America Ideal And Reality

First published in 1998. This is Volume I of nine in the Historical Sociology series and looks at the United States of 1776 in contemporary European philosophy. This is a developed study of a lecture given on ‘Bourgeois Ideal and Capitalist Reality’-the capitalist reality which is the natural outcome, and yet the complete perversion, of the bourgeois ideal of the eighteenth century. This lecture, which was delivered in November, I942, discussed in more general terms the development of which the social history of the United States between I776 and I800.

First published in 1998. This is Volume I of nine in the Historical Sociology series and looks at the United States of 1776 in contemporary European philosophy. This is a developed study of a lecture given on ‘Bourgeois Ideal and Capitalist Reality’-the capitalist reality which is the natural outcome, and yet the complete perversion, of the bourgeois ideal of the eighteenth century. This lecture, which was delivered in November, I942, discussed in more general terms the development of which the social history of the United States between I776 and I800.

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities. What good can come of bringing them into the open? America’s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed’s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

This practical handbook has been revised to provide in-depth coverage of the Office of Thrift and Supervision rules as well as those of the OCC. It includes up-to-date information on every of trust compliance, as it applies in 2000.

In America on Film, first published in 2002, Sam Girgus examines a selection of films made in the last quarter of the twentieth century in an effort to trace how the notion of 'American' has changed drastically from that portrayed in American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Mississippi Masala, Lone Star, Malcolm X, Raging Bull, When We Were Kings, and Bugsy he finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals, and conflicts; and a transformation in the relationship of American identity and culture to race and ethnicity, as well as to sexuality, gender, and the body. America on Film charts these changes through analysis of cinematic tensions between fiction, documentary, and modernism. An art form that combines fragments of reality with imagination, film, Girgus maintains, connects the documentary realism of the photographic image to the abstraction and non-representation of modernism.