The 1964 campaign was a turning point in the nation’s politics and one of the rare elections in American history marked by sharp ideological divisions. Differences over race relations, the Vietnam War, and federal power divided the parties, and racial issues dominated the campaign as candidates clashed over the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racial factions disrupted the Democratic Convention and George Wallace openly courted white supremacists. The election took place amid national turmoil and great historic events such as Freedom Summer, the murder of three civil rights activists in Mississippi, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Seldom had the nation faced a starker choice. The election proved to be a watershed moment in American political history—but not in the way most contemporaries viewed it. Democrat Lyndon Johnson trounced Republican Barry Goldwater in a huge landslide. To most observers at the time, liberalism rode triumphant and conservatism crumbled, with some even talking of the demise of the Republican Party. But it was not to be, as the liberal wave crashed almost immediately and conservatives came to dominate a resurgent Republican Party in the late twentieth century. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Marked by sharp ideological divisions over civil rights, Vietnam, and federal power, the 1964 presidential campaign between Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater proved a watershed election in American history. Although Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide and liberalism seemed to ride triumphant, the liberal wave crashed almost immediately and conservatives came to dominate a resurgent Republican Party in the late twentieth century. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this is the first historical account of this crucial election, and the transition it marked for the nation. Filled with colorful details and fascinating figures - Johnson, Goldwater, Wallace, Rockefeller, Nixon, Reagan, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Bush, and many more - it captures the full excitement, drama, and significance of "liberalism's last hurrah."

""Quest for the Presidency" is an engaging and, at times, amusing popular history of American presidential elections from 1789 to the present that offers insight into the impact past elections have on today's politics"--

One of the great liberal politicians of the twentieth century, rediscovered in an important, definitive biography Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) was one of the great liberal leaders of postwar American politics, yet because he never made it to the Oval Office he has been largely overlooked by biographers. His career encompassed three well†‘known high points: the civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic Convention that risked his political future; his shepherding of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the Senate; and his near†‘victory in the 1968 presidential election, one of the angriest and most divisive in the country’s history. Historian Arnold A. Offner has explored vast troves of archival records to recapture Humphrey’s life, giving us previously unknown details of the vice president’s fractious relationship with Lyndon Johnson, showing how Johnson colluded with Richard Nixon to deny Humphrey the presidency, and describing the most neglected aspect of Humphrey’s career: his major legislative achievements after returning to the Senate in 1970. This definitive biography rediscovers one of America’s great political figures.

Skeptics might rationalize that Mitt Romney received a scant 6 percent of the black vote in 2012 only because African Americans would naturally favor one of their own. But since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has attracted more than 15 percent of the black electorate, and few GOP candidates for other offices have fared much better. No segment of the American electorate is more reliably Democratic than African Americans. The GOP, meanwhile, remains nearly an all-white party. In this path-breaking book, historian Timothy Thurber illuminates the deep roots of this gulf by exploring the contentious, and sometimes surprising, relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party from the end of World War II through Richard Nixon’s presidency. The GOP, he shows, shaped the modern civil rights movement, but the struggle for racial equality also transformed the GOP. Thurber challenges conventional wisdom that the “party of Lincoln” disappeared in the mid-1960s. Prior to 1964, the GOP was indifferent or hostile to many of the demands from civil rights activists. During the height of the civil rights revolution, Republicans were essential to enacting federal policies that made American society more egalitarian. The GOP helped defend, and sometimes expanded, those reforms in the early 1970s. Conservatives were not as dominant after 1964 as scholars and pundits often portray. Yet throughout these three decades the rift between African Americans and the GOP remained substantial. They disagreed, often sharply, over the role of the federal government, particularly regarding economic matters and the integration of schools and neighborhoods. They had different views about race and American society. They also clashed in the political arena, where Republicans wrote off the black vote as unwinnable, irrelevant, or counterproductive to their drive to supplant the Democrats as the nation’s majority party. The GOP preferred to court whites nationwide, sometimes by appealing to their racial animosities. That strategy often yielded electoral success, but the legacy of the past looms large in the early twenty-first century. With its depth of research and insight, Republicans and Race will stand as a definitive study as the GOP ponders the composition of its base in future elections.

This collection of thoughtful and timely essays offers refreshing and intelligent new perspectives on postwar American liberalism. Sophisticated yet accessible, Making Sense of American Liberalism challenges popular myths about liberalism in the United States. The volume presents the Democratic Party and liberal reform efforts such as civil rights, feminism, labor, and environmentalism as a more united, more radical force than has been depicted in scholarship and the media emphasizing the decline and disunity of the left. Distinguished contributors assess the problems liberals have confronted in the twentieth century, examine their strategies for reform, and chart the successes and potential for future liberal reform. Contributors are Anthony J. Badger, Jonathan Bell, Lizabeth Cohen, Susan Hartmann, Ella Howard, Bruce Miroff, Nelson Lichtenstein, Doug Rossinow, Timothy Stanley, and Timothy Thurber.

During the 1940s and 1950s, one name, John Bartlow Martin, dominated the pages of the "big slicks," the Saturday Evening Post, LIFE, Harper's, Look, and Collier's. A former reporter for the Indianapolis Times, Martin was one of a handful of freelance writers able to survive solely on this writing. Over a career that spanned nearly fifty years, his peers lauded him as "the best living reporter," the "ablest crime reporter in America," and "one of America's premier seekers of fact." His deep and abiding concern for the working class, perhaps a result of his upbringing, set him apart from other reporters. Martin was a key speechwriter and adviser to the presidential campaigns of many prominent Democrats from 1950 into the 1970s, including those of Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern. He served as U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic during the Kennedy administration and earned a small measure of fame when FCC Chairman Newton Minow introduced his description of television as "a vast wasteland" into the nation's vocabulary.

Examines the origin, elements, and evolving significance of the “tides” in the discourse of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is a historian and political advocate whose ideas and activities have significantly influenced the shape and direction of American liberalism during the past fifty years. A central feature of Schlesinger’s ideological perspective is his belief that American history has been marked by alternating periods of conservative and liberal dominance, which he has termed the “tides of national politics.” Throughout his career, Schlesinger has used the “tides of national politics” to defend the legitimacy and superiority of active liberal government and leadership. The study investigates how the “tides” concept has functioned in both Schlesinger’s historical scholarship and his partisan political discourse. Depoe also explores the ways in which the “tides” concept has shaped and channeled Schlesinger’s political thought over time, leading him toward certain definitions of situations and away from others. Finally, Depoe offers Schlesinger’s life and work as a case study of the highs and lows of postwar American liberalism. By tracing Schlesinger’s responses to Eisenhower-era conservatism, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and the problems of Vietnam and violence during the 1960s, and the gradual delegitimation of liberalism from the 1970s to the present, this book offers a road map that can guide the reader toward a better understanding of the past, present, and future of liberalism in America.

For most people, the idea that extremist ideologies glorify themselves through warfare, and commit crimes against humanity and genocide, is the natural extension of their moral and philosophical failings. As this volume outlines, liberal democracies such as Australia, and others, also glorify in war and they may also, at various times, engage in, support, or turn a blind eye to crimes against humanity or genocide. However, liberal democracies such as Australia, the US, and the UK, among others, routinely present themselves as arbiters of liberal values, defenders of human rights, and guardians of virtue. This book explores the obvious contradiction between the ideals of liberalism and how liberal democracies ignore, and at times even justify, their failure to uphold the principles they espouse.

A prize-winning, five-decade history of the evangelical movement in Southern California that explains a sweeping realignment of American politics. From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of “plain-folk” religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon’s “Southern Solution,” and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, “Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.”