Reagan ja Amerikka - kaksi kirjaa

Morning in America. How Ronald Reagan Invented The 1980’s. Gil Troy.

Kovakantinen, Princeton 2005, amerikkalainen kirjastopoisto.

Transforming America. Politics and Culture During The Reagan Years. Robert M. Collins. Kovakantinen. Columbia University 2007, 310 sivua. kuin uusi

Kovantinen,

Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counterrevolution that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers and his detractors, is often "yes." In Morning in America, Gil Troy argues that the Great Communicator was also the Great Conciliator. His pioneering and lively reassessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy takes us through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters, integrating the story of the Reagan presidency with stories of the decade's cultural icons and watershed moments-from personalities to popular television shows.


One such watershed moment was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With the trauma of Vietnam fading, the triumph of America's 1983 invasion of tiny Grenada still fresh, and a reviving economy, Americans geared up for a festival of international harmony that-spurred on by an entertainment-focused news media, corporate sponsors, and the President himself-became a celebration of the good old U.S.A. At the Games' opening, Reagan presided over a thousand-voice choir, a 750-member marching band, and a 90,000-strong teary-eyed audience singing "America the Beautiful!" while waving thousands of flags.


Reagan emerges more as happy warrior than angry ideologue, as a big-picture man better at setting America's mood than implementing his program. With a vigorous Democratic opposition, Reagan's own affability, and other limiting factors, the eighties were less counterrevolutionary than many believe. Many sixties' innovations went mainstream, from civil rights to feminism. Reagan fostered a political culture centered on individualism and consumption-finding common ground between the right and the left.


Written with verve, Morning in America is both a major new look at one of America's most influential modern-day presidents and the definitive story of a decade that continues to shape our times.

Gil Troy is the award-winning author of "The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s" which will be published this October by Thomas Dunne Books of St. Martin?s Press. A Professor of History at McGill University since 1990, and a visiting scholar this fall at The Brookings Institution, this will be his eleventh book. A leading presidential historian, Troy has also written about the history of American presidential elections, Ronald Reagan and the 1980s, Hillary Clinton, the importance of moderation in American democracy, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's fight as US Ambassador to the UN against the infamous Zionism is Racism resolution. He writes a regular column for the Daily Beast on Forgotten History, putting current events in historical perspective and also writes a regular column for the Jerusalem Post. He has been widely published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and other major media outlets. Long designated by Maclean's Magazine as one of McGill's "Popular Profs," he is a sought-after public speaker.

By the end of the 1980s, the "malaise" that had once pervaded American society was replaced by a renewed sense of confidence and national purpose. However, beneath this veneer of optimism was a nation confronting the effects of massive federal deficits, a reckless foreign policy, AIDS, homelessness, and a growing "cultural war."

In Transforming America, renowned historian Robert Collins examines the decade's critical and controversial developments and the unmistakable influence of Ronald Reagan. Moving beyond conventional depictions that either demonize or sanctify Reagan, Collins offers fresh insights into his thought and influence. He portrays Reagan as a complex political figure who combined ideological conservatism with political pragmatism to achieve many of his policy aims. Collins demonstrates how Reagan's policies helped to limit the scope of government, control inflation, reduce the threat of nuclear war, and defeat communism. Collins also shows how the simultaneous ascendancy of the right in politics and the left in culture created a divisive legacy.

The 1980s witnessed other changes, including the advent of the personal computer, a revolution in information technology, a more globalized national economy, and a restructuring of the American corporation. In the realm of culture, the creation of MTV, the popularity of self-help gurus, and the rise of postmodernism in American universities were the realization of the cultural shifts of the postwar era. These developments, Collins suggests, created a conflict in American society that continues today, pitting cultural conservatism against a secular and multicultural view of the world.

Entertaining and erudite, Transforming Americaexplores the events, movements, and ideas that defined a turbulent decade and profoundly changed the shape and direction of American culture and politics.