Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
America Perceived
Download America Perceived full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online America Perceived ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis The Forgotten Americans by : Isabel Sawhill
Download or read book The Forgotten Americans written by Isabel Sawhill and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation's economic inequalities One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society--economic, cultural, and political--and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. Although many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and the federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.
Book Synopsis As Others See Us by : Stephen Brooks
Download or read book As Others See Us written by Stephen Brooks and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the ironies of the post-Cold War world, in which the power of the United States is without rival, is that the costs of isolationism and ignorance are greater than ever. The temptation to imagine that the rest of the world matters less than before is enticing, as America basks in the triumphant glow of a world in which capitalism and democracy, under the aegis of American leadership, are thought to have vanquished all rivals. Although it is unlikely that Americans will come to pay much attention to the rest of the world anytime soon—except when their citizens are threatened or killed abroad, or when they are persuaded that the threat of foreigners doing harm at home seems real—their failure to do so cripples the ability of the United States to understand a world in which American interests, security, and prosperity are embedded to an unprecedented degree. As Others See Us investigates the causes and consequences of the world’s perceptions of America. It proceeds from the premise that the images, ideas, and information that foreign populations have of the United States and Americans come from a number of sources, most of which are mediated. Some of these sources are American, Hollywood especially. Others are located outside the country, in the media, educational, religious, and political systems through which foreign populations learn about America. Any attempt to understand the "what" and "why" of foreign perceptions of America needs to look closely at these external determinants of how the image and interpretation of the United States is constructed in different societies.
Book Synopsis Citizen Spectator by : Wendy Bellion
Download or read book Citizen Spectator written by Wendy Bellion and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.
Book Synopsis Torn Between America and China by : Daniel Novotny
Download or read book Torn Between America and China written by Daniel Novotny and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2010 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can a developing, democratic and predominantly Muslim country like Indonesia manage its foreign relations, while facing a myriad of security concerns and dilemmas in the increasingly complex post-Cold War international politics, without compromising its national interests and sacrificing its independence? Approaching this problem from the vantage point of the Indonesian foreign policy elite, this book explores the elite's perceptions about other states and the manner in which these shape the decision-making process and determine policy outcomes. The combined qualitative and quantitative research strategy draws on a unique series of in-depth interviews with 45 members of the Indonesian foreign policy elite that included the country's (present and/or former) presidents, cabinet ministers, high-ranking military officers, and senior diplomats. Among all state actors, Indonesian relations with the United States and China are the highest concern of the elite. The leaders believe that, in the future, Indonesia will increasingly have to manoeuvre between the two rival powers. While the United States during George W. Bush's presidency was seen as the main security threat to Indonesia, China is considered the main malign factor in the long run with power capabilities that need to be constrained and counter-balanced.
Book Synopsis The American Perception of Class by : Reeve Vanneman
Download or read book The American Perception of Class written by Reeve Vanneman and published by . This book was released on 1988-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and nonacademics alike have usually assumed that the American working class does not think of itself as a coherent class opposed to the dominant powers in American society-in short, that it is not class conscious. In international perspective, the American working class appears docile and complacent. It has never supported a strong socialist movement; a weak union movement has limited itself to simple wage demands; and class conflict here has rarely threatened to explode into a social revolution. Both radicals and mainstream scholars have explained this American exceptionalism by the conservative psychology of the American worker.This provocative book presents a new vision of the American working class. The American Perception of Class offers a radically new interpretation of American class conflict and criticizes earlier analyses for psychologizing the problem and "blaming the victims" for their subordination. It marshals a great variety of evidence, primarily from national surveys, to demonstrate that, contrary to what almost everybody has assumed, American workers are indeed class conscious. They have not been so beguiled by images of a classless society that they can no longer recognize the divide that separates them from their middle class and corporate bosses; nor have they been swallowed up by an affluent middle class; and they have not been so divided by racial and ethnic loyalties, or gender specific interests that they have forgotten their common class position.Finally, the book suggests a new approach to class conflict in America-one not based on the psychology of the American worker but on the strength of American business and its capacity to overwhelm or redirect any challenge from below. No other working class has faced such a formidable opponent. Author note: Reeve Vanneman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park. >P>Lynn Weber Cannon is Associate Director for the Center for Research on Women and Professor of Sociology at Memphis State University.
Book Synopsis Rosie and Mrs. America by : Catherine Gourley
Download or read book Rosie and Mrs. America written by Catherine Gourley and published by Twenty-First Century Books. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how popular culture during the Great Depression and later during the Second World War influenced the lives of women.
Book Synopsis Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers by : Kenneth F. Scheve
Download or read book Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers written by Kenneth F. Scheve and published by Peterson Institute. This book was released on 2001 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using evidence from public opinion polls Scheve (political science, Yale U.) and Slaughter (economics, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire) discuss the attitudes of American workers towards globalization, concluding that there is a strong division in attitude based on education and skill levels, with less-skilled workers seeing globalization as a threat. The authors delineate globalization and their analysis in purely economic terms as they discuss the public opinion evidence on US opposition to globalization, various economic models to interpret the differences in opinion of the surveys, the larger context of recent US labor-market pressures and how these affect worker preferences. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Book Synopsis Good Enough for Government Work by : Amy E. Lerman
Download or read book Good Enough for Government Work written by Amy E. Lerman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix. With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.
Book Synopsis Madness in America by : Lynn Gamwell
Download or read book Madness in America written by Lynn Gamwell and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes explore the historical roots of Americans' understanding of madness today. Drawing on a rich array of sources, the authors interweave the perceptions of medical practitioners, the mentally ill and their families, and journalists, poets, novelists, and artists. As they trace successive ways of explaining madness and treating those judged insane, Gamwell and Tomes vividly depict the political and cultural dimensions of American attitudes toward mental illness." "Gamwell and Tomes observe telling differences in the ways in which patients of different genders, races, and classes have been diagnosed and treated. The authors demonstrate how definitions of madness figured in national debates over abolitionism, women's rights, and alternative medicine. Madness in America also considers how the boundaries between sanity and insanity have been repeatedly redrawn in such areas as sexual behavior and criminality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Fantasyland written by Kurt Andersen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
Book Synopsis Notes on a Foreign Country by : Suzy Hansen
Download or read book Notes on a Foreign Country written by Suzy Hansen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.
Book Synopsis Social Indicators of Well-Being by : Frank M. Andrews
Download or read book Social Indicators of Well-Being written by Frank M. Andrews and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study about perceptions of well-being. Its purpose is to investigate how these perceptions are organized in the minds of different groups of American adults, to find valid and efficient ways of measuring these percep tions, to suggest ways these measurement methods could be implemented to yield a series of social indicators, and to provide some initial readings on these indicators; i.e., some information about the levels of well-being perceived by Americans. The findings are based on data from more than five thousand Americans and include results from four separate representative samplings of the American population. One of the ways our research is unusual is that it includes a major methodological component. Typical surveys involve a modest effort at instru ment development, the application of the instrument to a group of respondents, and an analysis of the resulting data that mainly describes the people studied. Our work, however, was implemented in a series of sequential cycles, each of which consisted of conceptual development, instrument design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Ideas and findings generated in prior cycles affected the design of subsequent cycles.
Book Synopsis America Through European Eyes by : Aurelian Cr_iu_u
Download or read book America Through European Eyes written by Aurelian Cr_iu_u and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A collection of essays that discuss representative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and English views of American democracy and society, and offer a critical assessment of various narrative constructions of American life, society, and culture"--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis The Mormon Image in the American Mind by : J.B. Haws
Download or read book The Mormon Image in the American Mind written by J.B. Haws and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do Americans think about Mormons - and why do they think what they do? This is a story where the Osmonds, the Olympics, the Tabernacle Choir, Evangelical Christians, the Equal Rights Amendment, Sports Illustrated, and even Miss America all figure into the equation. The book is punctuated by the presidential campaigns of George and Mitt Romney, four decades apart. A survey of the past half-century reveals a growing tension inherent in the public's views of Mormons and the public's views of the religion that inspires that body.
Book Synopsis America's Crisis of Values by : Wayne E. Baker
Download or read book America's Crisis of Values written by Wayne E. Baker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-23 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is America bitterly divided? Has America lost its traditional values? Many politicians and religious leaders believe so, as do the majority of Americans, based on public opinion polls taken over the past several years. But is this crisis of values real? This book explores the moral terrain of America today, analyzing the widely held perception that the nation is in moral decline. It looks at the question from a variety of angles, examining traditional values, secular values, religious values, family values, economic values, and others. Using unique data from the World Values Surveys, the largest systematic attempt ever made to document attitudes, values, and beliefs around the world, this book systematically evaluates the perceived crisis of values by comparing America's values with those of over 60 other nations. The results are surprising. The evidence shows overwhelmingly that America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth. The gap between reality and perception does not represent mass ignorance of the facts or an overblown moral panic, Baker contends. Rather, the widespread perception of a crisis of values is a real and legitimate interpretation of life in a society that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation and that contains growing cultural contradictions. Instead of posing a problem, the author argues, this crisis rhetoric serves the valuable social function of reminding us of what it means to be American. As such, it preserves the ideological foundation of the nation.
Book Synopsis The Republic of Color by : Michael Rossi
Download or read book The Republic of Color written by Michael Rossi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America. For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.
Book Synopsis America, As Seen on TV by : Clara E. Rodríguez
Download or read book America, As Seen on TV written by Clara E. Rodríguez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2020 Latino Book Awards, Best Academic Themed Book The surprising effects of American TV on global viewers As a dominant cultural export, American television is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language for many people throughout the world. Yet, American television is flawed, and, it represents race, class, and gender in ways that many find unfair and unrealistic. What happens, then, when people who grew up on American television decide to come to the United States? What do they expect to find, and what do they actually find? In America, As Seen on TV, Clara E. Rodríguez surveys international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US to examine the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. She finds that many were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse, and that it is not the easy-breezy, happy endings culture portrayed in the media, but a work culture. The author also surveys US-millennials about their consumption of US TV and finds that both groups share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US as they have experienced them. However, the groups differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views on sex, smoking and drinking. America, As Seen on TV explores the surprising effects of TV on global viewers and the realities they and US millennials actually experience in the US.
