Bruce J. Schulman

Whether admired or reviled, Lyndon B. Johnson and his tumultuous administration embodied the principles and contradictions of his era. Taking advantage of newly released evidence, this second edition incorporates a selection of fresh documents, including transcripts of Johnson's phone conversations and conservative reactions to his leadership, to examine the issues and controversies that grew out of Johnson's presidency and have renewed importance today. The voices of Johnson, his aides, his opponents, and his interpreters address the topics of affirmative action, the United States' role in world affairs, civil rights, Vietnam, the Great Society, and the fate of liberal reform. Additional photographs of Johnson in action complement Bruce J. Schulman's rich biographical narrative, and a chronology, an updated bibliographical essay, and new questions for consideration provide pedagogical support.

A Brief Biography with Documents

Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism

From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt investigates the effects of federal policy on the American South from 1938 until 1980 and charts the close relationship between federal efforts to reform the South and the evolution of activist government in the modern United States. Decrying the South’s economic backwardness and political conservatism, the Roosevelt Administration launched a series of programs to reorder the Southern economy in the 1930s. After 1950, however, the social welfare state had been replaced by the national security state as the South’s principal benefactor. Bruce J. Schulman contrasts the diminished role of national welfare initiatives in the postwar South with the expansion of military and defense-related programs. He analyzes the contributions of these growth-oriented programs to the South’s remarkable economic expansion, to the development of American liberalism, and to the excruciating limits of Sunbelt prosperity, ultimately relating these developments to southern politics and race relations. By linking the history of the South with the history of national public policy, Schulman unites two issues that dominate the domestic history of postwar America—the emergence of the Sunbelt and the expansion of federal power over the nation’s economic and social life. A forcefully argued work, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, originally published in 1991(Oxford University Press), will be an important guide to students and scholars of federal policy and modern Southern history.

Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980

From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt

Harvard University Press

Julian E. Zelizer

Bruce J.. Schulman

William E Huntington Professor of History Bruce J Schulman

Professor of History and Public Affairs Julian E Zelizer

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, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies. A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.

Making America Conservative in the 1970s

Rightward Bound

Most of us think of the 1970s as an "in-between" decade, the uninspiring years that happened to fall between the excitement of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution. A kitschy period summed up as the "Me Decade," it was the time of Watergate and the end of Vietnam, of malaise and gas lines, but of nothing revolutionary, nothing with long-lasting significance. In the first full history of the period, Bruce Schulman, a rising young cultural and political historian, sweeps away misconception after misconception about the 1970s. In a fast-paced, wide-ranging, and brilliant reexamination of the decade's politics, culture, and social and religious upheaval, he argues that the Seventies were one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades. The Seventies witnessed a profound shift in the balance of power in American politics, economics, and culture, all driven by the vast growth of the Sunbelt. Country music, a southern silent majority, a boom in "enthusiastic" religion, and southern California New Age movements were just a few of the products of the new demographics. Others were even more profound: among them, public life as we knew it died a swift death. The Seventies offers a masterly reconstruction of high and low culture, of public events and private lives, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Evel Knievel, est, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. From The Godfather and Network to the Ramones and Jimmy Buffett; from Billie jean King and Bobby Riggs to Phyllis Schlafly and NOW; from Proposition 13 to the Energy Crisis; here are all the names, faces, and movements that once filled our airwaves, and now live again. The Seventies is powerfully argued, compulsively readable, and deeply provocative.

The Great Shift in American culture, Society, and Politics

The Seventies

An indispensable reference for students studying the Court Specifically written to engage high-school students, Student’s Guide to the Supreme Court presents a comprehensive overview of the history, traditions, and people of the highest court in the land. This one-stop source does not require any prior knowledge of the Supreme Court and covers topics that meet national high school curriculum standards. Part One consists of three informative essays: The Supreme Court: The Weakest or the Strongest Branch? How Does the President Nominate a Supreme Court Justice? Do They Matter? How Supreme Court Decisions Affect Modern American Life. Part Two is an alphabetical section of key words and legal concepts spanning abortion to writs of mandamus. The members of the current Roberts Court—including Sonia Sotomayor—are profiled here, as are all chief justices and notable associate justices. Part Three complements the first two sections with a generous sampling of influential primary source documents, including landmark decisions, excerpts from justices’ papers, political cartoons, and constitutional provisions related to the Supreme Court. Key Features Easy-to-read Aligns with high school curriculum Unique three-part format

Student's Guide to the Supreme Court

The twentieth century has been popularly seen as "the American Century," as publisher Henry Luce dubbed it, a long period in which the United States had amassed the economic resources, the political and military strength, and the moral prestige to assume global leadership. By century''s end,the trajectory of American politics, the sense of ever waxing federal power, and the nation''s place in the world seemed less assured. Americans of many stripes came to contest the standard narratives of nation building and international hegemony that generations of historians dutifully charted.In this volume, a group of distinguished junior and senior historians - including John McGreevy, James Campbell, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Eric Rauchway, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, and James Kloppenberg - revisit and revise many of the chestnuts of American political history. First and foremost, thecontributors challenge the teleological view of the inexorable transformation of the United States into a modern nation. To be sure, chain stores replaced mom-and-pop businesses, interstate highways knit together once isolated regions, national media shaped debate from coast-to coast, and the IRS,the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the Social Security Administration and other instruments of national power became daily presences in the lives of ordinary Americans. But the local and the parochial did not inexorably give way to the national and eventually to global integration. Instead, thecontributors to this volume illustrate the ongoing dialectic between centrifugal and centripetal forces in the development of the twentieth century United States. The essays analyze a host of ways in which local places are drawn into a wider polity and culture. At the same time, they reveal hownational and international structures and ideas repeatedly create new kinds of local movements and local energies.The authors also challenge the tendency to view American politics as a series of conflicts between liberalism and conservatism, which Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. and Jr. codified as the idea that American national politics routinely experienced roughly fifteen year periods of liberal reform followed bysimilar intervals of conservative reaction. For generations, American political history remained the story of reform, the rise and fall, triumphs and setbacks of successive waves of reformers - Jacksonian Democrats and abolitionists, Populists and Progressives, New Dealers and Great Society povertywarriors - and, recently, equally rich scholarship has explored the origins and development of American conservatism. The contributors do not treat the left and right as separate phenomena, as the dominant forces of different eras. Instead they assert the liberal and the conservative are always andessentially intertwined, mutually constituted and mutually constituting. Modern American liberalism operates amid tenacious, recurring forces that shape and delimit the landscape of social reform and political action just as conservatives layered their efforts over the cumulative achievements oftwentieth century liberalism, necessarily accommodating themselves to shifts in the instruments of government, social mores and popular culture.These essays also unravel a third traditional polarity in twentieth century U.S. history, the apparent divide between foreign policy and domestic politics. Notwithstanding its proud anti-colonial heritage and its enduring skepticism about foreign entanglements, the United States has been and remainsa robustly international (if not imperial) nation. The authors in this volume - with many formative figures in the ongoing internationalization of American history represented among them - demonstrate that international connections (not only in the realm of diplomacy but also in matters ofmigration, commerce, and culture) have transformed domestic life in myriad ways and, in turn, that the American presence in the world has been shaped by its distinctive domestic political culture.Blurring the boundaries between political, cultural, and economic history, this collective volume aims to raise penetrating questions and challenge readers'' understanding of the broader narrative of twentieth-century U.S. history.

Bruce J. Schulman

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