Suburban Warriors

Download or read book Suburban Warriors written by Lisa McGirr and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century. Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism. While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens—and often upsets—our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.

Download or read book The Right Wing: The Good, The Bad, and the Crazy written by Charles Phillip Rider and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book "The Right Wing: the Good, the Bad, and the Crazy" discusses the political right in the United States from Prohibition through recent speculation concerning the presidential campaign of 2016. A chapter is devoted to each U.S. President from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Many references are contained in the book concerning right wing personalities such as Robert Welch, Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Rush Limbaugh, Darrel Issa and others. Right wing organizations such as the John Birch Society, Fox News, and the Tea Party are analyzed. The Afterword section contains the author's solution to issues such as gun control, the U.S. Debt, the need for additional federal revenues, and the lack of medium and large U.S. corporations' tax support of the U.S. government. Controversial issues such as sex education, immigration, and the present large gap between wealthy and middle class income are discussed in the book. The influence of the religious right in politics is analyzed. The author, Charles Rider, analyzes some of the above issues from an attorney's perspective. The book contains facts not generally known by readers such as Senator McCarthy, the communist witch hunter, subpoenaed many witnesses and forced them to testify in front of the Senate Permanent Sub Committee on Investigations. None of the witnesses ever went to jail or prison for communist activity. McCarthy's committee records of witnesses' testimony and background disappeared from the FBI files and the National Archives. During the Afghan War, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld created a monetary reward program for information as to names of terrorists. Leaflets were distributed that the U.S. Government would pay up to $15,000 for names of terrorists. People turned in their enemies and sometimes goat herders and store clerks ended up in Guantanamo.

Download or read book Suburban Knights written by E.F. Kitchen and published by . This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether they're bored office stiffs, housewives or disgruntled war veterans, the armour-clad members of the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) like to get beaten up the old-fashioned way. From 2003 to 2005, internationally renowned photographer E.F. Kitchen photographed and interviewed the fighters of the SCA on location, using a bespoke, 8x10 bellows camera. What followed was Suburban Knights, a fierce, sepia-toned series of portraits of these 21st-century warriors, lost in time.

Download or read book Suburban Dicks written by Fabian Nicieza and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel* *A finalist for the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel* From the cocreator of Deadpool comes a highly entertaining debut featuring two unlikely and unforgettable amateur sleuths. An engrossing murder mystery full of skewering social commentary, Suburban Dicks examines the racial tensions exposed in a New Jersey suburb after the murder of a gas station attendant. Andie Stern thought she'd solved her final homicide. Once a budding FBI profiler, she gave up her career to raise her four (soon to be five) children in West Windsor, New Jersey. But one day, between soccer games, recitals, and trips to the local pool, a very pregnant Andie pulls into a gas station--and stumbles across a murder scene. An attendant has been killed, and the local cops are in over their heads. Suddenly, Andie is obsessed with the case, and back on the trail of a killer, this time with kids in tow. She soon crosses paths with disgraced local journalist Kenneth Lee, who also has everything to prove in solving the case. A string of unusual occurrences--and, eventually, body parts--surface around town, and Andie and Kenneth uncover simmering racial tensions and a decades-old conspiracy. Hilarious, insightful, and a killer whodunit, Suburban Dicks is the one-of-a-kind mystery that readers will not be able to stop talking about.

Download or read book Civilian Warriors written by Erik Prince and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The founder of Blackwater offers the gripping true story of the world’s most controversial military contractor. In 1997, former Navy SEAL Erik Prince started a business that would recruit civilians for the riskiest security jobs in the world. As Blackwater’s reputation grew, demand for its services escalated, and its men eventually completed nearly 100,000 missions for both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was a huge success except for one problem: Blackwater was demonized around the world. Its employees were smeared as mercenaries, profiteers, or worse. And because of the secrecy requirements of its contracts with the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, Prince was unable to correct false information. But now he’s finally able to tell the full story about some of the biggest controversies of the War on Terror, in a memoir that reads like a thriller.

Download or read book Confronting Suburban Poverty in America written by Elizabeth Kneebone and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Back in the 1960s tackling poverty "in place" meant focusing resources in the inner city and in rural areas. The suburbs were seen as home to middle- and upper-class families—affluent commuters and homeowners looking for good schools and safe communities in which to raise their kids. But today's America is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem, but increasingly a suburban one as well. In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. After decades in which suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, the 2000s marked a tipping point. Suburbia is now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country and more than half of the metropolitan poor. However, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. As Kneebone and Berube cogently demonstrate, the solution no longer fits the problem. The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including shifts in affordable housing and jobs, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. The phenomenon raises several daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they work in more scaled, cross-cutting, and resource-efficient ways to address widespread need. This book embraces that opportunity. Kneebone and Berube paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America offers a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize po

Download or read book Kitchen Table Politics written by Stacie Taranto and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most histories of modern American politics tell a similar story: that the Sunbelt, with its business friendly environment, right-to-work laws, and fierce spirit of frontier individualism, provided the seedbed for popular conservatism. Stacie Taranto challenges this narrative by positioning New York State as a central battleground. In 1970, under the governorship of Republican Nelson Rockefeller, New York became one of the first states to legalize abortion. By 1980, however, conservative, antifeminist Republicans with broad suburban appeal—symbolized by figures such as Ronald Reagan—had usurped power from these so-called Rockefeller Republicans. What happened during the intervening decade? In Kitchen Table Politics, Taranto investigates the role that middle-class, mostly Catholic women played both in the development of conservatism in New York State and in the national shift toward a conservative politics of "family values." Far from Albany, a short train ride away from the feminist activity in New York City, white, Catholic homemakers on Long Island and in surrounding suburban counties saw the legalization of abortion in the state in 1970 as a threat to their hard-won version of the American dream. Borrowing tactics from church groups and parent-teacher associations, these women created the New York State Right to Life Party and organized against several feminist initiatives, including defeating an effort to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution in 1975. These self-described "average housewives," Taranto argues, were more than just conservative shock troops; instead, they were inventing a new, politically viable conservatism centered on the heterosexual traditional nuclear family that the GOP's right wing used to broaden its electoral base. Figures such as activist Phyllis Schlafly, New York senator Al D'Amato, and presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan viewed the Right to Life Party's activism as offering a viable model to defeat feminist initiatives and win family values votes nationwide. Taranto gathers archival evidence and oral histories to piece together the story of these homemakers, whose grassroots organizing would shape the course of modern American conservatism.