American Dreamers (eBook)

Michael Kazin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-59670-3 (ISBN)

Infos

A panoramic yet intimate history of the American left--of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who have fought for a more just and humane society, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky--that gives us a revelatory new way of looking at two centuries of American politics and culture.

Michael Kazin--one of the most respected historians of the American left working today--takes us from abolitionism and early feminism to the labor struggles of the industrial age, through the emergence of anarchists, socialists, and communists, right up to the New Left in the 1960s and '70s. While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been, in the traditional view, a story of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, Kazin tells a new history: one in which many of these movements, although they did not fully succeed on their own terms, nonetheless made lasting contributions to American society that led to equal opportunity for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals, the celebration of sexual pleasure, multiculturalism in the media and the schools, and the popularity of books and films with altruistic and antiauthoritarian messages.

Deeply informed, at once judicious and impassioned, and superbly written, American Dreamers is an essential book for our times and for anyone seeking to understand our political history and the people who made it.

From the Hardcover edition.

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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NEWSWEEK/THE DAILY BEAST, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE PROGRESSIVEThe definitive history of the reformers, radicals, and idealists who fought for a different America, from the abolitionists to Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky.  While the history of the left is a long story of idealism and determination, it has also been a story of movements that failed to gain support from mainstream America. In American Dreamers, Michael Kazin—one of the most respected historians of the American left working today—tells a new history of the movements that, while not fully succeeding on their own terms, nonetheless made lasting contributions to American society. Among these culture shaping events are the fight for equal opportunity for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure; the inclusion of multiculturalism in the media and school curricula; and the creation of books and films with altruistic and anti-authoritarian messages. Deeply informed, judicious and impassioned, and superbly written, this is an essential book for our times and for anyone seeking to understand our political history and the people who made it.

Textauszug

What Difference Did It Make? The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. --Marx and Engels You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than one to which you wake up every morning. --Richard Rorty In dreams begin responsibility. --William Butler Yeats This book was inspired by Dr. Seuss. Around the time the Supreme Court helped elect George W. Bush in 2000, I took refuge from political despair by thinking about the books my mother had read to me in the 1950s, several of which I also read to my children forty years later. Seuss, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel and who had neither an M.D. nor a PhD, got his start in the cartoon business illustrating ads for an insecticide company, but he soon turned his talent to political purposes. Although he never seems to have joined a left organization, Seuss was a man of the Popular Front, that broad left vessel anchored by the Communist Party. For two years in the early 1940s, he was a regular cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily PM, contributing hundreds of drawings that skewered such figures as Charles Lindbergh for warming up to Hitler and flagrant racists like Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. After the war, Seuss began to produce children's books that used witty rhymes and fluid, fanciful drawings to convey the best principles and some of the fondest aspirations of the left. He kept this up until his death in 1989. The books, which have sold millions of copies, include The Sneetches, a brief for racial equality, Yertle the Turtle, a satire of fascist tyranny, The Lorax, a plea to save nature from corporate greed, The Butter Battle Book, a fable in support of nuclear disarmament, and Horton Hears a Who!, a parable about the need to act against genocide. His most famous book, The Cat in the Hat, while less overtly political, introduced a sublimely destructive feline who did his bit to inspire the counterculture of the 1960s. Seuss made great children's literature out of the essential critique and vision of the left. He married the ideal of social equality to the principle of personal freedom. As the journalist E. J. Kahn Jr. put it: 'In his books, might never makes right, the meek inherit the earth, and pride frequently goeth before a fall, usually a pratfall.' Seuss crafted 'messages' with more wit, hipness, and color than any movement activist I have ever known. But he rarely took part in protests or campaigns, and few of his readers appreciated that he was illustrating a coherent and quite political worldview.3 Seuss's work was an underappreciated accomplishment in the long, if often difficult, history of the American left. Radicals in the U.S. have seldom mounted a serious challenge to those who held power in either the government or the economy. But they have done far better at helping to transform the moral culture, the 'common sense' of society--how Americans understand what is just and what is unjust in the conduct of public affairs. And that is no small thing. 'The most enduring aspects of a social movement,' writes the historian J. F. C. Harrison, 'are not always its institutions but the mental attitudes which inspire it and which are in turn generated by it.' Leftists who articulated big dreams of a different future did much to initiate what became common, if still controversial, features of American life. These included the advocacy of equal opportunity...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.8.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-307-59670-2 / 0307596702
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59670-3 / 9780307596703