Critical Americans

Critical Americans
Author: Leslie Butler
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2009-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807877573
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In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools

Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools
Author: Allan S. Horlick
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 273
Release: 1994-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004247041
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Patricians, Professors, and Public Schools argues that the thinking behind efforts to reform American schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized two new ideas—that economic growth and the opportunity it created were more limited than had earlier been thought, and that popular aspirations should be revised downward accordingly. After discussing the thinking that reformers reacted against in the first chapter of the book, later chapters examine those most responsible for these new ideas, especially Felix Adler and John Dewey. These chapters argue that reformers' fears about the social dislocation stemming from economic growth makes the most sense of the educational redirection they promoted. This is a new interpretation of developments that have long been debated by American historians, and should be of interest to a wide variety of readers.

The Facts of Reconstruction

The Facts of Reconstruction
Author: Eric Anderson
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1991-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807116913
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Thirty years after the publication of John Hope Franklin’s influential interpretative essay Reconstruction: After the Civil War, ten distinguished scholars have contributed to a new appraisal of Reconstruction scholarship. Recognizing Professor Franklin’s major contributions to the study of the Reconstruction era, their work of analysis and review has been dedicated to him. Although most of the contributors studied with John Hope Franklin, The Facts of Reconstruction is not a festschrift, at least not the conventional sense. The book does not offer a comprehensive assessment of Franklin’s remarkably wide-ranging work in southern and Afro-American history, but instead engages his influential interpretation of Reconstruction. The essays in The Facts of Reconstruction focus upon questions raised in Reconstruction: After the Civil War. Was southern white intransigence the decisive influence in Presidential Reconstruction? What as the role of violence in southern “redemption”? How successful were the educational experiments of the Reconstruction era? Why did southern Republicans fail to build an effective coalition capable of surviving the pressure of racism? In addition, several essays discuss questions not directly addressed in Franklin’s book, since his pathbreaking work indirectly stimulated study in a variety of new areas. For example, contributors to The Facts of Reconstruction examine the ante-bellum origins of Reconstruction, evaluate the development of racial segregation during the late nineteenth century, analyze the political and legal ideas behind the Reconstruction debates, and study the prospering minority among blacks. Representing a variety of perspectives, the authors have sought to follow John Hope Franklin’s admonition that Reconstruction should not be used as “a mirror of ourselves.” If they have succeeded, this book in honor of a profound scholar and inspiring teacher will provoke new discussion about “the facts of Reconstruction.”

Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-century America

Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-century America
Author: Hazel Dicken Garcia
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1989
Genre: Journalism
ISBN: 9780299121747
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In the early nineteenth century, critics believed the press was destroying social structure--eroding law and order and the institutions of the family, religion, and education. To counter these effects they advocated, among other things, eradicating Sunday newspapers and "subversive" content such as news of crime, sex, and sporting events. Dicken-Garcia traces the relationship between societal values and the press coverage of issues and events. Setting out to tame the press by understanding it, she argues, critics had begun to dissect it. In the process, they articulated the rudiments of journalistic theory, and proposed what issues should be addressed by journalists, what functions should be undertaken, and what standards should be imposed.

New Democracy

New Democracy
Author: William J. Novak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674260449
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The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Governing the American State

Governing the American State
Author: Kimberly Johnson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691170908
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The modern, centralized American state was supposedly born in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Kimberley S. Johnson argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooperative federalism was not born in a Big Bang, but instead emerged out of power struggles within the nation's major political institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examining the fifty-two years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression, Johnson shows that the "first New Federalism" was created during this era from dozens of policy initiatives enacted by a modernizing Congress. The expansion of national power took the shape of policy instruments that reflected the constraints imposed by the national courts and the Constitution, but that also satisfied emergent policy coalitions of interest groups, local actors, bureaucrats, and members of Congress. Thus, argues Johnson, the New Deal was not a decisive break with the past, but rather a superstructure built on a foundation that emerged during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Her evidence draws on an analysis of 131 national programs enacted between 1877 and 1930, a statistical analysis of these programs, and detailed case studies of three of them: the Federal Highway Act of 1916, the Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. As this book shows, federalism has played a vital but often underappreciated role in shaping the modern American state.