American Value

American Value
Author: David Pedersen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226653390

Over the past half-century, El Salvador has transformed dramatically. Historically reliant on primary exports like coffee and cotton, the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 1992 to find much of its national income now coming from a massive emigrant workforce that earns money in the US and sends it home. In this work, Pedersen examines this new way of life as it extends across two places: Intipucā, a Salvadoran town infamous for its remittance wealth, and the Washington, DC metro area.

Environmental Values in American Culture

Environmental Values in American Culture
Author: Willett Kempton
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1996
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780262611237

How do Americans view environmental issues? This study by a team of cognitive anthropologists reveals similarities in the way different groups of Americans view environmental change, while also showing that Americans may have misunderstandings about these

The Hippies and American Values

The Hippies and American Values
Author: Timothy Miller
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780870496943

Introduction; The Ethics of Dope; The Ethics of Sex; The Ethics of Rock; The Ethics of Community; The Ethics of Cultural Opposition; Legacy

Still the Best Hope

Still the Best Hope
Author: Dennis Prager
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0062097814

Conservative radio host and syndicated columnist Dennis Prager provides a bold, sweeping look at the future of civilization with Still the Best Hope, and offers a strong, cogent argument for why basic American values must triumph in a dangerously uncertain world. Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the only alternatives to the “American Trinity” of liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity are Islamic totalitarianism, European democratic socialism, capitalist dictatorship, or global chaos if we should fail. America is Still the Best Hope, as this eminently sensible, profoundly inspiring volume so powerfully proves.

Race, Incarceration, and American Values

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Author: Glenn C. Loury
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262260948

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.

The Next America

The Next America
Author: Paul Taylor
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610396685

The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past. America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use. Today's Millennials -- well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings -- are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future. Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40 -- both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up. Drawing on Pew Research Center's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed -- toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.

American Ways

American Ways
Author: Gary Althen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1988
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780933662681

Althen (former foreign student adviser, U. of Iowa) gives advice to foreign visitors to the U.S. that is intended to help them understand the motivations, attitudes, communication styles, and actions of Americans. Emphasizing the interpretation of observed behavior, he covers ways of reasoning and American ideas about politics, family life, education, religion, the media, social relationships, racial and ethnic diversity, male-female relationships, sports and recreation, driving, shopping, personal hygiene, and organizational and public behavior. Over-generalization is an understandable danger in such a work as this, but Althen does make an effort to emphasize that there are variations among Americans, while he concentrates on the similarities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Idea of America

The Idea of America
Author: William Edward White
Publisher: Colonial Williamsburg
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0879352604

Debate keeps America vibrant. Debate over what course America should take. Debate over our shared, democratic values. Debate over the extent that our shared values influence public policy—and in which direction. Far from being a sign that our democratic republic is failing, this raucous, controversial, enduring debate—this Great Debate—indicates our republic is healthy. Americans continually seek, in the words of the Preamble to the Constitution, “to form a more perfect union.” Not everyone agrees on how best to do that—and that’s where civic and civil debate comes in. Americans have debated what course the nation should take since before there was a nation.

Thinking Points

Thinking Points
Author: George Lakoff
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2006
Genre: Communication in politics
ISBN: 9780374530907

Core Values in American Life

Core Values in American Life
Author: Arthur G. Neal
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2014-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1412854423

What values do Americans hold dear? What happens when real-world situations cause those values to conflict? To better understand the intellectual map of how American society works, Arthur G. Neal and Helen Youngelson-Neal analyze values prominent in American word and deed. These values appear in our nation’s formal documents—rights and privileges prominently emphasized in the US Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They have shaped the historical destiny and, indeed, include those values most extensively propagated by the general population. Using these criteria, the authors identify individualism, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, consumerism, materialism, equality of opportunity, technology, mastery of the environment, quality of marriage, and national unity as the core American values. Core values provide the raw materials for the construction of contemporary society as a moral community, wherever that community is located. Such values are clusters of ideas that are central to self-identities; they generate a sense of collective belonging and membership. As such, core values define the existing social order and advance a set of ideas for depicting a desirable future. The analysis presented here helps us understand contemporary conflicts inherent in the American value system and the problems confronted by Americans as they try to live within the limitations and contradictions of value systems.