New Atlantis revisited

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Alan Brinkley

How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of post-war liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.

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William B. Hixson, Jr

This book is a creative synthesis of the published scholarly research on the contemporary American right wing from the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Unlike most other syntheses, it directly engages that research by critically analyzing the major explanations emerging from it. Emphasizing neither the lives and backgrounds of the scholars that he discusses nor paradigms within the social sciences as a whole, William Hixson focuses on the way the concepts of individual researchers have interacted with accumulating evidence on the American right, and how this evidence has led to new and more comprehensive theories. Hixson first summarizes and evaluates the research on the major developments analyzed by scholars - the social sources of "McCarthyism," the "radical right" of the early 1960s, George Wallace's constituency in his Presidential campaigns, and the emerging "new right" of the late 1970s. He then compares the interpretations of the two most influential students of the right wing, Seymour Martin Lipset and Michael Paul Rogin. Finally, he offers his own explanations, suggesting that the right wing is both a mass and elite phenomenon, that its durability comes from its appeal to the upwardly mobile, especially in economically expanding regions, and that far from being either "traditionalist" or reactive, it represents a proactive defense of values associated with late nineteenth-century "modernization."

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Mark Wahlgren Summers

"For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently enslaved for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. Summers goes beyond this vitally important question, focusing on Reconstruction's need to form an enduring Union without sacrificing the framework of federalism and republican democracy. This book offers a fresh explanation for Reconstruction's demise and a case for its essential successes as well as its great failures. Indeed, this book demonstrates the extent to which the victors' aims in 1865 were met--and at what cost"--

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Thomas Benjamin

Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, burst into international news in January 1994. Several thousand insurgents, given a voice in the communiques of Subcomandante Marcos, took control of the capital and other key towns and held the Mexican army and government at bay for weeks. Proclaiming themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, they captured both land and headlines. Worldwide, people wanted to know the answer to one question: why had revolutionaries taken over a Mexican state? No other study of Chiapas answers that question as thoroughly as does this book. Benjamin delineates the basic continuity in the history of Chiapas from the 1890s to 1995. The uprising and government's armed occupation of the state are but the latest violent episodes in a region that is now and has always been a rich land worked by poor people. By studying the impoverishment of the laboring class in Chiapas, Benjamin addresses how the Chiapan elite survived the Revolution of 1910 and remain in control of the state's development and destiny.