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The most entirely satisfactory volume in this batch of books about President Kennedy is Peter J. Ling’s biography (John F. Kennedy). The author could perhaps have done with more space, but it remains astonishing how much information he gives us, and his command of the sources is equally impressive. He is scholarly, lucid, fair-minded and up-to-date.
The first thing to note about this book is that it is about the American far left’s (that is by what Norwood sees as the American far left after 1920) engagement with Antisemitism and it is not about, or at least not just about, Antisemitism by the American far left.
The legal act of defining the ‘employee’ is about drawing lines. Those boundaries are often artificial, legally structured, and forged in an array of contests over power, ideology, and economics. They may be artificial, but they are powerful, demarcating who is in and who is out, who is us and who is them.
Ryan Floyd’s Abandoning American Neutrality should be considered required reading about America’s entry into the First World War.
In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Anthony McFarlane talks to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto about his new book, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (born 1950) is a British historian and author of several popular works of revisionist history.
As it recedes in historical memory, American anti-communism becomes more interesting as a historical phenomenon. Try explaining a slogan like ‘Better dead than red’ to a roomful of undergraduates born long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In retrospect, American anti-communism stands out for its coherence, vehemence, and endurance.
Power, Politics and the Decline of the Civil Rights Movement traces the movement in its waning years, focusing primarily on the fates of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC (as the Student Nonviolent and the Student National Coordinating Committee).
Household goods piled along curbs with hand-lettered signs saying ‘free’; never-worn clothing hanging in closets, price tags still in place; vacated college dormitory rooms filled with abandoned throw rugs, hair dryers, bookcases; consultants who help us simplify our lives by getting rid of ‘stuff.’ This is the world of things that many Americans inhabit today.
Ask Americans when their country became the world’s dominant power and chances are most will point to the hard-fought victory in the Second World War. But as Adam Tooze shows in his latest work, that shift occurred a generation earlier and before American forces had even fired a shot in what was once called the Great War.
Scholars of modern Jewish life have largely focused on Jews’ position in the nation-states in which they live.