Men of letters in the early republic

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Christopher Lasch

Christopher Lasch has examined the role of women and the family in Western society throughout his career as a writer, thinker, and historian. In Women and the Common Life, Lasch suggests controversial linkages between the history of women and the course of European and American history more generally. He sees fundamental changes in intimacy, domestic ideals, and sexual politics taking place as a result of industrialization and the triumph of the market. Questioning a static image of patriarchy, Women and the Common Life insists on a feminist vision rooted in the best possibilities of a democratic common life.

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Richard R. Beeman

"In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Richard R. Beeman offers an overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, Beeman reveals an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In doing so, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality." "Political life in eighteenth-century America, Beeman demonstrates, was diffuse and fragmented, with America's British subjects and their leaders often speaking different political dialects altogether. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were under way that were making it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures." As the author shows in a final chapter on the Revolution, those popular pressures, once unleashed, were difficult to contain and drove the colonies slowly and unevenly toward a democratic form of government. Synthesizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Beeman offers an account of the way politics actually worked in this formative time for American political culture."--BOOK JACKET.

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Mark Stephen Jendrysik

As we search for greater understanding of the origins of liberalism, religious toleration, and modern democratic thought, Mark Jendrysik's timely work examines the political and religious ideals that buttressed the first 'modern' revolution. Explaining the English Revolution studies the years 1649 to 1653, from regicide to the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, during which time English writers "took stock" of a disordered England stripped of the traditional ideas of political, moral, and social order and considered the possibilities for a politically and religiously reordered state. Jendrysik provides--through a rich comparative analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries Filmer, Winstanley, Cromwell, and Milton--a new understanding of the Civil War-era intelligentsia's assessment of the crisis in the body politic and their varied prescriptions and plans for a new post-revolutionary England.

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David Halberstam

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.