What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture s tendency to valorize nature and the rural world.
Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of...

The ascendancy of conservatism in the last twenty years is an unprecedented episode in American intellectual and political history. In Watch on the Right, J. David Hoeveler Jr. gives us enlightening, often immensely entertaining, portraits of the key thinkers behind this revolution. As Hoeveler writes, conservative thinkers hang their hats on many different racks, and this book dramatizes for us the breadth of the conservative coalition as exemplified by the eight writers surveyed: William F. Buckley Jr. George Will, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol, Hilton Kramer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, R....

We tried as hard as we could to believe that politics might be idyl, only to discover that what we took to be a political pastoral was really a grim military campaign or a murderous betrayal of political allies. Thus Lionel Trilling summarized the experience of an entire generation of American liberal intellectuals who had watched with mounting disbelief and disillusion the rise of totalitarianism in the 1950s.

An Osseo native looks at the enduring power of immigrant traditions in rural Trempealeau County, from its pioneer days to recent decades.

American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 demonstrates how evolutionary theories fundamentally shaped, and ultimately undercut, the American socialist movement. Mark Pittenger examines the attempts of radicals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to synthesise the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer with socialist philosophy, social theory and political practice. In contrast to authors who have shown the influence of Darwinism on conservative and progressive political ideologies, Pittenger establishes that radicals also took scientific ideas seriously...

American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 demonstrates how evolutionary theories fundamentally shaped, and ultimately undercut, the American socialist movement. Mark Pittenger examines the attempts of radicals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to synthesise the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer with socialist philosophy, social theory and political practice. In contrast to authors who have shown the influence of Darwinism on conservative and progressive political ideologies, Pittenger establishes that radicals also took scientific ideas seriously...

Traces, by means of their own words, women's work in 19th- and early 20th-century reform movements in Wisconsin's politics, and especially in its press. Until the state's ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1919, Wisconsin women were never at a loss for words, or a newspaper to print them.

Genevieve McBride traces women's work in reform movements in the state's politics and especially in its press, bringing women's voices vividly to life, in their own words. Nowhere was the struggle fought for so long and so hard as in Wisconsin.