Ordinary Americans

Author : Linda R. Monk
Publisher : Hyperion Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ordinary Americans written by Linda R. Monk and published by Hyperion Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of first-person accounts by average Americans detailing the first 500 years of U.S. history. Multicultural perspectives are emphasized.

Author : Isabel Sawhill
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300230362
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Forgotten Americans written by Isabel Sawhill and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation's economic inequalities One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society--economic, cultural, and political--and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. Although many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and the federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

Author : Alfred F. Young
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814796850
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Liberty Tree written by Alfred F. Young and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-11-06 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of Liberty Tree, acclaimed historian Alfred F. Young presents a selection of his seminal writing as well as two provocative, never-before-published essays. Together, they take the reader on a journey through the American Revolution, exploring the role played by ordinary women and men (called, at the time, people out of doors) in shaping events during and after the Revolution, their impact on the Founding generation of the new American nation, and finally how this populist side of the Revolution has fared in public memory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, which include not only written documents but also material items like powder horns, and public rituals like parades and tarring and featherings, Young places ordinary Americans at the center of the Revolution. For example, in one essay he views the Constitution of 1787 as the result of an intentional accommodation by elites with non-elites, while another piece explores the process of ongoing negotiations would-be rulers conducted with the middling sort; women, enslaved African Americans, and Native Americans. Moreover, questions of history and modern memory are engaged by a compelling examination of icons of the Revolution, such as the pamphleteer Thomas Paine and Boston's Freedom Trail. For over forty years, history lovers, students, and scholars alike have been able to hear the voices and see the actions of ordinary people during the Revolutionary Era, thanks to Young's path-breaking work, which seamlessly blends sophisticated analysis with compelling and accessible prose. From his award-winning work on mechanics, or artisans, in the seaboard cities of the Northeast to the all but forgotten liberty tree, a major popular icon of the Revolution explored in depth for the first time, Young continues to astound readers as he forges new directions in the history of the American Revolution.

Author : Emily Van Duyn
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197557015
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Democracy Lives in Darkness written by Emily Van Duyn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Republicans and Democrats increasingly distrust, avoid, and wish harm upon those from the other party. To make matters worse, they also increasingly reside among like-minded others and are part of social groups that share their political beliefs. All of this can make expressing a dissenting political opinion hard. Yet digital and social media have given people new spaces for political discourse and community, and more control over who knows their political beliefs and who does not. With Democracy Lives in Darkness, Van Duyn looks at what these changes in the political and media landscape mean for democracy. She uncovers and follows a secret political organization in rural Texas over the entire Trump presidency. The group, which organized out of fear of their conservative community in 2016, has a confidentiality agreement, an email listserv and secret Facebook group, and meets in secret every month. By building relationships with members, she explores how and why they hide their beliefs and what this does for their own political behavior and for their community. Drawing on research from communication, political science, and sociology along with survey data on secret political expression, she finds that polarization has led even average partisans to hide their political beliefs from others. And although intensifying polarization will likely make political secrecy more common, she argues that this secrecy is not just evidence that democracy is hurting, but that it is still alive; that people persist in the face of opposition and that this matters if democracy is to survive"--

Author : Joan L. Severa
Publisher : Kent State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780873385121
Total Pages : 628 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dressed for the Photographer written by Joan L. Severa and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual analysis of the dress of middle-class Americans from the mid- to late-19th century. Using images and writings, it shows how even economically disadvantaged Americans could wear styles within a year or so of current fashion.

Author : Frances Fax Piven
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0742563405
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Challenging Authority written by Frances Fax Piven and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008-07-11 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that ordinary people exercise extraordinary political courage and power in American politics when, frustrated by politics as usual, they rise up in anger and hope, and defy the authorities and the status quo rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives. By doing so, they disrupt the workings of important institutions and become a force in American politics. Drawing on critical episodes in U.S. history, Piven shows that it is in fact precisely at those seismic moments when people act outside of political norms that they become empowered to their full democratic potential.

Author : Lisa Dodson
Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1595584722
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Moral Underground written by Lisa Dodson and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a highly accessible mix of narrative and interviews with social science research, Dodson unearths the untold story of a silent movement for justice in contemporary America. Lisa Dodson spent eight years interviewing more than 800 supervisors, teachers and healthcare workers about their experiences interacting with the working poor. She repeatedly heard accounts of people bending the rules to help workers get by. These stories point to a surprising and inspiring phenomenon of the middle class refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair enconomy.

Author : Bob Dotson
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101606150
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Story written by Bob Dotson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These are remarkable and poignant stories that need to be told.” —Ken Burns More than six million people watch Bob Dotson’s Emmy award-winning segment, American Story, on NBC’s Today Show. For the last four decades, Dotson has traveled the country searching out inspiring individuals who quietly perform everyday miracles. In the process, he has become the treasured cartographer of America’s heart and soul. Today’s news is overwhelmingly grim; it’s also told by journalists who travel in herds as they trail politicians and camp out at big stories. In American Story, Dotson shines a light on America’s neglected corners, introducing readers to the ordinary Americans who have learned to fix what really matters.

Author : Amy Bach
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780805074475
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ordinary Injustice written by Amy Bach and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an award-winning lawyer-reporter, a radically new explanation for America’s failing justice system The stories of grave injustice are all too familiar: the lawyer who sleeps through a trial, the false confessions, the convictions of the innocent. Less visible is the chronic injustice meted out daily by a profoundly defective system. In a sweeping investigation that moves from small-town Georgia to upstate New York, from Chicago to Mississippi, Amy Bach reveals a judicial process so deeply compromised that it constitutes a menace to the people it is designed to serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who brings almost no cases to trial; the court that works together to achieve a wrong verdict. Going beyond the usual explanations of bad apples and meager funding, Bach identifies an assembly-line approach that rewards shoddiness and sacrifices defendants to keep the court calendar moving, and she exposes the collusion between judge, prosecutor, and defense that puts the interests of the system above the obligation to the people. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible—the first and necessary step to any reform. Full of gripping human stories, sharp analyses, and a crusader’s sense of urgency, Ordinary Injustice is a major reassessment of the health of the nation’s courtrooms.

Author : David Dayen
Publisher : New Press, The
ISBN 13 : 1620971593
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chain of Title written by David Dayen and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history—a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street. They called it foreclosure fraud: millions of families were kicked out of their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies that had no legal right to foreclose. Lisa Epstein, Michael Redman, and Lynn Szymoniak did not work in government or law enforcement. They had no history of anticorporate activism. Instead they were all foreclosure victims, and while struggling with their shame and isolation they committed a revolutionary act: closely reading their mortgage documents, discovering the deceit behind them, and building a movement to expose it. Fiscal Times columnist David Dayen recounts how these ordinary Floridians challenged the most powerful institutions in America armed only with the truth—and for a brief moment they brought the corrupt financial industry to its knees.