Category Archives: Uncategorized

Review: *The Ordeal of American Culture: Modernity, Tradition, and the Great Depression*

Bibliographic Details Author: David M. Kennedy Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999 Year: 1999 (Paperback edition with a new preface) Thesis Statement In The Ordeal of American Culture: Modernity, Tradition, and the Great Depression, David M. Kennedy argues that the Great … Continue reading →

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The Great Migration and the Transformation of American Culture, 1915-1970

Bibliographic Details Author: Isabel Wilkerson Publisher: Random House Year: 2010 Thesis Statement Isabel Wilkerson argues that the Great Migration—the mass movement of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1915 and … Continue reading →

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The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens

Bibliographic Details Author: Samuel Bowles Publisher: Yale University Press, 2016 Thesis Statement Samuel Bowles argues that the design of economic and social policies in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century was fundamentally shaped by a … Continue reading →

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When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

Bibliographic Details Ira Katznelson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Thesis Statement Katznelson argues that the major social welfare and labor legislation of the New Deal and the postwar era—from the Wagner Act and Social Security to the GI Bill—was deliberately … Continue reading →

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No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

Bibliographic Details Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster, 1994. Thesis Statement Goodwin argues that the unique partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt created a synergistic leadership that transformed the American home front during World War II, simultaneously mobilizing the nation … Continue reading →

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As Great a War as Any: The American Experience in the Second World War

Bibliographic Details Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II, 2nd Edition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) Thesis Statement Adams argues that the popular American memory of World War II as a “good war”—a unified, noble, … Continue reading →

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America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State

Bibliographic Details Ronald Schaffer. America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xvii + 244 pp. Thesis Statement Schaffer argues that the American mobilization for World War I did not … Continue reading →

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The Great War: The End of an Era and the Making of the Modern American State

Bibliographic Details Author: Robert H. Zieger Publisher: University of North Carolina Press Year: 2000 Thesis Statement Robert H. Zieger’s The Great War argues that World War I was the single most transformative event in modern American history, fundamentally reshaping the … Continue reading →

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Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation

Bibliographic Details Author: David E. Nye Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 1985 (Revised paperback edition, 1990) Thesis Statement David E. Nye’s Forces of Production argues that the rise of industrial automation in the United States between 1900 and 1945 was … Continue reading →

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The Color of Money: The Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

Bibliographic Details Mehrsa Baradaran, Harvard University Press, 2017. Thesis Statement Mehrsa Baradaran argues that the persistent racial wealth gap in the United States was not an accident of history or a product of individual failings, but rather a deliberate outcome … Continue reading →

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