Böcker av Mary E. Stuckey

"While its national parks are widely viewed as "America's best idea," and are both popular and noncontroversial in the United States, the establishment and history of almost every national park has been characterized by conflict over competing claims to land, history, knowledge, and economic interests. American presidents stake their claims to environmentalism, their assertions of a singular national history, and their definitions of a unified national identity on the parks, and often do so inside the parks themselves. Like any major area of public policy, however, the fissures present in debates over the national parks also represent important fracture lines in the public understanding of the meaning of "America" and of individual claims to citizenship. The park system, in other words, does a lot of political work for both presidents and the mass public, even though much of that work goes largely unnoticed. This book explores that political work, focusing on national origins and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, monuments to the national past, heritage and the assertion of a national narrative, environmentalism and natural resources, and the exploitation of the national landscape for economic gain"--

Politics as practiced by Reagan is examined through analysis of Reagan's rhetoric from his days as the governor of California to his campaign for the presidency in 1980.

As Mary Stuckey observes, presidents embrace, articulate, and reinvigorate the American sense of national identity. They define who Americans are - often by declaring who they aren't. Here, she shows how presidential speech has served to broaden the American political community over the past two centuries while at the same time excluding others.

Suitable for presidency watchers, media scholars, and those who care about the quality of American politics, this title presents a perceptive study of presidential rhetoric that shows how technological changes have emptied presidential discourse of political substance, weakening American democracy.

The data for this volume includes speeches, remarks, addresses, statements, memorandums, and other forms of public speech during the Reagan years. The design of the book is both chronological and thematic, given the theme of the development of Reagan's rhetoric over time and the eventual exposition of its weakness.