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This book is a history of the civil liberties records of American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama. It examines the full range of civil liberties issues: First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, press, and assembly; due process; equal protection, including racial justice, women's rights, and lesbian and gay rights; privacy rights, including reproductive freedom; and national security issues. The book argues that presidents have not protected or advanced civil liberties, and that several have perpetrated some of worst violations. Some Democratic presidents (Wilson and Roosevelt), moreover, have violated civil liberties as badly as some Republican presidents (Nixon and Bush). This is the first book to examine the full civil liberties records of each president (thus, placing a president's record on civil rights with his record on national security issues), and also to compare the performance on particular issues of all the presidents covered.
The austere president who presided over the Roaring Twenties and whose conservatism masked an innovative approach to national leadership He was known as "Silent Cal." Buttoned up and tight-lipped, Calvin Coolidge seemed out of place as the leader of a nation plunging headlong into the modern era. His six years in office were a time of flappers, speakeasies, and a stock market boom, but his focus was on cutting taxes, balancing the federal budget, and promoting corporate productivity. "The chief business of the American people is business," he famously said. But there is more to Coolidge than the stern capitalist scold. He was the progenitor of a conservatism that would flourish later in the ...
Calvin Coolidge was one of Americas most unusual presidents. Selected as vice president by rebellious convention delegates and thrust unexpectedly into the presidency on the death of his predecessor, he nonetheless imprinted his authority on both party and country. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he came to personify not just an administration but a social and political era. Although historians still dispute his legacy, the thirtieth presidents image remains both distinctive and enduring. This is partly because Coolidge was a walking contradiction of his times. He had little of the charisma deemed essential to political success and was obsessed with fiscal prudence in an age of acquisitiveness and wild financial speculation. His economic views were more suited to a nineteenth century agrarian nation than to an emerging industrial-capitalist giant. His personal life embodied the values of white, Puritan New England, not those of the big northern cities, whose cosmopolitanism and moral relativism increasingly set the tone for the nation in the Coolidge years.
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}} \viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang1033\f0\fs20 One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed \i Wilson\i0 - the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President. \par In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently-discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson....
In the first full-scale biography of Calvin Coolidge in a generation, Robert Sobel shatters the caricature of our thirtieth president as a silent, do-nothing leader. Sobel instead exposes the real Coolidge, whose legacy as the most Jeffersonian of all twentieth century presidents still reverberates today.
Calvin Coolidge lived during a time of constitutional transformation – the Progressive Era and World War I – before serving as President of the United States from 1923-1929. Thomas J. Tacoma argues that Coolidge contended with this changing regime and world through as a Burkean conservative and an Americanist politician. In The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge: Burkean Americanist, Tacoma contextualizes Coolidge’s thought in the Progressive milieu of the age and Coolidge’s own educational background in New England and then presents the core of Coolidge’s political thought: civilization. Tacoma maintains that Coolidge believed in civilization and that the traditional American po...
Few historians have looked beyond the Teapot Dome scandal and examined the naval policies of President Warren Harding and his secretary of navy, Edwin Denby. Both sponsored policies that nourished the nation’s industrial infrastructure. Their legacy would yield a dividend of growth, production, employment, and ultimately, national security. In this revised edition, Professor Manley R. Irwin brings forth an innovative approach to researching these policies, papers, and archives, adding additional research from new documents which expand, enhance, and complement the first edition. The book argues that Harding and Denby exercised unusual foresight in preparing the navy for a war against Japan. Both individuals promulgated structural changes in the department and adopted a set of management tools that would redound to the navy in its prosecution of its Pacific offensive in World War II. Irwin's thorough investigation and addition of new evidence from original documents provides invaluable details and insights into the lasting legacy of the Harding administration.
Amity Shlaes reclaimed a misunderstood president with her bestselling biography Coolidge. Now she presents an expanded and annotated edition of that president’s masterful memoir. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge is as unjustly neglected as Calvin Coolidge himself. The man caricatured as “Silent Cal” was a gifted writer. The New York Times called him “the most literary man who has occupied the White House since 1865.” One biographer wrote that Coolidge’s autobiography “displays a literary grace that is lacking in most such books by former presidents.” The Coolidge who emerges in these pages is a model of character, principle, and humility—rare qualities in Washington. Th...