Steve Deace

Daniel Horowitz

COVID-19 fascism was the worst tyranny in American history, and those responsible must be held accountable so nothing like it ever happens again. COVID-19 was used to launch the worst tyranny in American history, which we’re still facing even now. It was also the worst oppression in global history since the Third Reich. Just as that evil required a reckoning at Nuremberg, this one does as well. In this Nuremberg 2.0, we call witnesses that our elected representatives and law enforcement agents need to hear from in order to know the full extent of the evil, and who is responsible for it—so that this never happens again.

Confronting COVID Fascism with a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again

Rise of the Fourth Reich

This biography of Betty Friedan traces the development of her feminist outlook from her childhood in Illinois to her marriage. Horowitz offers a reading of The Feminine Mystique and argues that the roots of Friedan's feminism run deeper than she has led us to believe.

The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism

Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique

When a cultural movement that began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century erupted into mainstream American culture in the late 1990s, it brought to the fore the idea that it is as important to improve one's own sense of pleasure as it is to manage depression and anxiety. Cultural historian Daniel Horowitz's research reveals that this change happened in the context of key events. World War II, the Holocaust, post-war prosperity, the rise of counter-culture, the crises of the 1970s, the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and the prime ministerships of Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron provided the important context for the development of the field today known as positive psychology. Happier? provides the first history of the origins, development, and impact of the way Americans -- and now many around the world -- shifted from mental illness to well-being as they pondered the human condition. This change, which came about from the fusing of knowledge drawn from Eastern spiritual traditions, behavioral economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and cognitive psychology, has been led by scholars and academic entrepreneurs, as they wrestled with the implications of political events and forces such as neoliberalism and cultural conservatism, and a public eager for self-improvement. Linking the development of happiness studies and positive psychology with a broad series of social changes, including the emergence of new media and technologies like TED talks, blogs, web sites, and neuroscience, as well as the role of evangelical ministers, Oprah Winfrey's enterprises, and funding from government agencies and private foundations, Horowitz highlights the transfer of specialized knowledge into popular arenas. Along the way he shows how marketing triumphed, transforming academic disciplines and spirituality into saleable products. Ultimately, Happier? illuminates how positive psychology, one of the most influential academic fields of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, infused American culture with captivating promises for a happier society.

The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America

Happier?

David Horowitz

A brilliant history of American misgivings about the consequences of their comfort, affluence, and luxury. An illuminating study, intelligent and perceptive...full of interesting insights. --Reviews in American History

Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940

The Morality of Spending

The Great Recession threatened the well-being of tens of millions of Americans, dramatically weakened the working class, hollowed out the middle class, and strengthened the position of the very wealthy. Against this backdrop, the hit reality show Shark Tank premiered in 2009. Featuring ambitious entrepreneurs chasing support from celebrity investors, the show offered a version of the American Dream that still seemed possible to many, where a bright idea and a well-honed pitch could lift a bootstrap business to new heights of success. More than a decade later, Shark Tank still airs regularly on multiple networks, and its formula has sparked imitators everywhere, from elite universities to elementary school classrooms. In Entertaining Entrepreneurs, Daniel Horowitz shows how Shark Tank's version of entrepreneurship disguises and distorts the opportunities and traps of capitalism. Digging into today's cult of the entrepreneur, Horowitz charts its rise from the rubble of economic crisis and its spread as a mainstay of American culture, and he explores its flawed view of what it really takes to succeed in business. Horowitz offers more than a look at one television phenomenon. He is the perfect guide to the portrayal of entrepreneurship in business school courses, pitch competitions, popular how-to books, and scholarly works, as well as the views of real-world venture capitalists.

Reality TV's Shark Tank and the American Dream in Uncertain Times

Entertaining Entrepreneurs

How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate. Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World

Consuming Pleasures

We are confronted with a jarring reality that the Left has succeeded in growing the power of the courts. Obama has replaced roughly 30 percent of the district and appellate judges on the federal benches. We are now facing a judicial time bomb, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. With the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling the courts have usurped the will of the people and set a precedent that has become a de facto law of the land. In STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY Horowitz reveals just how disenfranchised voters have become. On issue after issue we are witnessing a transformation of our society before our very eyes, all without the ability to stop it through the political process. We are becoming a government not of the people, by the people, for the people, but of the elites by the justices and for the few. First the courts went after your income. Then they went after the right to abortion. Then the right for men to marry men and women to marry women. Next they will go after the right to our sovereign borders. Where will it end? It is the legislative branch that gives the people their voice. With a weak congress, the people will suffer at the hands of a tyrannical few. By ceding the power of the purse, willfully ignoring executive overreach, blindly confirming judicial nominees, and writing statutes so broadly they transfer full legislative power to the president, the past few generations of congressmen have helped the executive branch and the courts crush their own power. STOLEN SOVEREIGNTY is a book defending sovereignty and society from the courts. Horowitz masterfully explains the legal foundations of this great nation and how the three branches of government are designed to keep the people free. He outlines how the recent overreach of the judicial branch has led to the extinguishing of the voice of the people. And most important, he provides solutions as the looming immigration crisis overshadows the political landscape. “It is no longer sufficient to sneer, scorn, or warn against the judicial tyranny; it’s time to fight back and implement immediate reforms or we will cease to exist as a democratic society and a sovereign nation,” says Horowitz. As we hunger for leaders who will steer the country back on the track of liberty and justice for all, we must ensure we are never one court decision or one executive order away from losing our society, sovereignty, and government. The courts have spoken. Now, it’s time for the American people to reclaim their sovereignty.

How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America

Stolen Sovereignty

Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique"

Vance Packard's bestselling books--Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960)--taught the generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) was a journalist who played an important role in the nation's transition from the largely complacent 1950s to the tumultuous 1960s. He was also one of the first social critics to benefit from and foster the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard left magazine writing to author his most famous works of social criticism. Horowitz traces the influence of Packard's education and early years in rural Pennsylvania, providing a deeper understanding of his thought and his later books. Packard's life, Horowitz contends, illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation. His career also expands our understanding of how one era shaped the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Daniel Horowitz

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