Böcker av David S. Brown

The fierce polarization of contemporary politics has encouraged Americans to read back into their nation's past a perpetual ideological struggle between liberals and conservatives. However, in this timely book, David S. Brown advances an original interpretation that stresses the critical role of moderate statesmen, ideas, and alliances in making our political system work. Beginning with John Adams and including such key figures as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Bill Clinton, Brown charts the vital if uneven progress of centrism through the centuries. Moderate opposition to both New England and southern secessionists during the early republic and later resistance to industrial oligarchy and the modern Sunbelt right are part of this persuasion's far-reaching legacy. Time and again moderates, operating under a broad canopy of coalitions, have come together to reshape the nation's electoral landscape.Today's bitter partisanship encourages us to deny that such a moderate tradition is part of our historical development--one dating back to the Constitutional Convention. Brown offers a less polemical and far more compelling assessment of our politics.

Pigeonholed as a Jazz Age epicurean and an emblem of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after WWI. Placing him among Progressives such as Charles Beard, Randolph Bourne, and Thorstein Veblen, David Brown reveals Fitzgerald as a writer with an encompassing historical imagination.

As the US went to war in 1941, "Time" magazine founder Henry Luce coined a term for what was rapidly becoming the establishment view of America's role in the world: the twentieth century, he argued, was the American Century. But an important concentration of Midwestern historians actively dissented. This book tells their story of opposition.

Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America's most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. This biography explores his life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism.

Provides an interdisciplinary look at the implications of improvisation in jazz on modern design. This book locates jazz music within the broad aesthetic, political, and theoretical upheavals, asserting that modern architecture and urbanism in particular can be strongly influenced and defined by the ways that improvisation is facilitated in jazz.

More than 180 entries in this text cover the significant events, people, philosophies, and legislation associated with Thomas Jefferson, the consummate gentleman-statesman. Each entry describes and defines the topic and places it in historical context.