This book is a work of historical sociology that examines the forces that have shaped and re-shaped this fundamental cultural value.
Author: Carl L Bankston
Publisher:
ISBN: 1621965929
Category:
Page:
View: 984
American Ideas of Equality
"This book provides a social history spanning 270 years...deftly revealing how the American idea of equality evolved and diverged and how conflicting ideas intersect race and class to shape prevailing patterns of group formation and ...
Author: Carl L Bankston
Publisher:
ISBN: 1621966941
Category:
Page: 324
View: 790
Equality is a fundamental American value. The nation's Declaration of Independence declared equality as a self-evident foundation for political life and the pursuit of equality has continued to dominate policy debates in the twenty-first century. However, equality is a complex idea and it has had different meanings in different eras. Using a variety of data sources, this book describes how the views we hold regarding this fundamental national value developed as products of our cultural history from the origins of the American republic to 2020. It traces how cultural transmission, political and economic structures, and communication technology have shaped this core American value. The book begins with the early days of the American republic and follows ideological changes through the era of the self-made man, the rise of corporate society, the New Deal, the post-World War II era, and the era of Civil Rights. It ends with a detailed discussion of how this history has resulted in some of the most divisive political and social controversies of the twenty-first century. Most studies of equality have taken this as having a single, clear meaning. Most often, this has been either how much equality of opportunity exists now or has existed in the past, or how much equality of condition exists now or has existed in the past. They rarely consider that people can be equal or unequal in different ways, and that what we mean when we talk about equality or engage in debates about it has been shaped by historical experience. This book is a work of historical sociology that examines the forces that have shaped and re-shaped this fundamental cultural value. The book leads readers through an exploration of how different stages of American history have led to thinking about equality in terms of independence from hierarchy, the opportunity for self-creation, access to services and resources, widespread upward mobility, and equality across social categories. It takes a unique multidisciplinary approach, combining intellectual and cultural history with political, economic, and sociological analysis. No other book offers this kind of analysis of the both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of a cultural concept at the core of American national life. American Ideas of Equality will be a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in American studies; cultural, economic, and political history; political science; and sociology.Women and Equality
THIS MODEST AND thoughtful little book, so entirely free from polemics, is excellent evidence of what an unprejudiced study of the past can contribute to the solution of contemporary impasses.'
Author: William Henry Chafe
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195023657
Category: History
Page: 224
View: 571
The Pursuit of Equality in American History
The author looks to the origins of equality in Greek thought and the idea's important in the eighteenth century to understand the tenacious attraction it has had for American over more than two hundred years of political, legal, and social ...
Author: Jack Richon Pole
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520032861
Category: Civil rights
Page: 408
View: 915
The author looks to the origins of equality in Greek thought and the idea's important in the eighteenth century to understand the tenacious attraction it has had for American over more than two hundred years of political, legal, and social controversy.The American Ideal of Equality
This text discusses equality and the development of the American civilization. The author explores how an ideal becomes a constitutional standard by focusing on constitutional change.
Author: Charles Redenius
Publisher: Port Washington, N.Y. : Kennikat Press
ISBN: UOM:39015012068485
Category: Constitutional history
Page: 186
View: 221
This text discusses equality and the development of the American civilization. The author explores how an ideal becomes a constitutional standard by focusing on constitutional change.Crafting Equality
The story they tell supports a vision of equality that embraces both heterogeneity and homogeneity as necessary for maintaining the balance between liberty and property.
Author: Celeste Michelle Condit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226922485
Category: Political Science
Page: 378
View: 246
Philosophers and historians often treat fundamental concepts like equality as if they existed only as fixed ideas found solely in the canonical texts of civilization. In Crafting Equality, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites argue that the meaning of at least one key word—equality—has been forged in the day-to-day pragmatics of public discourse. Drawing upon little studied speeches, newspapers, magazines, and other public discourse, Condit and Lucaites survey the shifting meaning of equality from 1760 to the present as a process of interaction and negotiation among different social groups in American politics and culture. They make a powerful case for the critical role of black Americans in actively shaping what equality has come to mean in our political conversation by chronicling the development of an African-American rhetorical community. The story they tell supports a vision of equality that embraces both heterogeneity and homogeneity as necessary for maintaining the balance between liberty and property. A compelling revision of an important aspect of America's history, Crafting Equality will interest anyone wanting to better understand the role public discourse plays in affecting the major social and political issues of our times. It will also interest readers concerned with the relationship between politics and culture in America's increasingly multi-cultural society.Equality
In Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1886, Charles Postel demonstrates how taking stock of these movements forces us to rethink some of the central myths of American history.
Author: Charles Postel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429946926
Category: History
Page: 400
View: 649
An in-depth study of American social movements after the Civil War and their lessons for today by a prizewinning historian The Civil War unleashed a torrent of claims for equality—in the chaotic years following the war, former slaves, women’s rights activists, farmhands, and factory workers all engaged in the pursuit of the meaning of equality in America. This contest resulted in experiments in collective action, as millions joined leagues and unions. In Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1886, Charles Postel demonstrates how taking stock of these movements forces us to rethink some of the central myths of American history. Despite a nationwide push for equality, egalitarian impulses oftentimes clashed with one another. These dynamics get to the heart of the great paradox of the fifty years following the Civil War and of American history at large: Waves of agricultural, labor, and women’s rights movements were accompanied by the deepening of racial discrimination and oppression. Herculean efforts to overcome the economic inequality of the first Gilded Age and the sexual inequality of the late-Victorian social order emerged alongside Native American dispossession, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow segregation, and lynch law. Now, as Postel argues, the twenty-first century has ushered in a second Gilded Age of savage socioeconomic inequalities. Convincing and learned, Equality explores the roots of these social fissures and speaks urgently to the need for expansive strides toward equality to meet our contemporary crisis.The Concepts of Freedom and Equality in the American Constitution
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Philosophische Fakultät II - Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, ...
Author: Jan Geisler
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783640224791
Category:
Page: 102
View: 710
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Philosophische Fakultät II - Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: Als 1791 die US-amerikanische Verfassung mit den ersten zehn Zusätzen versehen wurde, stellte einer ihrer wichtigsten Grundsätze die Freiheit des Einzelnen dar. Um die politische Einheit der Bundesstaaten zu erreichen, mußten bereits bei der Ausarbeitung der Verfassung weitreichende Kompromisse eingegangen werden. Sie führten letztlich zum Abspalten der Südstaaten und zu einem Bürgerkrieg. Dessen ursprüngliches Motiv war der Erhalt der Union. Als Resultat formulieren wir heute die Abschaffung der Sklaverei und die Neuordnung der Vereinigten Staaten auf der Basis von neuen Prinzipien, die nicht mehr vordergründig die Freiheit des Einzelnen gegenüber der Regierung betonten, sondern die Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz. An dieser Stelle setzt das Thema meiner Arbeit an. Ziel ist eine Beschreibung der Notwendigkeit eines Paradigmawechsels von Freiheit zu Gleichheit. Vor dem Hintergrund der unterschiedlichen sozialen Situation von Afroamerikanern und Weißen in den Vereinigten Staaten, die, wie gezeigt wird, eine Folge von Sklaverei und Rassentrennung sind, wird das Konzept von Freiheit mit dem Konzept von Gleichheit in Beziehung gesetzt. Das schließt einen Exkurs in die Ideengeschichte dieser Konzepte und der amerikanischen Verfassung ein. Darüber hinaus erfolgt eine Beschreibung der unterschiedlichen Lebenswelten von Weißen und Afroamerikanern damals und heute und eine Analyse der Faktoren, die zu dieser Situation führten. Einen großen Raum der Arbeit nimmt die Herausbildung und Wahrnehmung der Konflikte ein, die sich auf Grund der propagierten Ziele der Revolution und der begrenzten Möglichkeiten zu ihrer Durchsetzung ergaben. Sklaverei wird in diesem Zusammenhang als die Institution beschrieben, die maßgeblich zur Herausbildung und WahrnAmerica After Tocqueville
America after Tocqueville complements Harvey Mitchell's previous book, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996).
Author: Harvey Mitchell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521812461
Category: History
Page: 58
View: 307
America after Tocqueville complements Harvey Mitchell's previous book, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996). This study draws on Democracy in America to study the condition of democracy in the United States in our own time. Three aspects of Americanism inform Harvey Mitchell's book, and cannot be separated from Tocqueville's consideration of the three races. First, he addresses tensions in the United States between ideas of equality and a political system that tries to keep it within bounds. He turns to the relationship between this system and the dynamics of American capitalism. and he analyses the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in American life. Overall, he asks if Americans have surrendered to what Tocqueville called the materialization of life; if that compromise means their abandonment of their original spiritual quest; and, if they are on the way to a radical alienation from politics.The Idea of Equality in International Politics
He had resolved , therefore , to shoulder the primary burden for helping Britain and its allies even if it conflicted with Latin American ideas of equal concern for the hemisphere . In line with this approach , the United States ...
Author: Robert A. Klein
Publisher:
ISBN: UOM:39015001679904
Category: Equality of states
Page: 264
View: 311