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Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s
Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades. Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan’s America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies. A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism’s rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism. .
Price: $13.40
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The Purchase of Intimacy
In their personal lives, people consider it essential to separate economics and intimacy We have, for example, a long-standing taboo against workplace romance, while we see marital love as different from prostitution because it is not a fundamentally financial exchange. In The Purchase of Intimacy, Viviana Zelizer mounts a provocative challenge to this view. Getting to the heart of one of life's greatest taboos, she shows how we all use economic activity to create, maintain, and renegotiate important ties--especially intimate ties--to other people. In everyday life, we invest intense effort and worry to strike the right balance. For example, when a wife's income equals or surpasses her husband's, how much more time should the man devote to household chores or child care? Sometimes legal disputes arise. Should the surviving partner in a same-sex relationship have received compensation for a partner's death as a result of 9/11? Through a host of compelling examples, Zelizer shows us why price is central to three key areas of intimacy: sexually tinged relations; health care by family members, friends, and professionals; and household economics. She draws both on research and materials ranging from reports on compensation to survivors of 9/11 victims to financial management Web sites and advice books for same-sex couples. From the bedroom to the courtroom, The Purchase of Intimacy opens a fascinating new window on the inner workings of the economic processes that pervade our private lives. .
Price: $16.26
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Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children
In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically "useless" and emotionally "priceless," from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child's monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children's life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views of life that ignore the pervasive role of social, cultural, emotional, and moral factors in our marketplace world. .
Price: $16.95
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The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies
A dollar is a dollar--or so most of us believe Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing social relations to cold, hard cash. Arguing against this conventional wisdom, Viviana Zelizer, a distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author, shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. .
Price: $26.05
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Journalism After September 11 (Communication and Society)
The events of September 11 continue to resonate in powerful, yet sometimes unexpected ways. For many journalists, the crisis has decisively recast their sense of the world around them. The familiar notions of what it means to be a journalist, how best to practice journalism, and what the public can reasonably expect of journalists in the name of democracy, have been shaken to their foundations. Journalism After September 11examines how the traumatic attacks of that day continue to transform the nature of journalism, particularly in the United States and Britain. It brings together an internationally respected group of scholars and media commentators to explore journalism's present and future by engaging with such pressing issues as trauma, free speech, censorship, patriotism, impartiality and celebrity. Journalism After September 11 raises vitally important questions regarding what journalism can and should look like today. In providing answers, it addresses topics such as: journalism and public life at a time of crisis; the role of sources in shaping the news; reporting by global news media, such as CNN; current affairs broadcasting; news photography and trauma; the emotional well-being of reporters; as well as a host of pertinent issues around news, democracy and citizenship..
Price: $16.00
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The American Congress: The Building of Democracy
Congress is the heart and soul of our democracy, the place where interests are brokered, laws are established, and innovation is turned into concrete action. It is also where some of democracy's greatest virtues clash with its worst vices: idealism and compromise meet corruption and bitter partisanship. The American Congress unveils the rich and varied history of this singular institution. Julian E. Zelizer has gathered together forty essays by renowned historians to capture the full drama, landmark legislation, and most memorable personalities of Congress. Organized around four major periods of congressional history, from the signing of the Constitution to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, this volume brings a fresh perspective to familiar watershed events: the Civil War, Watergate, the Vietnam War. It also gives a behind-the-scenes look at lesser-known legislation debated on the House and Senate floors, such as westward expansion and war powers control. Here are the stories behind the 1868 vote to impeach President Andrew Johnson; the rise of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress and a leading advocate for pacifism; and the controversy surrounding James Eastland of Mississippi, who carried civil rights bills in his pockets so they could not come up for a vote. Sidebars further spotlight notables including Huey Long, Sam Rayburn, and Tip O'Neill, bringing the sweeping history of our lawmaking bodies into sharp focus. If you've ever wondered how Congress worked in the past or what our elected officials do today, this book gives the engaging, often surprising, answers..
Price: $3.00
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On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000
Thirty years after the "Watergate Babies" promised to end corruption in Washington, Julian Zelizer offers the first major history of the demise of the committee-era Congress and the rise of the contemporary legislative branch. Based on research in more than a hundred archival collections, this book tackles one of the most enduring political challenges in America: barring a wholesale revolution, how can we improve our representative democracy so as best to fulfill the promises of the Constitution? Whereas popular accounts suggest that major scandals or legislation can transform government institutions, Zelizer shows that reform is messy, slow, and involves many institutions coming together at the right time. The short period of reform in the 1970s--one that rivaled the Progressive Era--revolved around a coalition that had worked for decades, a slow reconfiguration of the relationship among political institutions, shifts in the national culture, and the ability of reformers to take advantage of scandals and elections. Zelizer presents a new look at the origins of the partisanship and scandal warfare that characterize today's politics. The book also offers a warning to the next generation of reformers by showing how a new political environment can radically transform the political impact of government reforms, as occurred when the conservative movement--during its rise to power in recent decades--took advantage of reforms that had ended the committee era. Julian Zelizer teaches political history at Boston University. His book, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945-1975 (Cambridge, 1999), was awarded the Organization of American Historian's 1998 D.B. Hardeman Prize. He is the co-editor of The Democratic Experiment (Princeton University Press, 2003) and the editor of The American Congress: The Building of Democracy (Houghton-Mifflin, 2005)..
Price: $4.39
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Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye
Barbie Zelizer reveals the unique significance of the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. She shows how the photographs have become the basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent atrocities. Impressive in its range and depth and illustrated with more than 60 photographs, Remembering to Forget is a history of contemporary photojournalism, a compelling chronicle of these unforgettable photographs, and a fascinating study of how collective memory is forged and changed. "[A] fascinating study. . . . Here we have a completely fresh look at the emergence of photography as a major component of journalistic reporting in the course of the liberation of the camps by the Western Allies. . . . Well written and argued, superbly produced with more photographs of atrocity than most people would want to see in a lifetime, this is clearly an important book."—Omer Bartov, Times Literary Supplement.
Price: $17.95
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Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory
Images of the assassination of John F. Kennedy are burned deeply into the memories of millions who watched the events of November 1963 unfold live on television. Never before had America seen an event of this magnitude as it happened. But what is it we remember? How did the near chaos of the shooting and its aftermath get transformed into a seamless story of epic proportions? In this book, Barbie Zelizer explores the way we learned about and came to make sense of the killing of the president.
Covering the Body (the title refers to the charge given journalists to follow a president) is a powerful reassessment of the media's role in shaping our collective memory of the assassination—at the same time as it used the assassination coverage to legitimize its own role as official interpreter of American reality. Of the more than fifty reporters covering Kennedy in Dallas, no one actually saw the assassination. And faced with a monumentally important story that was continuously breaking, most journalists had no time to verify leads or substantiate reports. Rather, they took discrete moments of their stories and turned them into one coherent narrative, blurring what was and was not "professional" about their coverage.
Through incisive analyses of the many accounts and investigations in the years since the shooting, Zelizer reveals how journalists used the assassination not just to relay the news but to address the issues they saw as central to the profession and to promote themselves as cultural authorities. Indeed, argues Zelizer, these motivations are still alive and are at the core of the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's movie, JFK.
At its heart, Covering the Body raises serious questions about the role of the media in defining our reality, and shaping our myths and memories. In tracing how journalists attempted to answer questions that still trouble most Americans, Zelizer offers a fascinating analysis of the role of the media as cultural authorities.
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Price: $9.00
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