Author Archives: the_starry_messenger

Bibliographic Details Author: Robert M. Crunden Publisher: Basic Books (a division of HarperCollins) Year of Publication: 1982 Thesis Statement Robert M. Crunden argues that the Progressive impulse—a distinctively American moral and intellectual framework rooted in Protestant reform, social science, and … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Author: Jason M. Colby Publisher: Cornell University Press Year: 2011 Thesis Statement Jason M. Colby’s The Business of Empire argues that the United Fruit Company, operating in Central America from the late nineteenth century through World War II, … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Arnold A. Offner. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Thesis Statement Offner argues that President Harry S. Truman’s rigid, confrontational, and often poorly informed approach to foreign policy—characterized … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Joshua B. Freeman, Viking (Penguin), 2012 Thesis Statement Joshua B. Freeman argues that the United States’ transformation from a continental republic into a global empire between 1900 and 1955 was not an accidental or reluctant process, but a … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Author: Paul Fussell Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 1975 (originally published as The Great War and Modern Memory; while the core focus is British, later editions and subsequent scholarship, particularly as adapted for American audiences, have shaped its … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Author: John F. Kasson Publisher: Hill and Wang (a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Year: 2022 Thesis Statement Kasson argues that World War I did not simply interrupt the Progressive Era but fundamentally traumatized American culture, shattering … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Paul Fussell, Oxford University Press, 1975 (25th Anniversary Edition, 2000) Thesis Statement Fussell argues that the experience of the First World War—specifically the trench warfare on the Western Front—fundamentally altered the way British and American culture understood language, … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Patrick J. Cohrs, Publisher: Oxford University Press, Year: 2006 Thesis Statement Cohrs argues that the period between the end of the First World War and the onset of the Great Depression was not simply a prelude to catastrophe, … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Gary Gerstle. Princeton University Press, 2001 (Updated edition 2017). Thesis Statement Gary Gerstle argues that American national identity in the twentieth century was forged through a continuous and fraught struggle between two competing civic and ethnic conceptions of … Continue reading →

Bibliographic Details Author: Michael J. Pfeifer Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 2023 Thesis Statement Michael J. Pfeifer argues that the period from 1900 to 1945 was not simply a sequence of crises—Progressive reform, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the … Continue reading →