America-Lite

America-Lite
Author: David Gelernter
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2013-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1594037094
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America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders—and each other? In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture. Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history—they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty. With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we’ve politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug. How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.

How to Hide an Empire

How to Hide an Empire
Author: Daniel Immerwahr
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374715122
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Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

American Hour

American Hour
Author: Os Guinness
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1993-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0029131731
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Os Guinness examines the ways in which the current crisis of cultural authority strikes at the heart of American identity. As he shows, this crisis has occurred because America's beliefs, traditions, and ideals - civic as well as religious - are losing their power to shape the private and public lives of countless Americans. He first charts this growing crisis in America's moral and cultural order, tracing its roots early in this century to the first open phase of conflict, which began to build in the fifties and climaxed in the cultural revolution of the sixties. He goes on to examine the subsequent conservative counter-revolution, focusing throughout on the impact of this crisis on three areas vital to the health of the republic - on American identity, as in the currently contested notion of what it means to be an American; American public philosophy, including the now controversial relationship of religion and public life; and American republican character, including our distinctive emphasis on the importance of the "habits of the heart." Guinness also examines the historical role of religion in American society and its integral function in American public life. He explores how religion came to lose its power as a vital shaping force of America's moral and cultural order, and he considers the consequences of this loss. He then establishes four scenarios that range from the continued decline of religion in public life to a resurgence of faith, showing how each possible outcome could affect American society in the upcoming century. Examining closely the recent controversies over religion and politics, Guinness concludes by setting forth a vision of how we can move beyond these struggles and provide America's diverse faiths with a revitalized and constructive role in public life. --From publisher's description

Americanism:The Fourth Great Western Religion

Americanism:The Fourth Great Western Religion
Author: David Gelernter
Publisher: Doubleday
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2007-06-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0385522959
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What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right. Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment. Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism. If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square. Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.

Violence in America

Violence in America
Author: Robert Klein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1315315548
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Violence is a growing problem in American society, and hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about yet another heart-wrenching episode of mass violence. Such events, unfortunately, are only the most public manifestation of violence in America. The full nature and extent of daily violence, the various and pervasive forms it takes, and the enormous social, emotional, moral, and economic consequences that result, remain largely outside of our awareness. More importantly, our ability to identify the root causes and know how best to effectively intervene remains limited. Most investigations in this field have focused on the individual psychodynamic characteristics of the perpetrators. The underlying group dynamic factors that include consideration of broader social, cultural, socioeconomic, and historical variables have received less attention. This volume brings together for the first time a collection of distinguished group psychotherapists, all of whom have been trained to recognize both individual psychodynamic characteristics and group dynamic factors, to apply the lessons learned through years of clinical practice to arrive at a deeper understanding of the etiology, treatment, and prevention of violence. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy.

Postwar Higher Education in America

Postwar Higher Education in America
Author: Richard B. Schwartz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-09-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0761870555
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The twenty million students now pursuing higher education in America are paying more than history, culture and the consumer price index can possibly justify, while the product they are purchasing is one that has become systematically debased. General education has been depreciated, core curricula eroded, expectations (at all levels) reduced. Slightly above half of the currently-enrolled students are graduating and only half of those are finding employment commensurate with what was once understood to be an authentic college education. Many are saddled with crippling debt, a particularly cruel reality for those who are unemployed or underemployed and unable to remove their debts via bankruptcy. Commentators now refer to the college campus as a country club or a daycare facility, one that is populated by a host of counselors, tutors and hand-holders who serve an often unprepared or underprepared student body. Remedial courses are commonplace, even with the systematic reduction of expectations. Among competing nations, international tests place our 15 year-olds no higher than 19th in three critical categories. Many now speak of "K-16 education" as our colleges replicate the atmosphere and behaviors of our grammar and high schools. How did we reach this point? How did the erosion of faculty and curricular authority occur within our institutions of higher learning? What roles were played by the radical students of the 1960s? How did our colleges of education contribute to the problem? How did corporatist administrators replace academic leaders and leverage ideologies to extend bureaucracy, attract and secure tuition dollars at any intellectual cost and create self-serving career paths for individuals running across the cracking ice of ineptitude and a lack of personal commitment? Most important, how can we reverse this process, recapture the relevant strengths of past practices, escape the gray vocationalism we now encounter at every turn and return to principles and standards that can legitimately be termed authentic? How can we save the previously-marginalized students who suffer the most within the current system? These are the questions posed by this book.