American Contradiction : Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now / Paul Starr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Starr, Paul.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Social conditions--21st century.

United States.

United States--Politics and government--21st century.

United States--Social conditions--20th century.

United States--Politics and government--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (456 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2025]

Summary:

How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama--and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction. The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. The nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining. Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America's twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry's decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.

Contents:

Introduction : a new people, an old nation: America in the twenty-first century

Part I. American revolutions of the twentieth century

1. Midcentury normal

2. Black Americans, model minority

3. How sex got serious

4. Half a counterrevolution

Part II. Sleepwalking into revenge

5. Americans as enemies : the 1990s as historical pivot

6. Sleepwalking (1) : immigration

7. Sleepwalking (2) : race

8. How America stopped working for working-class Americans

9. Trumpism as total revenge

10. A new, old America : counterrevolution through the courts

11. The American contradiction, 2024.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780300286144

0-300-28614-7

OCLC:

1544959072