Coming to Terms with America

Coming to Terms with America
Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2021-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0827615116

Culling the finest thinking of renowned historian Jonathan D. Sarna, Coming to Terms with America examines how Jews have long “straddled two civilizations,” endeavoring to be both Jewish and American at once, from the American Revolution to today.

The Way We Really Are

The Way We Really Are
Author: Stephanie Coontz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2008-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786725567

Stephanie Coontz, the author of The Way We Never Were, now turns her attention to the mythology that surrounds today’s family—the demonizing of “untraditional” family forms and marriage and parenting issues. She argues that while it’s not crazy to miss the more hopeful economic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, few would want to go back to the gender roles and race relations of those years. Mothers are going to remain in the workforce, family diversity is here to stay, and the nuclear family can no longer handle all the responsibilities of elder care and childrearing.Coontz gives a balanced account of how these changes affect families, both positively and negatively, but she rejects the notion that the new diversity is a sentence of doom. Every family has distinctive resources and special vulnerabilities, and there are ways to help each one build on its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.The book provides a meticulously researched, balanced account showing why a historically informed perspective on family life can be as much help to people in sorting through family issues as going into therapy—and much more help than listening to today’s political debates.

Coming to Terms with America

Coming to Terms with America
Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 555
Release: 2021-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0827618786

Coming to Terms with America examines how Jews have long "straddled two civilizations," endeavoring to be both Jewish and American at once, from the American Revolution to today. In fifteen engaging essays, Jonathan D. Sarna investigates the many facets of the Jewish-American encounter--what Jews have borrowed from their surroundings, what they have resisted, what they have synthesized, and what they have subverted. Part I surveys how Jews first worked to reconcile Judaism with the country's new democratic ethos and to reconcile their faith-based culture with local metropolitan cultures. Part II analyzes religio-cultural initiatives, many spearheaded by women, and the ongoing tensions between Jewish scholars (who pore over traditional Jewish sources) and activists (who are concerned with applying them). Part III appraises Jewish-Christian relations: "collisions" within the public square and over church-state separation. Originally written over the span of forty years, many of these essays are considered classics in the field, and several remain fixtures of American Jewish history syllabi. Others appeared in fairly obscure venues and will be discovered here anew. Together, these essays--newly updated for this volume--cull the finest thinking of one of American Jewry's finest historians.

When Can We Go Back to America?

When Can We Go Back to America?
Author: Susan H. Kamei
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 736
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: JUVENILE NONFICTION
ISBN: 1481401459

"An oral history about Japanese internment during World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, from the perspective of children and young people affected"--

Forgotten Americans

Forgotten Americans
Author: Isabel Sawhill
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0300241062

A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation’s economic inequalities One of the country’s leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society—economic, cultural, and political—and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. While many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought

Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought
Author: Arthur Allen Cohen
Publisher: New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan
Total Pages: 1188
Release: 1988
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

A collection of 140 essays by renowned figures on the fundamental concepts, beliefs and movements in historical and contemporary Jewish thought. Charity, chosen people, death, culture, family, freedom, history, love, immortality, myth, prayer, science, tradition and Torah are among the subjects addressed in this handbook of Jewish experience and thought.

American Judaism

American Judaism
Author: Jonathan D. Sarna
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300190395

Jonathan D. Sarna's award-winning American Judaism is now available in an updated and revised edition that summarizes recent scholarship and takes into account important historical, cultural, and political developments in American Judaism over the past fifteen years. Praise for the first edition: "Sarna . . . has written the first systematic, comprehensive, and coherent history of Judaism in America; one so well executed, it is likely to set the standard for the next fifty years."--Jacob Neusner, Jerusalem Post "A masterful overview."--Jeffrey S. Gurock, American Historical Review "This book is destined to be the new classic of American Jewish history."--Norman H. Finkelstein, Jewish Book World Winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award/Jewish Book of the Year

America Coming to Terms: The Vietnam Legacy

America Coming to Terms: The Vietnam Legacy
Author: Nguyen Anh Tuan
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 806
Release: 2008-12-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1462812708

Douglas Pike, an eminent authority on Southeast Asia and particularly on Vietnam, wrote: “Dr. Nguyen Anh Tuan is a highly respected economist and political thinker. Even perhaps for our purpose here, he is a man of great breadth of view, a philosopher in the true meaning of the word...” In America Coming to Terms, Dr. Nguyen Anh Tuan addresses himself to the central issue of the Vietnam War. This ambitious study seeks to place the U.S. involvement in Vietnam into the broader context of American and world history. The legacy of the Vietnam War remains a critical topic, particularly with the war in Iraq generating the specter of conflicting partisan politics in a deeply divided country. America’s involvement in Vietnam was misunderstood at the time and is still misrepresented now. As the Iraq War often invites comparisons with the Vietnam War, a full understanding of the U.S. experience in Vietnam is essential. More importantly, lessons learned from Vietnam can be applied to Iraq at present as well as to any U.S. conflict in the future. America Coming to Terms will help the American public to better understand the real legacy of the Vietnam War. It will provide Americans – liberal as well as conservative, Democrat as well as Republican – with substantive reasons to be united and to be proud of America. Most importantly, it will meaningfully impact the writing of American history for future generations and change for the better the world’s perception of the American people and of America. Steven Hayward, a most distinguished scholar wrote: “Revisionist historians two or three generations from now are likely to begin making the argument that the United States won the ultimate victory in the Vietnam War, and that it should be seen as the turning point in the Cold War...” In America Coming to Terms, Dr. Tuan set the record straight that – notwithstanding a number of mistakes that were committed – not only America won the Cold War but, ultimately, also won the Vietnam War.

The Upswing

The Upswing
Author: Robert D. Putnam
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 198212914X

From the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids, a “sweeping yet remarkably accessible” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis that “offers superb, often counterintuitive insights” (The New York Times) to demonstrate how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation. Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.

These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths: A History of the United States
Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 773
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393635252

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.