From Many Cultures One Nation

From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines. One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures."

Many Voices, One Nation explores U.S. history through a powerful collection of artifacts and stories from America’s many peoples. Sixteen essays, composed by Smithsonian curators and affiliated scholars, offer distinctive insight into the peopling of the United States from the Europeans’ North American arrival in 1492 to the near present. Each chapter addresses a different historical era and considers what quintessentially American ideals like freedom, equality, and belonging have meant to Americans of all backgrounds, races, and national origins through the centuries. Much more than just an anthology, this book is a vibrant, cohesive presentation of everyday objects and ideas that connect us to our history and to one another. Using these objects and personal stories as a transmitter, the book invites readers to hear the voices of our many voices, and contemplate the complexity of our one nation. The stories and artifacts included in this volume bring our seemingly disparate pasts together to inspire possibilities for a shared future as we constantly reinterpret our e pluribus unum – our nation of many voices.

Why some Americans built fallout shelters—an exploration America's Cold War experience For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war? Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

Reviews the geography, history, people, customs, and the arts of the West African country of Nigeria.

One Nation Under God? is a remarkable consideration of how religion manifests itself in America today.

How Motown changed the landscape of American popular culture

This volume analyzes how public rhetoric, argumentation, and discourse led to the successful change in government in South Africa. Intended for scholars and students in rhetoric, speech, political communication, persuasion, and related areas.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations, thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The histories of East and West Germany traditionally emphasize the Cold War rivalries between the communist and capitalist nations. Yet, even as the countries diverged in their political directions, they had to create new ways of working together economically. In Designing One Nation, Katrin Schreiter examines the material culture of increasing economic contacts in divided Germany from the 1940s until the 1990s. Trade events, such as fairs and product shows, became one of the few venues for sustained links and knowledge between the two countries after the building of the Berlin Wall. Schreiter uses industrial design, epitomized by the furniture industry, to show how a network of politicians, entrepreneurs, and cultural brokers attempted to nationally re-inscribe their production cultures, define a postwar German identity, and regain economic stability and political influence in postwar Europe. What started as a competition for ideological superiority between East and West Germany quickly turned into a shared, politically legitimizing quest for an untainted post-fascist modernity. This work follows products from the drawing board into the homes of ordinary Germans to offer insights into how converging visions of German industrial modernity created shared expectations about economic progress and living standards. Schreiter reveals how intra-German and European trade policies drove the creation of products and generated a certain convergence of East and West German taste by the 1980s. Drawing on a wide range of sources from governments, furniture firms, industrial design councils, home lifestyle magazines, and design exhibitions, Designing One Nation argues that an economic culture linked the two Germanies even before reunification in 1990.