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...
American Dream
The state of the suburbs
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...
“The Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby”
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...
“American Dream” and “America First”
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...
The Author’s Corner with Harry Stout
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...
"Corporate Evangelicalism"
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...
The New “Books and Culture” is Here
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...
The St. Louis Hegelians
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...
The Lonely Crowd Turns 60
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...
The Levittown of the Jersey Shore
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...