Stephen J. Whitfield – A Companion to 20th-century America

Автор: Stephen J. Whitfield
Название книги: A Companion to 20th-century America
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Америки, Австралии, Океании
Страницы: 582
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to 20th-Century America is an authoritative survey of the most important topics and themes of twentieth-century American history and historiography.

Contains 29 original essays by leading scholars, each assessing the past and current state of American scholarship
Includes thematic essays covering topics such as religion, ethnicity, conservatism, foreign policy, and the media, as well as essays covering major time periods
Identifies and discusses the most influential literature in the field, and suggests new avenues of research, as the century has drawn to a close
‘‘The American Century’’ is the title that the magazine publisher Henry R. Luce
bestowed on the past century, even before it had run half its course. In an editorial
appearing in the February 17, 1941 issue of Life, the weekly that Luce invented, he
expressed a vision that – perhaps even more than the reverberant term he devised –
merits consideration as a way of understanding what the United States has meant in
the framework of world history.
When his editorial appeared, Nazi Germany had already conquered much of
Europe; and its oppressed peoples might well have wondered how and when an
unprecedented tyranny might ever be defeated. Allied with the Third Reich was
another totalitarian power, the Soviet Union, leaving only Great Britain to resist
the Nazi juggernaut. In Asia the most populous nations on the planet were also
beleaguered – whether in the convulsions of civil war (China) or under imperialist
rule (India). At such a moment, the United States was not merely isolationist; it also
looked isolated. Officially neutral, this republic of slightly under 134 million people
was still recovering from the most severe crisis that its capitalist economy had ever
suffered. What was about to happen in 1941 were turning points that neither Luce
nor anyone else could have been expected to foresee: the German invasion of the
Soviet Union, which would turn the largest nation on earth into a tenacious enemy,
and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, which would turn the greatest industrial
power on the planet into a champion of collective security against the Axis. Only four
years after Luce’s editorial, a full-scale war of catastrophic destructiveness would leave
his country the dominant power on earth. That position of hegemony the US would
hold until the end of the American century.
In 1941 Luce might have seemed guilty of exaggeration, if not of delusion. By
1945 he could have been credited with eerie foresight. From the perspective of the
twenty-first century, what he intended in urging both a repudiation of isolation and a
promotion of national values has taken on special resonance. For he advocated an
acceptance of global responsibility to advance the two benefits that he claimed had
made the United States so appealing a society: its abundance and its freedom. (Full
employment would not be reached until after American entry in the Second World
War, and white supremacy would still be legally enforceable for another generation.) Only a month before Luce’s editorial was published, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
had proclaimed something similar, tabulating the Four Freedoms that needed to be
vindicated in battle: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want,
Freedom from Fear. Unlike FDR, Luce was neither a Democrat nor much of a liberal.
But the magazine magnate captured something about the national mood too, and
managed to articulate the American dream (itself a phrase that had been coined, by
historian James Truslow Adams, only a decade earlier). If the United States was to pay
a high price in blood and treasure during the war, and was to project unrivaled
military and economic might thereafter, the ideals that Luce identified had to be of
universal value and not merely the special but parochial aspirations of his fellow
citizens.
The twenty-nine chapters that constitute this Blackwell Companion can be read as
sites for testing what the Time, Inc. tycoon proposed. How, over the course of the
twentieth century, has the nation approximated the democratic prospect? To what
extent have the ideals of prosperity and liberty been realized? How has the promise of
opportunity been rendered, squandered, fulfilled? Start at the beginning. The year
1897 marked the end of the bleak depression that had begun four years earlier, and –
a year before the acquisition of an empire in the wake of the Spanish-American War –
inaugurated a spectacular period of economic growth. Until the shocking collapse of
the stock market in 1929, the gross national product (GNP) more than tripled (when
dollars are held constant). Per capita GNP more than doubled, which meant that, by
1910, increasingly comfortable Americans were living in the greatest industrial power
in the world. That was still true nine decades later, when globalization was often
understood to be a synonym for Americanization. How such productivity was managed,
how such resources were allocated and deployed – these are themes that
inevitably emerge in a book about the American century. This book is about freedom
too. How was the value that was so alluring to millions of immigrants pursued,
defined, redefined, betrayed, or achieved? How was it compelled to compete with
other ideals? The proportion of the foreign-born at the end of the century was
comparable to its dawn, and was drawn even more from Latin America, Asia, and
Africa than from Europe. How so variegated and diverse a populace achieved stability
and order, while exalting an ideal of freedom, is integral to the story of twentiethcentury
America too.
This volume is intended to challenge readers to imagine the past anew, to consider
it from a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches, and to appreciate how recent
scholarship has required a re-conceptualization of the last century. The authors have
tried to do justice to the elusive, intriguing, and complex fate of experiencing the
American century. All of these scholars have taken into account the ways by which
recent research and reinterpretation inevitably destabilize the past, and have sought to
make such revisions as accessible and intelligible to readers as possible. Some contributors
have approached their topics chronologically, in terms of decades (which do
not necessarily occur in conventional ten-year intervals). But most chapters are
designed to trace a phenomenon over the course of time. These historians are all
experts in their particular fields, and have engaged in analysis as well as synthesis.
Whether they have succeeded is ultimately the judgment of the readers of this
Companion. But all of the contributors have earned the gratitude and admiration of
the editor of this volume.