Search Results

Looking at the rising economic inequality of the last quarter century and how it undermines Americans' confidence that their democratic capitalist system remains sufficient in distributing political and economic benefits to its citizens, the chapter begins by explaining the complex connections between the state and inequality through time. It argues that a better understanding can be attained only if the issue is historically contextualized and considered as part of the long evolution of the American state. Thus, in this chapter, a schema of five regimes of state building and their consequences for the shifting nature of inequality in American society is presented.

This chapter examines conservatism in American society. It argues that conservatives have become the most conspicuous feature of American politics in terms of intellectual engagement and ideological conviction. In effect, they have set out to redefine the moral and historical basis of the liberal mainstream. Organic conservatism, individualist conservatism, the conservative matrix, the religious right, neoconservatism are discussed.

This chapter describes the growth of the great national, non-profit religious publishing societies during the second and third decades of the 19th century. It focuses on the American Bible Society, the American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union. These societies were innovators in modern printing technologies and distribution strategies, but remained true to the overriding goal of charity publishing.

This chapter discusses the business organization strategies of religious publishers. Although the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Sunday School Union had developed the technological capacity for universal mass media by 1830, they lacked the organizational ability to distribute these books to all the people who needed them. Focusing on the work of the American Bible Society and American Tract Society in the 1830s and 1840s, it is shown how the religious publishers created new structures and strategies of business organization to do, through the invisible hand of administration, what invisible hand of the market could not do.

This chapter discusses the contemporary challenges confronting the established conventions and dynamics associated with America's ideational arrangements. Topics covered include cultural fears, the international challenge, and the challenge of democracy.

This chapter discusses the egalitarian principle in American society. It presents three outlooks on equality: equality as given, equality as process, and equality in the breach. It then considers the ‘racial problem’ involving Black Americans, the feminist challenge to equality, and barriers to complete social equality.

This chapter examines American nationalism. American nationalism is widely reputed not only to be based upon values but to be primarily understood and expressed in terms of these characterizing principles. The ideas in questions are those core values associated with the United States — liberty, democracy, rule of law, individual rights, progress, equality, and property. In one respect, America's tradition of ‘open nationalism’ provides a satisfactory account of the country's social cohesion and ideological unity. Under these ecumenical auspices, nationalism can offer a plausible explanation of how America's disparate values have been reconciled into an amalgam capable of providing both the focal point and the unifying medium for a vast immigrant culture.

This chapter addresses the various issues raised in this book. It also identifies patterns of behavior and extracts lessons, finally situating the role of IT of the public sector into the broader experiences of modern American society. Topics discussed include the public sector as a galaxy of industries, how the digital hand changed the work of government and education, IT adoption patterns, and the role of the public sector as creator of today's economy.

This chapter discusses the importance of progress in American society. Change is conceived as being largely synonymous with vitality, purpose, and direction, and is viewed as an integral and imperative feature of an open society. Political, economic, and social forms of progress are generally thought to occur in tandem and, especially so, in a social order like that of the United States which is traditionally geared to the emancipation of human potential for individual action and collective enterprise.

This chapter discusses the issue of order in American society. Topics covered include the foundations of order, government action into the private sphere of individual liberty on the grounds of preventing disorder, response to terrorism, order as a constitutional principle, social control and conspiracy, and criminal justice and private security.

This chapter examines populism in the United States. It argues that despite some of the historical and social ambiguities that surround American populism, the contribution of populism remains a valuable component of America's democratic culture. The populist impulse can act as a potent corrective to the self-absorption of political elites and a necessary antidote to the habitual co-option of the people's name by office-holders and decision-makers. At its worst, populism can become embroiled in existential speculations over the identity of the people, which can lead not so much to the moralization of politics but to the moral rejection of politics in favour of a simplified and more ominous alternative. At its best, populism offers a critical awareness of the anomalies and imbalances within a mass democracy, as well as a reformist impulse that finds expression either through a renovation of established institutions or through the provision of alternative public spheres. Soft populism, hard populism, and populist paradoxes are discussed.

This epilogue describes the transition of mainstream religious publishing from the millennial high of general supplies conducted by great ecumenical societies to the more steady, yet fragmented, world of the denominational publisher. By the early 1860s, the largest religious publisher in America was no longer the American Bible Society (ABS) or the American Tract Society (ATS) but the Methodist Book Concern. Both the ABS and the ATS lives on; they continue to live on today, in an age of multimedia CD-ROMs and e-tracts. But after 1860, they learned to live within an enormously diverse constellation of denominations and religious publishing enterprises.

Renaissance Europeans were “certain” that they had reached the pinnacle of human endeavor. Religion, culture, art, society, and behavior were elements that differed from Europe to America. The motivations of European missionaries involved the attempt to instill those elements into Native American societies. Spanish missionaries were aided by the Union of Church and State.

This chapter concludes Part II of this book. While American society has reached a new marital low point and has begun the reconstruction of family life, it has not seen the demise of the master narrative that still privileges the two-parent heterosexual genetic family. At the epicenter of the master narrative is the father, the patriarchal puppeteer of the family. Part II highlighted how women craft families to make their own look more like the “ordinary” American family. Single mothers begin to cut the strings en route to motherhood, only to find themselves dancing, on behalf of their children, to the master narrative once again.

Since their first institutionalization in the seventeenth century, the promises made by the civil spheres of democratic nation-states have been mocked by gross exclusions and inequalities. These destructive intrusions have entered into the very construction of civil spheres, distorting their discourse, institutions, and interaction. Yet insofar as the civil sphere has retained any autonomy at all, and it often has, it has held out the continual possibility for civic repair. Those whom civil society has repressed in the name of a restricted and particularistic conception of civil competence, it also can save. More precisely, it can offer resources so that they can save themselves. This chapter discusses racial domination and duality in the construction of American civil society; duality and counterpublics; duality and the construction of black civil society; and duality toward the civil rights movement.

This book explores the role that magazines played in the modernization of America, and particularly in the development of translocal communities, during the period 1741–1860. Drawing on original data obtained from 5,362 magazines published during this period, the book analyzes how the growing number and variety of magazines promoted and directed modern community building in America. It investigates the ways that magazines affected and were affected by key features of American society, including rapid population growth and urbanization; breakthroughs in printing and papermaking technologies; the rise of religious communities and social reform movements; the growth of educational institutions; and the emergence of scientific agriculture. This introduction reviews scholarship on modernization and community and explains how these concepts apply to America during the period. It also provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter examines the interplay between magazines and religion, with emphasis on how the growing number and variety of magazines supported and channeled community building in America—including the translocal communities that were a big part of the modernization of American society. It first considers how American religion evolved during the period 1740–1860, citing in particular the rise of national religious organizations. It then explores the relationship between religious events and institutions, on the one hand, and religious magazines on the other. It also describes the fragmentation of American churches in disputes over theology and politics and concludes by explaining how the proliferation of religious magazines affected the rest of the magazine industry.

This essay discusses the work of the American Baptist Home Mission Society with African-Americans and Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century. It explores the tensions between hierarchy and inclusion in the efforts of White evangelists to incorporate racialized minorities into the Baptist Church and the body politic, as well as the tensions that ultimately arose between White missionary discourses and the proselytes’ own alternative visions of race, nation, and religion. It thus demonstrates the complex role of religion in the U.S. process of nation building.