A war for the soul of America
Subtitle: a history of the culture wars
By: Andrew Hartman
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780226254500
Subjects: Culture conflict; Social problems; Social change; History
Description: 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 social 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 the 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-334) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The sixties as liberation; title: The neoconservative Kulturkämpfe; title: Taking God's country back; title: The color line; title: The trouble with gender; title: The sacred and the profane; title: God, state, and curriculum; title: The battle for the American mind; title: The contested American past; title: Conclusion.