The Rise Of A Prairie Statesman

The first major biography of the 1972 U.S. presidential candidate and unsung champion of American liberalism The Rise of a Prairie Statesman is the first volume of a major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became America's most eloquent and prescient critic of the Vietnam War. In this masterful book, Thomas Knock traces George McGovern's life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city's streets. Drawing extensively on McGovern's private papers and scores of in-depth interviews, Knock shows how McGovern's importance to the Democratic Party and American liberalism extended far beyond his 1972 presidential campaign, and how the story of postwar American politics is about more than just the rise of the New Right. He vividly describes McGovern's harrowing missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 bomber pilot, and reveals how McGovern's combat experiences motivated him to earn a PhD in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress. When President Kennedy appointed him director of Food for Peace in 1961, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of the program's school lunch initiative that soon was feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world. As a senator, he delivered his courageous and unrelenting critique of Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam—a conflict that brought their party to disaster and caused a new generation of Democrats to turn to McGovern for leadership. A stunning achievement, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman ends in 1968, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, when the "Draft McGovern" movement thrust him into the national spotlight and the contest for the presidential nomination, culminating in his triumphal reelection to the Senate and his emergence as one of the most likely prospects for the Democratic nomination in 1972..

A deeply relevant look at what fascism means to Americans. From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of politicians, who have used the language of fascism to smear opponents, and he looks at the discussions of pundits, the analyses of academics, and the displays of fascism in popular culture, including fiction, radio, TV, theater, and film. Kuklick argues that fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult. For example, every political position has been besmirched as fascist. As a result, the term does not describe a phenomenon so much as it denounces what one does not like. Finally, in displaying fascism for most Americans, entertainment—and most importantly film—has been crucial in conveying to citizens what fascism is about. Fascism Comes to America has been enhanced by many illustrations that exhibit how fascism was absorbed into the US public consciousness.

Both North Dakota and South Dakota have long been among the most reliably Republican states in the nation: in the past century, voters have only chosen two Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, and in 2016 both states preferred Donald Trump by over thirty points. Yet in the decades before World War II, the people of the Northern Plains were not universally politically conservative. Instead, many Dakotans, including Republicans, supported experiments in agrarian democracy that incorporated ideas from populism and progressivism to socialism and communism and fought against "bigness" in all its forms, including "bonanza" farms, out-of-state railroads, corporations, banks, corrupt political parties, and distant federal bureaucracies—but also, surprisingly, the culture of militarism and the expansion of American military power abroad. In Nuclear Country, Catherine McNicol Stock explores the question of why, between 1968 and 1992, most voters in the Dakotas abandoned their distinctive ideological heritage and came to embrace the conservatism of the New Right. Stock focuses on how this transformation coincided with the coming of the military and national security states to the countryside via the placement of military bases and nuclear missile silos on the Northern Plains. This militarization influenced regional political culture by reinforcing or re-contextualizing long-standing local ideas and practices, particularly when the people of the plains found that they shared culturally conservative values with the military. After adopting the first two planks of the New Right—national defense and conservative social ideas—Dakotans endorsed the third plank of New Right ideology, fiscal conservativism. Ultimately, Stock contends that militarization and nuclearization were the historical developments most essential to the creation of the rural New Right throughout the United States, and that their impact can best be seen in this often-overlooked region's history.

The now–staunchly red state of Texas was deep blue in 1950 and had virtually no functioning Republican Party. California, on the other hand, was reliably red. Today, both states have jumped to the opposite end of the political spectrum. Texas is one of the most conservative states, while California has become one of today’s most liberal bastions. These are the most dramatic cases, but notable shifts in voting patterns have occurred throughout the western states in recent decades—shifts so varied and complex that they have, until now, eluded the attention focused on the drastic examples of the South and Northeast. Bringing clarity to the remarkably mixed yet poorly understood map of America’s red, blue, and purple western half, Color Coded presents the first comprehensive history of political change and stability in the region between 1950 and 2016. The West, in Walter Nugent’s analysis, includes nineteen states: the thirteen that the U.S. Census Bureau calls the Western Region—roughly from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, as well as off-shore Alaska and Hawaii—plus the six Great Plains states from North Dakota south to Texas. Consulting official voting results of more than 5,300 state and national elections, as well as newspaper reports, oral histories, public documents, and other sources, Nugent reveals the ever-shifting patterns that have defined western politics in modern times. Geography, culture, history, political trajectories, and the charisma of key political actors have all played their part in these changes—and will, Nugent asserts, continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A powerful, exhaustively researched study of modern political organization, party development, and shifting voter blocs in the West, Color Coded deftly charts, as well, the profound red-blue tensions that have defined modern America. Returns for the 5,300-plus elections on which the book is based, covering the nineteen western states between 1950 and 2016, are compiled in the book's appendix.

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A comprehensive, sweeping history of America’s rise to global superpower—from the Spanish-American War to World War II—by the acclaimed author of Dangerous Nation “With extraordinary range and research, Robert Kagan has illuminated America’s quest to reconcile its new power with its historical purpose in world order in the early twentieth century.” —Dr. Henry Kissinger At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States was one of the world’s richest, most populous, most technologically advanced nations. It was also a nation divided along numerous fault lines, with conflicting aspirations and concerns pulling it in different directions. And it was a nation unsure about the role it wanted to play in the world, if any. Americans were the beneficiaries of a global order they had no responsibility for maintaining. Many preferred to avoid being drawn into what seemed an ever more competitive, conflictual, and militarized international environment. However, many also were eager to see the United States taking a share of international responsibility, working with others to preserve peace and advance civilization. The story of American foreign policy in the first four decades of the twentieth century is about the effort to do both—“to adjust the nation to its new position without sacrificing the principles developed in the past,” as one contemporary put it. This would prove a difficult task. The collapse of British naval power, combined with the rise of Germany and Japan, suddenly placed the United States in a pivotal position. American military power helped defeat Germany in the First World War, and the peace that followed was significantly shaped by a U.S. president. But Americans recoiled from their deep involvement in world affairs, and for the next two decades, they sat by as fascism and tyranny spread unchecked, ultimately causing the liberal world order to fall apart. America’s resulting intervention in the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era, for the United States and for the world. Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility.

In The Rise of the States, noted urban historian Jon C. Teaford explores the development of state government in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the so-called renaissance of states at the end of the twentieth. Arguing that state governments were not lethargic backwaters that suddenly stirred to life in the 1980s, Teaford shows instead how state governments were continually adapting and expanding throughout the past century. While previous historical scholarship focused on the states, if at all, as retrograde relics of simpler times, Teaford describes how states actively assumed new responsibilities, developed new sources of revenue, and created new institutions. Teaford examines the evolution of the structure, function, and finances of state government during the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression, the post–World War II years, and the post–reapportionment era beginning in the late 1960s. State governments, he explains, played an active role not only in the creation, governance, and management of the political units that made up the state but also in dealing with the growth of business, industries, and education. Not all states chose the same solutions to common problems. For Teaford, the diversity of responses points to the growing vitality and maturity of state governments as the twentieth century unfolded.

The presidential election of 1968 forever changed American politics. In this character-driven narrative history, Aram Goudsouzian portrays the key transformations that played out over that dramatic year. It was the last "Old Politics" campaign, where political machines and party bosses determined the major nominees, even as the "New Politics" of grassroots participation powered primary elections. It was an election that showed how candidates from both the Left and Right could seize on "hot-button" issues to alter the larger political dynamic. It showcased the power of television to "package" politicians and political ideas, and it played out against an extraordinary dramatic global tableau of chaos and conflict. More than anything else, it was a moment decided by a contest of political personalities, as a group of men battled for the presidency, with momentous implications for the nation's future. Well-paced, accessible, and engagingly written, Goudsouzian's book chronicles anew the characters and events of the 1968 campaign as an essential moment in American history, one with clear resonance in our contemporary political moment.