The Irony Of American History

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The Irony of American History

Author : Reinhold Niebuhr
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226583996
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of American History by : Reinhold Niebuhr

Download or read book The Irony of American History written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace. “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times “Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society “Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction

American History Revised

Author : Seymour Morris, Jr.
Publisher : Broadway Books
ISBN 13 : 0307587614
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (75 download)

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Book Synopsis American History Revised by : Seymour Morris, Jr.

Download or read book American History Revised written by Seymour Morris, Jr. and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “American History Revised is as informative as it is entertaining and humorous. Filled with irony, surprises, and long-hidden secrets, the book does more than revise American history, it reinvents it.”—James Bamford, bestselling author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory This spirited reexamination of American history delves into our past to expose hundreds of startling facts that never made it into the textbooks, and highlights how little-known peopleand events played surprisingly influential roles in the great American story. We tend to think of history as settled, set in stone, but American History Revised reveals a past that is filled with ironies, surprises, and misconceptions. Living abroad for twelve years gave author Seymour Morris Jr. the opportunity to view his country as an outsider and compelled him to examine American history from a fresh perspective. As Morris colorfully illustrates through the 200 historical vignettes that make up this book, much of our nation’s past is quite different—and far more remarkable—than we thought. We discover that: • In the 1950s Ford was approached by two Japanese companies begging for a joint venture. Ford declined their offers, calling them makers of “tin cars.” The two companies were Toyota and Nissan. • Eleanor Roosevelt and most women’s groups opposed the Equal Rights Amendment forbidding gender discrimination. • The two generals who ended the Civil War weren’t Grant and Lee. • The #1 bestselling American book of all time was written in one day. • The Dutch made a bad investment buying Manhattan for $24. • Two young girls aimed someday to become First Lady—and succeeded. • Three times, a private financier saved the United States from bankruptcy. Organized into ten thematic chapters, American History Revised plumbs American history’s numerous inconsistencies, twists, and turns to make it come alive again.

Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic

Author : Reinhold Niebuhr
Publisher : Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN 13 : 1646982002
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (469 download)

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Book Synopsis Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic by : Reinhold Niebuhr

Download or read book Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr began his career as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Michigan, where he served from 1915–1928. Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic is Niebuhr's account of the frustrations and joys he experienced during his years at Bethel. Addressed to young ministers, this book provides reflections and insights for those engaged in the challenging yet infinitely rewarding occupation of pastoral ministry. With a foreword from Jonathan Walton on Niebuhr's enduring insights into the challenges and relevance of pastoral ministry, this powerful book remains as useful today as it was last century.

The Irony of Manifest Destiny

Author : William Pfaff
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 0802719678
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (27 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of Manifest Destiny by : William Pfaff

Download or read book The Irony of Manifest Destiny written by William Pfaff and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the ultimately successful postwar American policy of 'patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and pressure against the free institutions of the western world' (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for ending tyranny in the world. We defend this position by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities. This is where the problem lies. It has become somewhat of a national heresy to suggest the U.S. does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not." Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, William Pfaff--whose columns and commentary over the past 40-odd years have given him the widest international influence of any American commentator--lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that has animated our politics and foreign relations for decades, and makes clear why it is flawed and bound to fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment. "My proposition in this book is that the United States' spearation from 1800 to 1941 from the common history of the west has disqualified it from the mandate it has assumed as the society that embodies the future"...and in many ways is responsible for the impasse in which it finds itself at the end of the disastrous events of the last 8 years. "It has failed to learn from experience because it lacks the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."

The Irony of Vietnam

Author : Leslie H. Gelb
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 : 0815726791
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (157 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of Vietnam by : Leslie H. Gelb

Download or read book The Irony of Vietnam written by Leslie H. Gelb and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If a historian were allowed but one book on the American involvement in Vietnam, this would be it." — Foreign Affairs When first published in 1979, four years after the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in the United States, The Irony of Vietnam raised eyebrows. Most students of the war argued that the United States had "stumbled into a quagmire in Vietnam through hubris and miscalculation," as the New York Times's Fox Butterfield put it. But the perspective of time and the opening of documentary sources, including the Pentagon Papers, had allowed Gelb and Betts to probe deep into the decisionmaking leading to escalation of military action in Vietnam. The failure of Vietnam could be laid at the door of American foreign policy, they said, but the decisions that led to the failure were made by presidents aware of the risks, clear about their aims, knowledgeable about the weaknesses of their allies, and under no illusion about the outcome. The book offers a picture of a steely resolve in government circles that, while useful in creating consensus, did not allow for alternative perspectives. In the years since its publication, The Irony of Vietnam has come to be considered the seminal work on the Vietnam War.

Blood & Irony

Author : Sarah E. Gardner
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807857670
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (576 download)

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Book Synopsis Blood & Irony by : Sarah E. Gardner

Download or read book Blood & Irony written by Sarah E. Gardner and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.

The Politics of Irony in American Modernism

Author : Matthew Stratton
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 082325545X
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Irony in American Modernism by : Matthew Stratton

Download or read book The Politics of Irony in American Modernism written by Matthew Stratton and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Irony in American Modernism traces how "irony" emerged as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices in American literature of the twentieth century's first half. It is the first study to derive definitions of irony inductively from its widespread use within modernist culture.

The Irony of the Solid South

Author : Glenn Feldman
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817317937
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of the Solid South by : Glenn Feldman

Download or read book The Irony of the Solid South written by Glenn Feldman and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irony of the Solid South examines how the south became the “Solid South” for the Democratic Party and how that solidarity began to crack with the advent of American involvement in World War II. Relying on a sophisticated analysis of secondary research—as well as a wealth of deep research in primary sources such as letters, diaries, interviews, court cases, newspapers, and other archival materials—Glenn Feldman argues in The Irony of the Solid South that the history of the solid Democratic south is actually marked by several ironies that involve a concern with the fundamental nature of southern society and culture and the central place that race and allied types of cultural conservatism have played in ensuring regional distinctiveness and continuity across time and various partisan labels. Along the way, this account has much to say about the quality and nature of the New Deal in Dixie, southern liberalism, and its fatal shortcomings. Feldman focuses primarily on Alabama and race but also considers at length circumstances in the other southern states as well as insights into the uses of emotional issues other than race that have been used time and again to distract whites from their economic and material interests. Feldman explains how conservative political forces (Bourbon Democrats, Dixiecrats, Wallace, independents, and eventually the modern GOP) ingeniously fused white supremacy with economic conservatism based on the common glue of animus to the federal government. A second great melding is exposed, one that joined economic fundamentalism to the religious kind along the shared axis of antidemocratic impulses. Feldman’s study has much to say about southern and American conservatism, the enduring power of cultural and emotional issues, and the modern south’s path to becoming solidly Republican.

Recasting America

Author : Lary May
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226511766
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Recasting America by : Lary May

Download or read book Recasting America written by Lary May and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The freshness of the authors' approaches . . . is salutary. . . . The collection is stimulating and valuable."—Joan Shelley Rubin, Journal of American History

Cool Characters

Author : Lee Konstantinou
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674969472
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Cool Characters by : Lee Konstantinou

Download or read book Cool Characters written by Lee Konstantinou and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of “postirony.”

33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask

Author : Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Publisher : Forum Books
ISBN 13 : 0307406121
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask by : Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Download or read book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask written by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2007-07-10 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guess what? The Indians didn’t save the Pilgrims from starvation by teaching them to grow corn. Thomas Jefferson thought states’ rights—an idea reviled today—were even more important than the Constitution’s checks and balances. The “Wild” West was more peaceful and a lot safer than most modern cities. And the biggest scandal of the Clinton years didn’t involve an intern in a blue dress. Surprised? Don’t be. In America, where history is riddled with misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and flat-out lies about the people and events that have shaped the nation, there’s the history you know and then there’s the truth. In 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, Thomas E. Woods Jr., the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, sets the record straight with a provocative look at the hidden truths about our nation’s history—the ones that have been buried because they’re too politically incorrect to discuss. Woods draws on real scholarship—as opposed to the myths, platitudes, and slogans so many other “history” books are based on—to ask and answer tough questions about American history, including: - Did the Founding Fathers support immigration? - Was the Civil War all about slavery? - Did the Framers really look to the American Indians as the model for the U.S. political system? - Was the U.S. Constitution meant to be a “living, breathing” document—and does it grant the federal government wide latitude to operateas it pleases? - Did Bill Clinton actually stop a genocide, as we’re told? You’d never know it from the history that’s been handed down to us, but the answer to all those questions is no. Woods’s eye-opening exploration reveals how much has been whitewashed from the historical record, overlooked, and skewed beyond recognition. More informative than your last U.S. history class, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask will have you wondering just how much about your nation’s past you haven’t been told.

Chic Ironic Bitterness

Author : R. Jay Magill
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472024329
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Chic Ironic Bitterness by : R. Jay Magill

Download or read book Chic Ironic Bitterness written by R. Jay Magill and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant and timely reflection on irony in contemporary American culture “This book is a powerful and persuasive defense of sophisticated irony and subtle humor that contributes to the possibility of a genuine civic trust and democratic life. R. Jay Magill deserves our congratulations for a superb job!” —Cornel West, University Professor, Princeton University “A well-written, well-argued assessment of the importance of irony in contemporary American social life, along with the nature of recent misguided attacks and, happily, a deep conviction that irony is too important in our lives to succumb. The book reflects wide reading, varied experience, and real analytical prowess.” —Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University “Somehow, Americans—a pragmatic and colloquial lot, for the most part—are now supposed to speak the Word, without ironic embellishment, in order to rebuild the civic culture. So irony’s critics decide it has become ‘worthy of moral condemnation.’ Magill pushes back against this new conventional wisdom, eloquently defending a much livelier American sensibility than the many apologists for a somber ‘civic culture’ could ever acknowledge." —William Chaloupka, Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University The events of 9/11 had many pundits on the left and right scrambling to declare an end to the Age of Irony. But six years on, we're as ironic as ever. From The Simpsons and Borat to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the ironic worldview measures out a certain cosmopolitan distance, keeping hypocrisy and threats to personal integrity at bay. Chic Ironic Bitterness is a defense of this detachment, an attitude that helps us preserve values such as authenticity, sincerity, and seriousness that might otherwise be lost in a world filled with spin, marketing, and jargon. And it is an effective counterweight to the prevailing conservative view that irony is the first step toward cynicism and the breakdown of Western culture. R. Jay Magill, Jr., is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in American Prospect, American Interest, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Policy, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Print, amongother periodicals and books. A former Harvard Teaching Fellow and Executive Editor of DoubleTake, he holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hamburg in Germany. This is his first book.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Author : Reinhold Niebuhr
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226584011
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness by : Reinhold Niebuhr

Download or read book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness written by Reinhold Niebuhr and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy. Written and first read during the prolonged, tragic world war between totalitarian and democratic forces, Niebuhr’s book took up the timely question of how democracy as a political system could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, Niebuhr claimed, were “children of light,” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. They needed, he believed, to absorb some of the wisdom and strength of the “children of darkness,” whose ruthless cynicism and corrupt, anti-democratic politics should otherwise be repudiated. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society that took the measure of every group’s self-interest and was chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power. It is in the foreword to this book that he wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” This edition includes a new introduction by the theologian and Niebuhr scholar Gary Dorrien in which he elucidates the work’s significance and places it firmly into the arc of Niebuhr’s career.

The Irony of Southern Religion

Author : John B. Boles
Publisher : Peter Lang Pub Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9780820425849
Total Pages : 118 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (258 download)

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Book Synopsis The Irony of Southern Religion by : John B. Boles

Download or read book The Irony of Southern Religion written by John B. Boles and published by Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. This book was released on 1994 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

A Case for Irony

Author : Jonathan Lear
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416880
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis A Case for Irony by : Jonathan Lear

Download or read book A Case for Irony written by Jonathan Lear and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2001, Vanity Fair declared that the Age of Irony was over. Joan Didion has lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama has become an "irony-free zone." Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope looked into AmericaÕs heart to ask how might we dispose ourselves if we came to feel our way of life was coming to an end. Here, he mobilizes a squad of philosophers and a psychoanalyst to once again forge a radical way forward, by arguing that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Becoming human should not be taken for granted, Lear writes. It is something we accomplish, something we get the hang of, and like Kierkegaard and Plato, Lear claims that irony is one of the essential tools we use to do this. For Lear and the participants in his Socratic dialogue, irony is not about being cool and detached like a player in a Woody Allen film. That, as Johannes Climacus, one of KierkegaardÕs pseudonymous authors, puts it, Òis something only assistant professors assume.Ó Instead, it is a renewed commitment to living seriously, to experiencing every disruption that shakes us out of our habitual ways of tuning out of life, with all its vicissitudes. While many over the centuries have argued differently, Lear claims that our feelings and desires tend toward order, a structure that irony shakes us into seeing. LearÕs exchanges with his interlocutors strengthen his claims, while his experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst bring an emotionally gripping dimension to what is at stakeÑthe psychic costs and benefits of living with irony.

American Nietzsche

Author : Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226705811
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis American Nietzsche by : Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Download or read book American Nietzsche written by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

The Ironies of Affirmative Action

Author : John D. Skrentny
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022621642X
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ironies of Affirmative Action by : John D. Skrentny

Download or read book The Ironies of Affirmative Action written by John D. Skrentny and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affirmative action has been fiercely debated for more than a quarter of a century, producing much partisan literature, but little serious scholarship and almost nothing on its cultural and political origins. The Ironies of Affirmative Action is the first book-length, comprehensive, historical account of the development of affirmative action. Analyzing both the resistance from the Right and the support from the Left, Skrentny brings to light the unique moral culture that has shaped the affirmative action debate, allowing for starkly different policies for different citizens. He also shows, through an analysis of historical documents and court rulings, the complex and intriguing political circumstances which gave rise to these controversial policies. By exploring the mystery of how it took less than five years for a color-blind policy to give way to one that explicitly took race into account, Skrentny uncovers and explains surprising ironies: that affirmative action was largely created by white males and initially championed during the Nixon administration; that many civil rights leaders at first avoided advocacy of racial preferences; and that though originally a political taboo, almost no one resisted affirmative action. With its focus on the historical and cultural context of policy elites, The Ironies of Affirmative Action challenges dominant views of policymaking and politics.