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For George H. W. Bush, the distinction between campaigning (“politics”) and governing (“principles”) was crucial. Once in office, he abandoned his campaign mode and with it the rhetorical strategies that brought electoral success. Not recognizing the crucial importance of rhetoric to policy formation and implementation, Bush forfeited the resources of the bully pulpit and paid the price of electoral defeat. In this first-ever analysis of Bush’s rhetoric to draw on the archives of the Bush Presidential Library, scholars explore eight major events or topics associated with his presidency: the first Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin wall, the “New World Order,” Bush’s “educatio...
The judicious statesman who won victories abroad but suffered defeat at home, whose wisdom and demeanor served America well at a critical time George Bush was a throwback to a different era. A patrician figure not known for eloquence, Bush dismissed ideology as "the vision thing." Yet, as Timothy Naftali argues, no one of his generation was better prepared for the challenges facing the United States as the Cold War ended. Bush wisely encouraged the liberalization of the Soviet system and skillfully orchestrated the reunification of Germany. And following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he united the global community to defeat Saddam Hussein. At home, Bush reasserted fiscal discipline after the excesses of the Reagan years. It was ultimately his political awkwardness that cost Bush a second term. His toughest decisions widened fractures in the Republican Party, and with his party divided, Bush lost his bid for reelection in 1992. In a final irony, the conservatives who scorned him would return to power eight years later, under his son and namesake, with the result that the elder George Bush would see his reputation soar.
When Michael Dukakis accused George H. W. Bush of being the "Joe Isuzu of American Politics" during the 1988 presidential campaign, he asserted in a particularly American tenor the near-ancient idea that lying and politics (and perhaps advertising, too) are inseparable, or at least intertwined. Our response to this phenomenon, writes the renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, tends to vacillate—often impotently—between moral outrage and amoral realism. In The Virtues of Mendacity, Jay resolves to avoid this conventional framing of the debate over lying and politics by examining what has been said in support of, and opposition to, political lying from Plato and St. Augustine to Hanna...
"Well conceived and boldly realized, these essays provide sophisticated, daring interpretive inquiries into a pivotal moment in the history of photography."--Blake Stimson, author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation "With these innovative essays, Blair and Rosenberg challenge our understanding of both the documentary impulse and the time when it was defined and canonized."--Deborah Martin Kao, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard University Art Museums
From radical abolitionist John Brown to presidential candidate Bob Dole to visionary environmentalist Wes Jackson, Kansas history is bursting with fascinating stories of individuals who made a difference to the nation and whose lives reveal much about our collective past. Prominent Kansas historian Virgil Dean has gathered a distinguished team of writers-Thomas Isern, Craig Miner, and others-who have crafted incisive portraits of 27 notable men and women, covering 150 years of Kansas and American history. Here are agitators who moved their fellow citizens to action over political, social, and economic problems: not only John Brown, but also proslavery agitator William H. Russell; Mary Elizab...
Chronicles the life and military of a neglected hero of the American Revolution—General Richard Montgomery "Brave, humane, and generous . . . still he was only a brave, humane, and generous rebel; curse on his virtues, they've undone this country."—Member of British Parliament Lord North, upon hearing of General Richard Montgomery's death in battle against the British At 3 a.m. on December 31, 1775, a band of desperate men stumbled through a raging Canadian blizzard toward Quebec. The doggedness of this ragtag militia—consisting largely of men whose short-term enlistments were to expire within the next 24 hours—was due to the exhortations of their leader. Arriving at Quebec before da...