The American Dream

"The American Dream" is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means. In this fascinating short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present. Cullen notes that the United States, unlike most other nations, defines itself not on the facts of blood, religion, language, geography, or shared history, but on a set of ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and consolidated in the Constitution. At the core of these ideals lies the ambiguous concept of the American Dream, a concept that for better and worse has proven to be amazingly elastic and durable for hundreds of years and across racial, class, and other demographic lines. The version of the American Dream that dominates our own time--what Cullen calls "the Dream of the Coast"--is one of personal fulfillment, of fame and fortune all the more alluring if achieved without obvious effort, which finds its most insidious expression in the culture of Hollywood. For anyone seeking to understand a shifting but central idea in American history, The American Dream is an interpretive tour de force.

David Saari provides an extended essay on the nature of freedom in contemporary America, its historical roots, and its present-day manifestations. Drawing on the fields of history, law, politics, business, and philosophy, this wide-ranging study examines three facets of freedom--national freedom, freedom from the state, and freedom within the state--as they have developed in American law, politics, and society. Each of these facets is carefully defined and then applied to such contemporary issues as authority, property, equality, justice, and privacy.

"Contributes significantly to our understanding of the major disjunctions of contemporary social life."--Robert Jackall, Williams College

This is the first financial history of the United States in the 20th century from the commercial and investment banking perspective. Arguing that the ideal of an American Dream finds its best tangible expression in the ways in which the financial markets have been used to foster and protect the ideals of quality housing, higher education, and agricultural production, the author analyzes the successes and failures of the markets in producing a high standard of living and well-being over the past 70 years.

Once there was a golden age of American thrift, when citizens lived sensibly within their means and worked hard to stay out of debt The growing availability of credit in this century, however, has brought those days to an end -- undermining traditional moral virtues such as prudence, diligence, and the delay of gratification while encouraging reckless consumerism. Or so we commonly believe. In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Lendol Calder shows that this conception of the past is in fact a myth.

Calder presents the first book-length social and cultural history of the rise of consumer credit in America. He focuses on the years between 1890 and 1940, when the legal, institutional, and moral bases of today's consumer credit were established, and in an epilogue takes the story up to the present. He draws on a wide variety of sources -- including personal diaries and letters, government and business records, newspapers, advertisements, movies, and the words of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, and P.T. Barnum -- to show that debt has always been with us. He vigorously challenges the idea that consumer credit has er

In this book, the author offers a straightforward, nontechnical look at the issues threatening the American Dream and proposes a solution: restructure responsibility between the federal and state governments.

The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent.Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks.Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.

The years immediately following the Second World War witnessed a dramatic transformation of America's working-class suburbs, driven by an unprecedented post-war prosperity and a burgeoning consumer culture. Chrome and neon were the new currency in this newly vital consumer culture, and no post-war consumer products trafficked more heavily in this currency than diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks. Through these three distinctively American institutions, Andrew Hurley examines the struggle of Americans with modest means to attain the good life after two long decades of depression and war.

He tells this story of the humble origins, explosive growth, and gradual, sad decline of the diner, bowling alley, and trailer park in expert fashion. This is cultural and social history that knows how to entertain.