Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America challenges many of the commonly held assumptions and culturally held beliefs about progress and how the idea of progress has changed throughout the course of this American Century for Americans. In many ways, the book can be seen as an elegy to the 1950s, not an era that is often elegized. It seems that Ehrenhalt's major reason to write the book was in fact to argue that this decade was not nearly as bad as we like to think it was - not in terms of insularity, pressure to conform, excessive consumerization of the economy, or the suppression of the rights of women, gays and racial and religious minorities. But he also at times seems to argue that even if it were not the ideal decade in many ways, than the virtues that it did contain were still well worth praising (and worth revitalizing) because they offered to Americans something so precious (and something that is in such short supply these days) that it would have been worth giving up something important in exchange.
One of Ehrenhalt's most valid points is hardly original to him, but he presents it convincingly and within a context in which it is not often presented. There is no free lunch, and a sense of community, like other kinds of personal (emotional) richnesses must be paid for somehow, although (he argues) not in the kinds of drastic ways that we now think of the 1950s as having required.
The book examines the 1950s as the time before Baby Boomers began to attack the institutions of education, government, religious belief - the visible sociological...
The lack of public support is one of the key factors that resulted to the failure of the U.S. There were false claims that the American government acted against people's aspirations and that the American youth protested against the war. Early initiatives of the United States under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Truman obtained a lot of support. Only two members of the United States congress voted against giving Johnson the
U.S. History The Razor's Edge by Sommerset Maugham is superficially the story of Larry Darryl, a war veteran. The apparent protagonist decides to leave his family's comfortable place in Chicago "society," because of the horrors he has witnessed as a result of the war, most particularly the death of his best friend. (Maugham, The Razor's Edge, Chapter 1) However, unlike most novels of personal, spiritual quests, the focus of the author
U.S. History Historical Book Review: Moretta, John Anthony. William Pitt Ballinger, Texas A&M University Press: 2000. John Antony Moretta's biography of William Pitt Ballinger attempts to put in an historical perspective the career of a legendary Texas lawyer. Throughout this text, the author stresses the multifaceted nature of his subject. A kind of 19th century Thomas Jefferson in the breadth of his accomplishments, Ballinger's various interests and occupations included not only his
It would construct a credible, but false, situation to deceive or lead the target to act in a manner, which would accomplish the commander's goal. When the target accepted the deception, the commander determined the means or methods needed to present the events. The manual demonstrated the mechanism of "Conditioning an Adversary" through the case of the Egyptian crossing the Suez in 1973. It consisted that deceptive measures and
(Boyer, 2001) Sixty-hour weeks, no insurance, no compensation for injuries or overtime, and no pensions symbolized the workers' plight. And when the workers went on strike over the inequities, the government sided with the owners. The mass society of the late nineteenth century had no diversity. It was a society in which the rich and powerful manipulated the existence of the politically and economically powerless mass through overwhelming mass production, mass
The events leading to the Vietnam conflict were determined by the administration in place at that time (VIETNAM CONFLICT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War). Initially it was decided that Vietnam would be occupied by Chinese and British troops and that they would supervise the surrender of Japan. In 1960 Hanoi instructed the southern communists to establish an organization called the national liberation front. The purpose of this organization was to overthrow the government of the
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