Books in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series

Camden After the Fall chronicles the history of a classic post-industrial American city and points toward a sustained urban revitalization strategy for the twenty-first century.

Analyzing economic policy from the New Deal through the Reagan Revolution, Tax and Spend takes a new look at the so-called tax-and-spend liberals of the past. This important study examines why many Americans have come to hate the government but continue to demand the security it provides.

Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical role the famous evangelist played in creating the modern American South. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful transitional symbol-an evangelist, first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure.

Focusing on the fate of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, this comprehensive history of the thirty year war over welfare shows how stubborn allegiance to the male-headed household undermined the struggle for economic justice.

Rossinow revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. He takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed.

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet is the first religious biography of this leading civil rights activist and intellectual. Though Du Bois is often labeled an atheist, historian Edward J. Blum argues that his religious and spiritual insights are central to understanding his political and intellectual work.

Drawing from extensive archival research, Out of the Horrors of War demonstrates that disabled citizens in the World War II era organized a national movement for economic security and full citizenship, reshaping the U.S. welfare state and laying the foundation for the disability rights movement.

Queer Clout weaves together activism and electoral politics to trace the gay movement's path since the 1950s in Chicago. Stewart-Winter stresses gay people's and African Americans' shared focus on police harassment, highlighting how black political leaders enabled white gays and lesbians to join an emerging liberal coalition in city hall.

In Central Harlem, the symbolic and historic heart of black America, the violent unrest of July 1964 highlighted a new dynamic in the racial politics of the nation. The first "long, hot summer" of the Sixties had arrived.

Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians.

Up South documents the efforts of Philadelphia's Black Power activists to construct a vital and effective social movement combining analyses of racism with a program of grassroots community organizing in the context of the failure of civil rights liberalism to deliver on its promise of racial equality.

Rachel Rains Winslow examines how the adoption of foreign children transformed from a marginal activity in response to episodic crises in the 1940s to an enduring American institution by the 1970s. She provides the first historical examination of the people, policies, and systems that made the United States an enduring "adoption nation."

The story of the liberal and radical minds-including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans-who worked for conservative Henry Luce and his popular magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960.

Karen Ferguson explores the consequences of the counterintuitive and unequal relationship between the elite liberal Ford Foundation and black power activists, arguing that codeveloped initiatives in education, community development, and the arts contributed to the recreation of racial liberalism in the neo-conservative era and beyond.

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters tells the story of the battle for access to leisure space in cities across the United States. This detailed and eloquent history shows how African Americans fought to enter segregated amusement areas not only in pursuit of happiness but in connection to a wider movement for racial equality.

Radical Pacifism in Modern America illuminates the complex relationships between gender, race, activism, and political culture, identifying critical factors that simultaneously hindered and facilitated grassroots efforts at social and political change.

The Battle for Welfare Rights tells, for the first time, the complete story of a movement that profoundly affected the meaning of citizenship and the social contract in the United States.

Homeless explores the efforts of private and public institutions to solve the problem of homelessness by tracing the rise and fall of skid rows in America through the lens of New York's Bowery. Crowded onto skid rows, the homeless lived apart from the middle classes, who saw them as an aberrant population.

"American Capitalism is an important contribution to our understanding of postwar American thought and culture. It will force historians to revise their pantheon of important thinkers for the period."-George Cotkin, author of Existential America

"Excellent. . . . The Education of Jane Addams provides a detailed, wonderfully complex analysis of Addams's ideas, life, and work."-Journal of American History

In 1890, a delegation of African American activists formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the course of nearly two decades, these activists fought to end disfranchisement and segregation, and to contest racial violence, creating the foundation for the NAACP and the modern civil rights movement.

The period between 1880 and 1915 marked the first sustained migration of black people into New York City as blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.

Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.

Chronicling the birth of the biotechnology industry, Biotech shows how a cultural and political revolution in the 1960s resulted in a new scientific order-the practical application of biological knowledge supported by private investors expecting profitable returns eclipsed basic research supported by government agencies.

An in-depth account of the relationship between the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.

Mapping Decline, illustrated with more than 75 full-color maps, traces the ways private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, federal housing policies, and urban renewal encouraged "white flight" and urban decline in St. Louis, Missouri.

Not in This Family shows how gays and their heterosexual parents both have animated each other's sensibilities, consciousness, and even culture and politics. Author Heather Murray suggests a reciprocal family life and complicates the notion of gay banishment.

Set the World on Fire highlights the black nationalist women who fought for national and transnational black liberation from the early to mid-twentieth century.

Robert McNamara's Other War chronicles the former defense secretary's thirteen-year presidency of the World Bank. Using previously unstudied World Bank documents, Patrick Allan Sharma recounts the World Bank's transformation under McNamara and highlights his complex legacy.