Restless Giant, page 52
Religious developments, notably the ascendance of the Religious Right, have generated a lively literature. An excellent overview of political aspects is William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996). Other useful books are Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York, 1990); Sara Diamond, Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Religious Right (New York, 1998); Robert Wuthnow, The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (New York, 1997); and Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago, 2000). Frances FitzGerald, Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through American Cultures (New York, 1986), includes material on the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. For a historical approach to religion in American life, see James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 2002). Wolfe, Moral Freedom, mentioned earlier, is relevant and useful.
Environment: Writing in this field has blossomed. An upbeat survey of developments is Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism (New York, 1995). A pessimistic account is Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (Boston, 1992). For a historical survey, see Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York, 2002). See also Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, 1993); Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York, 1987); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1993); Adam Rose, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York, 2001); and Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation: Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945 (Orlando, 1998). Two widely read books by leading environmentalists are Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York, 1989), and John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York, 1989).
Education: A helpful survey is David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). See also two books by Diane Ravitch: Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York, 2000) and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York, 1983). John Jennings, Why National Standards and Tests? Politics and the Quest for Better Schools (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1998) focuses on debates in the 1990s. Other useful books include Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York, 1999); and Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap (Washington, 1998). Advocates of school reform in the new century include Abigail Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York, 2003), and John Chubb and Tom Loveless, eds., Bridging the Achievement Gap (Washington, 2002). See also the book by Zimmerman, listed below.
Cultural trends/values: Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, 1985) is a critical evaluation of American values in the early 1980s. John de Graaf et al., Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco, 2001) raps American materialism in the 1990s. For more on consumerism, see the books by Brooks and Cohen, mentioned above. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York, 1993) deplores many aspects of American culture. See also Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston, 2001). Other broadly conceived books concerned with trends in American culture include Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, and the volumes by Brooks, Putnam, and Wolfe, all mentioned earlier.
Books concerned with the media and film include Mary Ann Watson, Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience Since 1945 (Fort Worth, 1998), a fine survey; James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (New York, 1996); Robert Downie and Robert Kaiser, The News about the News: American Journalism in Peril (New York, 2002); and Ronald Davis, Celluloid Mirrors: Hollywood and American Society Since 1945 (Fort Worth, 1997).
Among the books concerned with the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and 1990s are: James Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991); Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York, 1999); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1991); John Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education (Durham, N.C., 1995); Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Gary Nash et al., History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997); Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York, 1996); and Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, listed above.
Civil Rights and Race Relations: There is an especially voluminous literature concerned with these subjects. Overviews include Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001); Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York, 1995); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York, 1997); Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (Washington, 1997); Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of America (Princeton, 1996); and John Higham, ed., Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations Since World War II (University Park, Pa., 1997).
For affirmative action, see Terry Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York, 2004); William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, 1998); Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (New York, 2002); and Ball, listed above. Other books concerning developments in race relations include Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York, 1991); Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York, 2004); Gary Orfield, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (New York, 1996); and Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice (Princeton, 2002), a survey of attitudes about race. See also the previously mentioned books by Gillon, Gladwell, Katz, Klarman, Skrentny, Sugrue, Self, and William Julius Wilson.
Immigration/Ethnicity: Relevant books include David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995); Roger Daniels and Otis Graham, Debating Immigration, 1882–Present (Lanham, Md., 2001); Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 2002); and Gary Gerstle and John Mollenkopf, eds., E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation (New York, 2001). Among the books featuring worries about the size of immigration to America are George Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration and the American Economy (Princeton, 1999); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (New York, 1995); and Samuel Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York, 2004). For other perspectives see Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (New Haven, 1997), and the books by Schlesinger and Hugh Davis Graham, cited above. A fine local study of ethnic conflict is Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
The 1970s/Ford and Carter Presidencies: Interpretive surveys of the 1970s include Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001); David Frum, How We Got Here: The ’70s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) (New York, 2000); Peter Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of the 1970s (New York, 1982); and Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence, Kans., 2004). Critiques of American life in the 1970s include Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1978); and two collections of essays by Tom Wolfe, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter, and Vine (New York, 1976) and In Our Time (New York, 1980). Battles in Boston over busing to accomplish racial balance receive excellent treatment in Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991), and J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York, 1986).
For the Ford administration, see John Greene, The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Lawrence, Kans., 1995); A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Washington, 1981); and James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York, 2004). As its title indicates, Mann’s book is also informative about later decades. For the Carter years, see Gary Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence, Kans., 1998); Burton Kaufman, The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr. (Lawrence, Kans., 1993); Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York, 1986); and Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (New York, 1982).
The 1980s/Reagan and Bush Presidencies: General books concerned with the 1980s include Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York, 1991); John White, The New Politics of Old Values (Hanover, N.H., 1989); and Bellah et al., listed above. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York, 2000) is a balanced, comprehensive study of the Great Communicator’s time in the White House. For Reagan, see also William Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan (New York, 1998); W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies (Lawrence, Kans., 2003); Kiron Skinner et al., eds., Reagan, in His Own Hand (New York, 2001); Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York, 2000); and Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). See also Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000).
John Greene, The Presidency of George Bush (Lawrence, Kans., 2000), and Herbert Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York, 1997) cover the presidency of George H. W. Bush. More focused studies include Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston, 1995); George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, 1995); and David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York, 2001).
The 1990s/Clinton Presidency: For aspects of the 1990s, see Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years (New York, 1991); Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York, 2001); and Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999), on globalization. For Clinton, consult William Berman, From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton Presidency (Lanham, Md., 2001); and Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (New York, 2002). For foreign policy matters, see Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York, 2004) and Halberstam, listed above. Three books that focus on the election of 2000 are E. J. Dionne and William Kristol, eds., Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (Washington, 2001); Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (New York, 2001); and Jack Rakove, ed., The Unfinished Election of 2000 (New York, 2001).
Statistics/Trends: As footnotes indicate, I have relied heavily for statistics on various editions of the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States, especially the edition of 2002. In places where the Statistical Almanac did not seem to provide necessary information, I have cited editions of the World Almanac and of the New York Times Almanac. Three additional books include charts, graphs, and statistics concerning important trends. They are Andrew Hacker, ed., U/S: A Statistical Portrait of the American People (New York, 1983); Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, eds., It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years (Washington, 2000); and Theodore Caplow et al., The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000 (Washington, 2001).
Index
Aaron, Henry “Hank,” 3
AARP (American Association of Retired People), 88
Abbey, Edward, 116
ABC, 285
ABM (anti-ballistic missile) Treaty, 202
Abortion: Bush, George H. W., and, 251–52
Bush, George W., and, 406
Clinton and, 326, 330
funds for, 54, 54n32
issues of, xii, 3, 25, 78, 104, 136–38, 170, 267
legal issues and, 52, 130, 130n53, 242
rates of, 52n27, 270, 365
Reagan and, 177
Supreme Court and, xii, 3
ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), 181, 182
Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena, 366
Adidas, 278
AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), 49–50, 49n18, 165, 374–76, 374n86
Affirmative action, xii, 90
African Americans and, 15, 16, 16n8, 26, 27, 305–6
baby boomers’ view of, 79
corporations and, 27–28
criticism of, 15, 25, 28, 30
immigration policy and, 25, 26, 26n36
impact of, 27–28
labor unions and, 25
military services and, 28
minority groups and, 26, 27, 67
Native Americans and, 26, 27
Reagan and, 171–74
Supreme Court and, xii, 27, 35, 113
universities and, 28–30, 29n41, 53
for women, 24
Afghanistan, xii, 110, 123, 194, 379, 381–83, 385, 393
AFL-CIO, 65, 87, 114, 188, 204
African Americans: 1990s and, 316–17
advancement of, 16–17, 16n9
affirmative action and, 15, 16, 16n8, 26, 27, 305–6
crime and, 43, 274
economic equality of, 18, 304–6
education and, 19–20, 19n18, 314–16
experience of, 24
full citizenship for, xi
illegitimacy and, 49
immigration and, 295, 296, 301
party affiliation of, 78
poverty and, 18, 306–9, 306n36, 307n39, 308n45
religion and, 142
school busing and, 20–23
social equality of, 18
support for, 10
Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 67
“Age of Limits,” 10, 11, 73, 74, 152
Aged, support for, 10, 14, 24
Agent Orange, 99
Agnew, Spiro, 2, 5, 92
Agriculture, 38, 354
Aid to Families with Dependent Children. See AFDC
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. See ACT-UP
AIDS epidemic, xii, 45, 179–82, 180n82, 356
AIM (American Indian Movement), 77, 77n4
Air controllers. See PATCO
Aircraft, sale of, 61
Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, 115
Alaska Lands Law, 119
Albanian Muslims, 400–401
Albright, Madeleine, 400
Aleuts, 26, 27
Algeria, 126
Ali, Muhammad, 6, 6n14
All in the Family, 187–88
All the President’s Men (Bernstein and Woodward), 71
Allen, Paul, 59
Allen, Tim, 285
Allen, Woody, 287
Allende, Salvador, 72, 103
America, 255n5
art and, 261–62
books and, 289
Christian Right and, 257, 266, 267
Clinton and, 260, 272
community organizations and, 258–59
as conservative, 78
conservatives and, 254–55, 260, 263, 264
consumerism and, 277–80
corporations and, 277–80, 285–86
creativity of, 359
credit card debt and, 279–80
cultural institutions and, 288–89, 291
culture wars and, xii, 3, 12, 260, 264–65, 265n31, 269, 274
drugs and, 273
energy use in, 350
evangelicals and, 257
family patterns and, 271–72
foreign policies of, xii, 4, 12, 197
gayhaters and, 261
Generation X and, 269
hate groups and, 261
history textbooks and, 266
legacy of 1960s and, 257
liberals and, 257, 260, 264, 267, 269–70
litigation and, 275–77
magazines’ impact on, 284
media sensationalism in, 255, 265–69
military policies of, 12
Millennials and, 269
movies’ impact on, 283–85, 287, 287n85
music’s impact on, 282, 287
religious conservatives and, 3, 136, 177, 256, 259, 266
Religious Right and, 256, 260, 265, 267, 268
rights-consciousness and, 274–77
role of, in world economy, 61–62, 360
schools and, 255
sexual immorality and, 255
social problems’ impact on, 268–69, 348
sports and, 278–79, 278n65
as target of terrorism, 198
television’s impact on, 259, 282–83, 285, 286, 288–89
universities and, 263, 278
violent crime and, 255, 260–61, 273–74
vulgarity and, 255
America 2000, 239
American Apartheid, 305
American Association of Retired People. See AARP
