Actually, I don’t. But in a recent piece at The Atlantic Katherine Hu wonders if “influencing” is the “new American dream.” Here is a taste: Fifty-four percent of young Americans would become an influencer if given the chance. This statistic, from...
Thomas A. Castillo is Associate Professor of History at Coastal Carolina University. This interview is based on his book, Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami (University of Illinois Press, 2022). JF: What led you to...
Alex Zakaras is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. This interview is based on his new book, The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson (Princeton University Press, 2022). JF: What led...
For Blacks, this country is still pretty racist. For Hispanics, things are getting better. Here is Brooks: How high are the barriers to opportunity for different groups? Do different groups have a fair shot at the American dream? This approach...
The suburbs are in the news again. Remember this Tweet: I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in...
Over at The Baffler, Matt Hanson reviews Greil Marcus’s Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby. Here is a taste: We’re seeing now, from the ghoulish first family on down, exactly what that...
Over at Smithsonian.com, University of London humanities professor Sara Churchwell talks with Anna Diamond about the history of these two phrases. Churchwell is the author of the forthcoming Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and the “American Dream.” Here...
Harry Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University. This interview is based on his new book, American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2017). JF: What led you to...
I recently finished reading Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity,and the Unmaking of the American Dream. I have been a fan of Lehmann’s writing for some time now. A former graduate student in history at the University of Rochester where he...
I just got my copy in the mail today. I immediately read the following two reviews: Eric Miller’s review of Peter Hales’s Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now. Miller writes: However [John] Winthrop...
Forget about Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. Well before the University of Wisconsin history professor suggested that the key to American identity was the settlement of the frontier, a group of Georg Hegel disciples were arguing that history had a...
In October 1950 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd, a sociological analysis of the “American character.” The Chronicle of Higher Education has a short piece, authored by Rupert Wilkinson, on the significance of this landmark...
I am blogging today from an ocean front cottage at the Jersey shore town of Ocean Beach. It is a bit cloudy and windy, but the temperature is in the 60s and the roar of the Atlantic is keeping me...
