🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£22.50
Out of Stock

A War for the Soul of America

A History of the Culture Wars

By (author) Andrew Hartman
Format: Hardback
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Published: 14th Apr 2015
Dimensions: w 152mm h 229mm d 25mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN-10: 022625450X
ISBN-13: 9780226254500
Barcode No: 9780226254500
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
When Patrick Buchanan took the stage at the Republican National Convention in 1992 and proclaimed, "There is a religious war going on for the soul of our country," his audience knew what he was talking about: the culture wars, which had raged throughout the previous decade and would continue until the century's end, pitting conservative and religious Americans against their liberal, secular fellow citizens. It was an era marked by polarization and posturing fueled by deep-rooted anger and insecurity. Buchanan's fiery speech marked a high point in the culture wars, but as Andrew Hartman shows in this richly analytical history, their roots lay farther back, in the tumult of the 1960s - and their significance is much greater than generally assumed. Far more than a mere sideshow or shouting match, the culture wars, Hartman argues, were the very public face of America's struggle over the unprecedented social changes of the period, as the cluster of norms that had long governed American life began to give way to a new openness to different ideas, identities, and articulations of what it meant to be an American. The hot-button issues like abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, feminism, and homosexuality that dominated politics in the period were symptoms of a larger struggle, as conservative Americans slowly began to acknowledge - if initially through rejection - many fundamental transformations of American life. As an ever-more partisan but also an ever-more diverse and accepting America continues to find its way in a changing world, A War for the Soul of America reminds us of how we got here, and what all the shouting has really been about.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
"Whatever happened to the culture wars? Americans don't argue the way they used to, at least not over hot-button cultural issues like same-sex marriage and abortion. Hartman has produced both a history and a eulogy, providing a new and compelling explanation for the rise and fall of the culture wars. But don't celebrate too soon. On the ashes of the culture wars, we've built a bleak and acquisitive country dedicated to individual freedom over social democracy. Anyone who wants to take account of the culture wars-or to wrestle with their complicated legacy-will also have to grapple with this important book." (Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools)