Collected works by the acclaimed political scientist, showcasing his thoughts on education, religion, literature, as well as twentieth-century figures. In 1973, Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933–2005) published The Idea of Fraternity in America, a groundbreaking book that argued for an alternative to America’s dominant philosophy of liberalism. This alternative tradition emphasized that community and fraternal bonds were as vital to the process of maintaining political liberty as was individual liberty. McWilliams expanded on this idea throughout his prolific career as a teacher, writer, and activist, promoting a unique definition of American democracy. In The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, editors Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams, daughter of the famed intellectual, have assembled key essays, articles, reviews, and lectures that trace McWilliams’s evolution as a scholar and explain his often controversial views on education, religion, and literature. The book also showcases his thoughts and opinions on prominent twentieth-century figures such as George Orwell and Leo Strauss. The first comprehensive volume of Wilson Carey McWilliams’ collected writings, The Democratic Soul will be welcomed by scholars of political science and American political thought as a long-overdue contribution to the field. “Wilson Carey McWilliams was a seer, a small d-democrat, an artist who valued eloquent prose, and one of his era’s shrewdest students of American politics. May this collection of some of his very best work introduce him to a new generation eager for a vision that is at once progressive, communitarian and deeply grounded in the realities of American history. McWiliams brought not only deep knowledge to his work, but also wisdom, compassion and a stubborn prophet’s sense of what is right, what is just, and what is good.” —E.J. Dionne, author of Why Americans Hate Politics “A treasury of thoughts and arguments from articles of the late Carey McWilliams. All are still timely, still relevant to American politics today. Political philosophy as he practiced it never goes out of style. How his keen eye and sturdy wisdom are missed!” —Harvey Mansfield, professor of Government, Harvard University “In addition to his work on the Founding, McWilliams was committed to writing and teaching about contemporary politics. No one was better at presenting to students the entirety of American political thought, as a single phenomenon linking past and present, a long story with a known beginning but an unknown end. These qualities come through very clearly in this collection of his essays.” —Dennis Hale, professor of political science, Boston College
Why in America should the most sinister of European social diseases have taken root? Why should that disease have spread from its seemingly anachronistic beginning in the Gilded Age until it infected many of our great magazines and newspapers? Until it determined not only where a man might stay the night, but where he got his education and how he earned his living? This book answers such questions by exposing the myths with which the anti-Semite surrounds his position. By taking away the "mask of privilege" it reveals the source of such prejudice for what it is--the determination of the forces of special privilege, with their hangers-on, to maintain their select and exclusive status regardless of the consequences to other human beings. Like Carey McWilliams's other books on minorities in America, 'A Mask for Privilege' reveals the facts of discrimination so that the fogs of prejudice may be dispersed by the truth. It traces the growth of discrimination and persecution in America from 1877 to 1947, shows why Jews are such good scapegoats, and contrasts the Jewish stereotype--"too pushing, too cunning" with that of other minority groups. Then it looks at the anti-Semitic personality and concludes, with Sartre, that here is "a man who is afraid"--of himself. In his stirring new introduction, Wilson Carey McWilliams calls this a work of recovery "evoking names and moods and incidents now either half-forgotten or lost to memory." This brilliant analysis of anti-Semitism is a documented and forceful attempt to inform Americans about the danger of the undemocratic, antisocial practices in their midst, and to suggest a positive program to arrest a course too similar to that which led to the Holocaust. It transcends majority-minority relations and becomes an analysis of antidemocratic practices, which affect the whole fabric of American life.
A biography of Woody Guthrie, a singer who wrote over 3,000 folk songs and ballads as he traveled around the United States, including "This Land is Your Land" and "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh.
Wherever we turn in America today, we see angry citizens disparaging government, distrusting each other, avoiding civic life, and professing a hatred of politics and politicians of all stripes. Is our situation hopeless? Wilson Carey McWilliams wouldn't think so. McWilliams, one of the preeminent political theorists of the twentieth century, was closely identified with an ambitious intellectual enterprise to reclaim and restore democracy as a source of national veneration, inspiration, and salvation. Better than most of his contemporaries, he understood and illuminated the major sources of the political malaise that afflicts our nation's citizens. For him, the key to reinvigorating our republic depends on our ability to reclaim the "second voice" of American politics-the one that emanates from our literature, churches, families, and schools and speaks out on behalf of community and civic responsibility. The writings gathered here cohere into McWilliams's most mature and most developed philosophical statement-the distillation of a distinguished career of thinking about the American experiment. From insights into "The Framers and the Constitution" to reflections on "America as Technological Republic," he shares a love for an older tradition of democracy, one based upon the active self-rule of self-governing citizens. "Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights" and "On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community" may force readers to adjust their understandings of American politics, while "Democracy and the Citizen" and "Political Parties as Civic Associations" will resound for observers of the current political scene, regardless of party. Carey McWilliams not only offers a prescient analysis of the current crisis in American citizenship and governance but also shows us what sources within the American tradition might exist to save us from our worst selves. His broad and iconoclastic approach to American politics should appeal to both conservatives and liberals-to anyone, in fact, who cares about the state of democracy in America.
Collected works by the acclaimed political scientist, showcasing his thoughts on education, religion, literature, as well as twentieth-century figures. In 1973, Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933–2005) published The Idea of Fraternity in America, a groundbreaking book that argued for an alternative to America’s dominant philosophy of liberalism. This alternative tradition emphasized that community and fraternal bonds were as vital to the process of maintaining political liberty as was individual liberty. McWilliams expanded on this idea throughout his prolific career as a teacher, writer, and activist, promoting a unique definition of American democracy. In The Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, editors Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams, daughter of the famed intellectual, have assembled key essays, articles, reviews, and lectures that trace McWilliams’s evolution as a scholar and explain his often controversial views on education, religion, and literature. The book also showcases his thoughts and opinions on prominent twentieth-century figures such as George Orwell and Leo Strauss. The first comprehensive volume of Wilson Carey McWilliams’ collected writings, The Democratic Soul will be welcomed by scholars of political science and American political thought as a long-overdue contribution to the field. “Wilson Carey McWilliams was a seer, a small d-democrat, an artist who valued eloquent prose, and one of his era’s shrewdest students of American politics. May this collection of some of his very best work introduce him to a new generation eager for a vision that is at once progressive, communitarian and deeply grounded in the realities of American history. McWiliams brought not only deep knowledge to his work, but also wisdom, compassion and a stubborn prophet’s sense of what is right, what is just, and what is good.” —E.J. Dionne, author of Why Americans Hate Politics “A treasury of thoughts and arguments from articles of the late Carey McWilliams. All are still timely, still relevant to American politics today. Political philosophy as he practiced it never goes out of style. How his keen eye and sturdy wisdom are missed!” —Harvey Mansfield, professor of Government, Harvard University “In addition to his work on the Founding, McWilliams was committed to writing and teaching about contemporary politics. No one was better at presenting to students the entirety of American political thought, as a single phenomenon linking past and present, a long story with a known beginning but an unknown end. These qualities come through very clearly in this collection of his essays.” —Dennis Hale, professor of political science, Boston College
Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 contains a selection of the literary critic and author Edmund Wilson's personal correspondence. As editor Leon Edel states in his introduction to these papers: "More than a sampling, the present volume provides sufficient material to show the energy and vitality of Wilson's professional relations with friends and acquaintances; it shows even more the continuity of his imaginative life from his youth to the end.
Why in America should the most sinister of European social diseases have taken root? Why should that disease have spread from its seemingly anachronistic beginning in the Gilded Age until it infected many of our great magazines and newspapers? Until it determined not only where a man might stay the night, but where he got his education and how he earned his living? This book answers such questions by exposing the myths with which the anti-Semite surrounds his position. By taking away the "mask of privilege" it reveals the source of such prejudice for what it is--the determination of the forces of special privilege, with their hangers-on, to maintain their select and exclusive status regardless of the consequences to other human beings. Like Carey McWilliams's other books on minorities in America, 'A Mask for Privilege' reveals the facts of discrimination so that the fogs of prejudice may be dispersed by the truth. It traces the growth of discrimination and persecution in America from 1877 to 1947, shows why Jews are such good scapegoats, and contrasts the Jewish stereotype--"too pushing, too cunning" with that of other minority groups. Then it looks at the anti-Semitic personality and concludes, with Sartre, that here is "a man who is afraid"--of himself. In his stirring new introduction, Wilson Carey McWilliams calls this a work of recovery "evoking names and moods and incidents now either half-forgotten or lost to memory." This brilliant analysis of anti-Semitism is a documented and forceful attempt to inform Americans about the danger of the undemocratic, antisocial practices in their midst, and to suggest a positive program to arrest a course too similar to that which led to the Holocaust. It transcends majority-minority relations and becomes an analysis of antidemocratic practices, which affect the whole fabric of American life.
Wherever we turn in America today, we see angry citizens disparaging government, distrusting each other, avoiding civic life, and professing a hatred of politics and politicians of all stripes. Is our situation hopeless? Wilson Carey McWilliams wouldn't think so. McWilliams, one of the preeminent political theorists of the twentieth century, was closely identified with an ambitious intellectual enterprise to reclaim and restore democracy as a source of national veneration, inspiration, and salvation. Better than most of his contemporaries, he understood and illuminated the major sources of the political malaise that afflicts our nation's citizens. For him, the key to reinvigorating our republic depends on our ability to reclaim the "second voice" of American politics-the one that emanates from our literature, churches, families, and schools and speaks out on behalf of community and civic responsibility. The writings gathered here cohere into McWilliams's most mature and most developed philosophical statement-the distillation of a distinguished career of thinking about the American experiment. From insights into "The Framers and the Constitution" to reflections on "America as Technological Republic," he shares a love for an older tradition of democracy, one based upon the active self-rule of self-governing citizens. "Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights" and "On Equality as the Moral Foundation for Community" may force readers to adjust their understandings of American politics, while "Democracy and the Citizen" and "Political Parties as Civic Associations" will resound for observers of the current political scene, regardless of party. Carey McWilliams not only offers a prescient analysis of the current crisis in American citizenship and governance but also shows us what sources within the American tradition might exist to save us from our worst selves. His broad and iconoclastic approach to American politics should appeal to both conservatives and liberals-to anyone, in fact, who cares about the state of democracy in America.
States like Russia and Ukraine may not have gone back to totalitarianism or the traditional authoritarian formula of stuffing the ballot box, cowing the population and imprisoning the opposition - or not obviously. But a whole industry of 'political technology' has developed instead, with shadowy private firms and government 'fixers' on lucrative contracts dedicated to the black arts of organizing electoral success. This book uncovers the sophisticated techniques of the 'virtual' political system used to legitimize post-Soviet regimes; entire fake parties, phantom political rivals and 'scarecrow' opponents. And it exposes the paramount role of the mass media in projecting these creations and in falsifying the entire political process. Wilson argues that it is not primarily economic problems that have made it so difficult to develop meaningful democracy in the former Soviet world. Although the West also has its 'spin doctors', dirty tricks, and aggressive ad campaigns, it is the unique post-Bolshevik culture of 'political technology' that is the main obstacle to better governance in the region, to real popular participation in public affairs, and to the modernization of the political economy in the longer term.
This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic, organized by the Autry National Center of the American West."--Introduction.
Between 1891 and 1920 more than 18 million immigrants entered the United States. While many Americans responded to this influx by proposing immigration restriction or large-scale "Americanization" campaigns, a few others, figures such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, adopted the image of the melting pot to oppose such measures. These Progressives imagined assimilation as a multidirectional process, in which both native-born and immigrants contributed their cultural gifts to a communal fund. Melting-Pot Modernism reveals the richly aesthetic nature of assimilation at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on questions of the individual's relation to culture, the protection of vulnerable populations, the sharing of cultural heritages, and the far-reaching effects of free-market thinking. By tracing the melting-pot impulse toward merging and cross-fertilization through the writings of Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, as well as through the autobiography, sociology, and social commentary of their era, Sarah Wilson makes a new connection between the ideological ferment of the Progressive era and the literary experimentation of modernism. Wilson puts literary analysis at the service of intellectual history, showing that literary modes of thought and expression both shaped and were shaped by debates over cultural assimilation. Exploring the depth and nuance of an earlier moment's commitment to cultural inclusiveness, Melting-Pot Modernism gives new meaning to American struggles to imaginatively encompass difference—and to the central place of literary interpretation in understanding such struggles.
   This 1954 film, made in New Mexico by blacklisted Hollywood people and members of a progressive union, was denied distribution during the McCarthy era. The film documents an actual strike and is narrated by a Mexican-American woman who grows in consciousness and effectiveness through her participation in the community struggle. With the publication of this book, the Feminist Press reprints Wilson's screenplay and introduces an original work by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt: an analysis of the background, history, and significance of both the strike and the film. Based partly on recent interviews, Rosenfelt's work includes a discussion of the change in status of the women who took part in this strike for better conditions.
The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging. "Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews
What makes a good scandal? Money, politics and power, and a huge dose of media interest. Scandal reigns in the world of politics, celebrity, business, religion, royalty and art, and this book covers it all - from Watergate to Michael Jackson, Diana to Oscar Wilde. Distinguished writer Colin Wilson delves into the murky intrigues of British and American life to bring the most scandalous secrets to light. Containing brand new chapters on Michael Jackson, ENRON, the death of David Kelly, the Catholic Church sex scandals and the cash-for-honours scandal, and an updated chapter on OJ Simpson, here are the embarrassing true stories the rich and famous tried but failed to hide.
Benjamin Davis Wilson was one of the first American settlers in Southern California. He became a prosperous rancher and the mayor of little Los Angeles. A special friend of the Indians of Southern California, Wilson was appointed their subagent in 1852, when the Indians were on the edge of catastrophe, their population reduced by two-thirds within a generation. Wilson's great contribution, the one he wished to be remembered for, was to appraise the problems of these Indians and urge their settlement on land set aside for them. His report (published in the Los Angeles Star in 1868) was instrumental in creating the reservation system. The Indians of Southern California in 1852 was inspired by Wilson's desire "to secure peace and justice to the Indians." He recognized his duty to guard against Indian raids on the ranchos and settlements while establishing policies that ensured the future welfare of Indians suffering from the breakdown of the old mission program. Besides the influential Wilson report, this volume contains vivid descriptions of life in the so-called Cow Counties of Southern California at mid-nineteenth century. Also included are excerpts from contemporary newspapers. The editor, John Walton Caughey, is the author of Gold Is the Cornerstone and California. Albert L. Hurtado is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of Indian Survival on the California Frontier.
The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place. Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.
Chew On This' reveals the truth about the the fast food industry - how it all began, its success, what fast food actually is, what goes on in the slaughterhouses, meatpacking factories and flavour labs, the exploitation of young workers in the thousands of fast-food outlets throughout the world, and much more.
These documentary collections present primary sources that illuminate critical national issues as they affect distinctive geographic regions, affording students in-depth coverage of matters of keen regional concern. The documents provide diverse perspectives on specific issues through written sources as well as cartoons, advertisements, and historical photos. All the documents are preceded by editorial commentary that sets the historical stage and probing questions that guide students' reading and analysis. A bibliography of all the sources completes these exciting and unique collections. Instructors using Houghton Mifflin survey texts also have the option of duplicating any of the documents for their class without copyright restrictions. The document sets can be purchased in class quantities by nonadopters of Houghton Mifflin texts.
There is not a trace of the provincial nor the apologetic in the tone of the State of Mind texts. Rather there is a justified claim for the sophisticated originality of this Californian art—sophisticated because the authors have convincingly argued that the artists, for the most part, had many conscious connections and familiarity with art from the rest of the country and Europe, yet were driven by a desire to be independent and different." —Moira Roth, editor and contributor, The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980 "State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is an essential overview of the rich and complex moment when California assumed its role as a leading center for the making and exhibition of the kind of adventurous and progressive art that immediately fascinated the world, and over the years has come to define a generation and a region. An unmatched source of hard-to-find primary images combined with thought-provoking critical essays, this book can easily function as a standard text on this subject.” —David Ross, former director of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and currently Chairman of the MFA program in Art Practice at The School of Visual Arts
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