The dramatic confrontation between civil-rights activism and the establishment power of Lyndon Johnson that transformed the movement and national politics.In August 1964, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, a Mississippi sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, challenged Lyndon Johnson and the party establishment with the stinging question, “Is this America?” Hamer was a leader of the Freedom Democratic Party, the outgrowth of grassroots voting rights campaigns and the v...

New perspectives on American political history from one of its leading writersIn recent years, the study of American political history has experienced a remarkable renaissance. After decades during which the subject fell out of fashion and disappeared from public view, it has returned to prominence as the study of American history has shifted its focus back to politics broadly defined. In this book, one of the leaders of the resurgence in American political history...

The dramatic confrontation between civil-rights activism and the establishment power of Lyndon Johnson that transformed the movement and national politics.In August 1964, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, a Mississippi sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer, challenged Lyndon Johnson and the party establishment with the stinging question, “Is this America?” Hamer was a leader of the Freedom Democratic Party, the outgrowth of grassroots voting rights c...

A biography of the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who became a symbol of the marriage between religion and social justice“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith. ...

Elections are, and always have been, the lifeblood of American democracy. Often raucous and sharply contentious, sometimes featuring grand debates about the nation's future, and invariably full of dramatic moments, elections offer insight into the character and historical evolution of American politics. America at the Ballot Box uses the history of presidential elections to illuminate American political democracy and its development from the early Republic to the late twentieth ce...

REVISED EDITION WITH A NEW CHAPTER AND EPILOGUETwo award-winning and best-selling historians explore the origins of a divided America in a new edition of Fault Lines.In this fully updated second edition of their masterful history, leading historians and best-selling authors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment, answering the question: When—and how—did America become so polarized? It all sta...

The nation's top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars propose solutions for democracy's futureIn recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become...

From the creation of newspapers with national reach in the late nineteenth century to the lightning-fast dispatches and debates of today's Internet, the media have played an enormous role in modern American politics. Scholars of political history universally concede the importance of this relationship yet have devoted scant attention to its development during the past century. Even as mass media have largely replaced party organizations as the main vehicles through which politicians commun...

Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades.Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, ...

This volume showcases the most exciting new voices in the fields of business and political history. While the media frequently warns of the newfound power of business in the world of politics, the authors in this book demonstrate that business has mobilized to shape public policy and government institutions, as well as electoral outcomes, for decades. Rather than assuming that business influence is inevitable, the chapters explore the complex evolution of this relationship in a wide range ...

A landmark study of racism, inequality, and police violence that continues to hold important lessons todayThe Kerner Report is a powerful window into the roots of racism and inequality in the United States. Hailed by Martin Luther King Jr. as a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life," this historic study was produced by a presidential commission established by Lyndon Johnson, chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner,...

For fifty years, Medicare and Medicaid have stood at the center of a contentious debate surrounding American government, citizenship, and health care entitlement. In Medicare and Medicaid at 50, leading scholars in politics, government, economics, health policy, and history offer a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of these programs and their impact on society -- from their origins in the Great Society era to the current battles over the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"). These hig...