These essays examine the policies and programs of LBJ's Great Society, and the ideological and political shifts that changed the nature of liberalism. Some essays focus on Lyndon Johnson himself and the institution of the modern presidency, others on specific reform measures, and others on the impact of these initiatives in the following decades.

This companion offers an overview of Lyndon B. Johnson's life, presidency, and legacy, as well as a detailed look at the central arguments and scholarly debates from his term in office. Explores the legacy of Johnson and the historical significance of his years as president Covers the full range of topics, from the social and civil rights reforms of the Great Society to the increased American involvement in Vietnam Incorporates the dramatic new evidence that has come to light through the release of around 8,000 phone conversations and meetings that Johnson secretly recorded as President

President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was breathtaking in its scope and dramatic in its impact. Over the course of his time in office, Johnson passed over one thousand pieces of legislation designed to address an extraordinary array of social issues. Poverty and racial injustice were foremost among them, but the Great Society included legislation on issues ranging from health care to immigration to education and environmental protection. But while the Great Society was undeniably ambitious, it was by no means perfect. In Prisoners of Hope, prize-winning historian Randall B. Woods presents the first comprehensive history of the Great Society, exploring both the breathtaking possibilities of visionary politics, as well as its limits. Soon after becoming president, Johnson achieved major legislative victories with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But he wasn't prepared for the substantial backlash that ensued. Community Action Programs were painted as dangerously subversive, at worst a forum for minority criminals and at best a conduit through which the federal government and the inner city poor could bypass the existing power structure. Affirmative action was rife with controversy, and the War on Poverty was denounced by conservatives as the cause of civil disorder and disregard for the law. As opposition, first from white conservatives, but then also some liberals and African Americans, mounted, Johnson was forced to make a number of devastating concessions in order to secure the future of the Great Society. Even as many Americans benefited, millions were left disappointed, from suburban whites to the new anti-war left to African Americans. The Johnson administration's efforts to draw on aspects of the Great Society to build a viable society in South Vietnam ultimately failed, and as the war in Vietnam descended into quagmire, the president's credibility plummeted even further. A cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of even well-intentioned policy, Prisoners of Hope offers a nuanced portrait of America's most ambitious--and controversial--domestic policy agenda since the New Deal.

That Broader Definition of Liberty synthesizes a political theory of the New Deal from the writings of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Thurman Arnold. The resultant theory highlights the need for the public accountability of private economic power, arguing that when the private economic realm is unable to adequately guarantee the rights of citizens, the state must intervene to protect those rights. The New Deal created a new American social contract that accorded our right to the pursuit of happiness a status equal to liberty, and grounded both in an expansive idea of security as the necessary precondition for the exercise of either. This was connected to a theory of the common good that privileged the consumer as the central category while simultaneously working to limit the worst excesses of consumption-oriented individualism. This theory of ends was supplemented by a theory of practice that focused on ways to institutionalize progressive politics in a conservative institutional context. Brian Stipelman, drawing upon a mixture of history, American political development, and political theory, offers a comprehensive theory of the New Deal, covering both the ends it hoped to achieve and the means it used to achieve them.

"[A] brilliant intellectual biography. . . . Ryan submits incisive, compressed accounts of Dewey's important works and, with considerable flair, describes the major political debates into which Dewey entered. Ryan has an expert historian's grasp on the major events of the century and weaves them skillfully through Dewey's life story." --Mark Edmundson, Washington Post Book World

The term "culture wars" refers to the political and sociological polarisation that has characterised American society the past several decades. This new edition provides an enlightening and comprehensive A-to-Z ready reference, now with supporting primary documents, on major topics of contemporary importance for students, teachers, and the general reader. It aims to promote understanding and clarification on pertinent topics that too often are not adequately explained or discussed in a balanced context. With approximately 640 entries plus more than 120 primary documents supporting both sides of key issues, this is a unique and defining work, indispensable to informed discussions of the most timely and critical issues facing America today.

In Literary/Liberal Entanglements, Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson bring together ten essays by scholars from a wide range of fields in English studies in order to interrogate the complex, entangled relationship between the history of literature and the history of liberalism. The volume has three goals: to investigate important episodes in the entanglement of literary history and liberalism; to analyze the impact of this entanglement on the secular and democratic projects of modernity; and thereby to reassess the dynamics of our neoliberal present. The volume is organized into a series of paired essays, with each pair investigating a concept central to both literature and liberalism: acting, socializing, discriminating, recounting, and culturing. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the vivid capacity of literary study writ large to reckon with, imagine, and materialize durative accounts of history and politics. Literary/Liberal Entanglements models a method of literary history for the twenty-first century.

Argues that 1965, not 1968, was the most transformative year of the 1960s, discussing attacks on civil rights demonstrators, increased African American militancy, the Watts riots, anti-war protests, and a growing national pessimism.

Transatlantic democracy in the 20th century - this concept goes beyond the idea of an American civilizing mission in Europe after two World Wars, and certainly beyond the notion of re-educating Germans, and making them fit for Western institutions after Nazism. As democracy is being contested anew in the beginning of the 21st century, a much more complicated landscape of democracy since 1900 emerges. Transfer was not a one-way-street, and patterns of conflict and transformation affected both American and European political societies. American democracy may not be reduced to a resilient defense of original traditions, while the narrative of German democracy is more than redemption from catastrophe. The essays in this volume contribute to a new history of transatlantic democracy that accounts for its manifold experiences and constant renegotiations, up to the current challenges of American and European populism.