecture of many U.S. cities, including Washington and Baltimore. By updating the findings of two regional studies from the 1980s with new research, Richard Striner and Melissa Blair explore the most significant Art Deco buildings still standing and mourn those that have been lost. This comparative study illuminates contrasts between the white-collar New Deal capital and the blue-collar industrial port city, while noting such striking commonalities as the regional patterns of Baltimore’s John Jacob Zinc, who designed Art Deco cinemas in both cities. Uneven preservation efforts have allowed significant losses, but surviving examples of Art Deco architecture include the Bank of America building in Baltimore (now better known as 10 Light Street) and the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington. Although possibly less glamorous or flamboyant than exemplars in New York or Miami, the authors find these structures—along with apartment houses and government buildings—typical of the Deco architecture found throughout the United States and well worth preserving. Demonstrating how an international design movement found its way into ordinary places, this study will appeal to architectural historians, as well as regional residents interested in developing a greater appreciation of Art Deco architecture in the mid-Atlantic region.
The debate is as old as the American Republic and as current as this morning's headlines. Should a president employ the powers of the federal government to advance our national development and increase the influence and power of the United States around the world? Under what circumstances? What sort of balance should the president achieve between competing visions and values on the path to change? Over the course of American history, why have some presidents succeeded brilliantly in applying their power and influence while others have failed miserably? In Lincoln's Way, historian Richard Striner tells the story of America's rise to global power and the presidential leaders who envisioned it and made it happen. From Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt within the Republican Party, the legacy was passed along to FDR—the Democratic Roosevelt—who bequeathed it to Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Six presidents—three from each party—helped America fulfill its great potential. Their leadership spanned the huge gulf that exists between our ideological cultures: they drew from both conservative and liberal ideas, thus consolidating powerful centrist governance. No creed of mere "government for government's sake," their program was judicious: it used government for national necessities. But it also brought inspiring results, thus refuting the age-old American ultra-libertarian notion that "the government that governs best, governs least." In a forceful narrative blending intellectual history and presidential biography, Striner presents the legacy in full. An important challenge to conventional wisdom, Lincoln's Way offers both an intriguing way of looking at the past and a much-needed lens through which to view the present. As a result, the book could change the way we think about the future.
This book is a story of Presidential failure, a chronicle of Woodrow Wilson’s miscalculations in war, and a harrowing account of the process through which an intelligent American leader fell to pieces under a burden he could not bear. Historian Richard Striner argues persuasively that President Woodrow Wilson failed his responsibilities as a wartime leader in World War I. With the patience of a prosecuting attorney, Striner presents the facts of Wilson’s wartime situation, considers the options that were open to him, explains his decision-making process, and then critiques his failure to engage in sufficient contingency planning as events played out. Striner interweaves narration, analytical commentary, and quotations from Wilson’s advisors and contemporaries to convey the feeling of history as sensed by the people who were making it. Striner argues that as America entered the war, Wilson’s character flaws emerged, worsened by medical conditions that clinicians have diagnosed as having reached the point of dementia by 1919. This tragic story of presidential leadership failure will be of interest to all readers of America’s military history and the American presidency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is one of America’s greatest and least appreciated presidents. Behind the demeanor that made Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower so popular was a cold-as-steel intelligence that kept his country prosperous and out of danger. Because his operating methods were so deeply hidden, it is only in the past few decades that historians have grasped the full extent of his achievements. Ike in Love and War shows the hidden sacrifices that made Eisenhower remarkable. It probes the mission that was driving him: the quest to reconcile his skill as a fighter with his mother’s pacifism, which led him to become the greatest peacekeeper of his age. More than other biographies, this one explores the man’s emotions. It puts the long-standing dispute about his romance with Kay Summersby in a new perspective: tragedy. Here is the story of a unique American, the passion and brilliance he kept concealed, the ambition that propelled him, the sacrifices that wore down his health, and the sheer self-mastery that made it all look easy. It never was. His achievements are timely as Americans face unprecedented dangers. This is the story of the world Ike made, the things he achieved, and the surprises that may still be in store for us as we strive to understand his life in full.
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