Yale University Press
American Contradiction
About this book
How did Americans come to elect Barack Obama—and then Donald Trump? Those choices capture what Paul Starr calls the American contradiction.
The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. The nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.
Starr tells this history from the dual standpoints of the progressive movements that changed the American people and of the movements that emerged in response. Black Americans, he argues, served as a model minority, setting in motion America’s twentieth-century revolutions in gender as well as race and rights. With industry’s decline and the rise of economic inequality, millions of Americans have felt dispossessed and want the old America back. Trump is their revenge. American Contradiction tells the story of how 1950s America became the almost unrecognizable America of the 2020s.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Preface
xi -
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Introduction: A New People, an Old Nation: America in the Twenty-First Century
1 - Part I American Revolutions of the Twentieth Century
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1. Midcentury Normal
23 -
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2. Black Americans, Model Minority
49 -
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3. How Sex Got Serious
84 -
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4. Half a Counterrevolution
117 - Part II Sleepwalking into Revenge
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5. Americans as Enemies: The 1990s as Historical Pivot
157 -
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6. Sleepwalking (1): Immigration
183 -
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7. Sleepwalking (2): Race
201 -
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8. How America Stopped Working for Working-Class Americans
232 -
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9. Trumpism as Total Revenge
254 -
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10. A New, Old America: Counterrevolution through the Courts
291 -
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11. The American Contradiction, 2024
332 -
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Notes
361 -
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Acknowledgments
419 -
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Index
421
