Philip Roth's Nostalgia for the Yiddishkayt and the New Deal Idealisms in The Plot Against America
This essay reads Philip Roth's The Plot Against America as testifying to the novelist's reengagement with and recovery of his essential Jewish racial identity as well as his re-vision of America as the promised land for its Jews. Situating the complex cultural politics of yiddishkayt in the matrix of the New Deal idealism of the Rooseveltian era, it addresses the novelist's engagement with American democracy that has safeguarded the Jews and other immigrants from being persecuted.
The Oxford companion to United States history
The Oxford Companion to United States History is a one-volume, alphabetically arranged encyclopedia offering comprehensive coverage of the field for pre-contact Native Americans to the end of the twentieth century. The volume's first aim will be to serve as trustworthy guide to the basics of American history: correct and clearly presented facts, and thorough and extensive coverage of the political, diplomatic, and military "core" of American history. Users will find the key figures in various fields of endeavour, the central events that represent defining moments in our past, and the principal court decisions that have shaped our Constitutional history. Beyond this essential beginning point, the volume will incorporate the fruits of the last quarter-century of scholarship in the field, with its heightened focus on social history and its widened social and cultural perspectives on traditional political, diplomatic, and military topics. Other areas to be given central and informed attention are science and technology; popular culture, mass culture, and sports; the arts; and religion.
From the old diplomacy to the new, 1865-1900
Historians have long argued about the nature of the changes that occurred in American foreign policy at the turn of the century, and whether those changes represented an abrupt break from the past or the culmination of long-term trends. Beisner addresses these issues by recasting the questions involved, and synthesizes the most useful contributions of both traditional and revisionist historians. From the Old Diplomacy to the New reinterprets the entire period as one in which American foreign policy underwent a fundamental paradigm shift that affected the goals and methods of diplomacy. A commitment to systematic policy and a determination to promote American interests in a dangerous world characterized the "new diplomacy."