Here are 100 books that The Old Christian Right fans have personally recommended if you like
The Old Christian Right.
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I was raised in Kansas, a conservative, Republican state. My parents were conservative Republicans. We went to a fundamentalist church, where the minister preached about Revelationand warned against the dangers of “humanism”. He said the Bible predicted an end time where God would violently destroy the evil world. I have grown away from such ideas, but I understand the cultural milieu out of which such Christian extremism comes. Fortunately, I also learned from my parents the values of honesty and love for all people. Those values call me to look at today’s right-wing authoritarianism, and to find the hope that will lead us to something better.
Recent authoritarian trends and attempts to re-establish white supremacy are not new in America.
In this novel, Philip Roth envisions an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh has defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election. He then proceeds to collude with Adolph Hitler and seeks to establish anti-Semitism throughout the country.
The novel is based on the actual attitudes which Lindbergh had toward Jews and other minorities. Of course, this is not truly an insurrection. Still, it is a portrayal of how extreme right-wing attitudes can seek to rob people of our hard-won democracy.
I was raised with a deep respect for freedom for all people in this country. My family had several Jewish friends and we loved and learned from them.
'He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive' Guardian
'Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the next everybody seemed to understand everything...'
When celebrity aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, wins the 1940 presidential election on the slogan of 'America First', fear invades every Jewish household. Not only has Lindbergh blamed the Jews for pushing America towards war with Germany, he has negotiated an 'understanding' with the Nazis promising peace between the two nations.
I am fascinated by how and why extremist thought enters the mainstream. It is what drew me to researching American fascist sympathizers in the 1920s and 1930s, and it is what scares me about the direction of politics in the United States today. When I am not hanging out with my family in Washington, DC, I am teaching in the American studies department at the University of Amsterdam. It’s a long commute, but my students make it worth it. I love to teach courses about protest traditions and democratic challenges in the United States in the twentieth century up until the present.
This book is both timeless and a product of a specific moment (the post-war era). First to the timeless stuff: the authoritarian personality that Adorno and his co-authors describe remains alive and kicking in 2022. He is obsessed with appearing tough, power-hungry, incapable of self-criticism, and presents himself as a victim of other peoples’ malfeasance. As for the more dated stuff, Freud lurks behind the authors’ interpretations; reading this book, I am struck by how differently post-war Americans understood gender and sexuality than we do today. This book poses searching questions about the extent to which authoritarianism and proto-fascism are ingrained in modern life.
What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked to analyse the rise of Fascism in Europe through the specific psychological traits that make people prone to authoritarianism. Based on extensive empirical studies of Americans conducted by a team which included the leading member of the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality ranked a range of character traits on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist). These included conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, superstition and occultism, power…
I am Lecturer in US Foreign Policy at Queen Mary University of London, and I work on issues of national security and identity, political rhetoric and the role of the everyday in shaping politics, especially media and popular culture. I have written extensively on American politics and US foreign policy over these past years with two published monographs and more than a dozen articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, plus a couple of op-eds and multiple TV and radio appearances. My most recent research project explores the role of populism under the Trump presidency and its political impact in the United States.
I found this to be a fascinating book. It offered real insights into the everyday lives of working-class individuals in rural Louisiana, especially their emotional states, anger, frustration, fears, hopes, and aspirations.
Reading the book, I felt like I was actually sharing the lives of the families that Hochschild observed, getting a real understanding of how they saw the world and why they might want to vote for a figure like Donald Trump. For my money, it is sociological writing at its best.
In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country - a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets, people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.
I am fascinated by how and why extremist thought enters the mainstream. It is what drew me to researching American fascist sympathizers in the 1920s and 1930s, and it is what scares me about the direction of politics in the United States today. When I am not hanging out with my family in Washington, DC, I am teaching in the American studies department at the University of Amsterdam. It’s a long commute, but my students make it worth it. I love to teach courses about protest traditions and democratic challenges in the United States in the twentieth century up until the present.
Reading Hofstadter’s essays can be an eerie experience. Yes, he was writing in the early 1960s, and often about historical phenomena (although the recent antics and influence of Senator McCarthy were clearly at the front of his mind). But many of his observations about status anxiety and conspiracy theories feel spookily relevant today. With typical eloquence, Hofstadter wrote that McCarthy was buoyed by Americans who were revolting against the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament”; I saw something similar in fascist sympathizers in the interwar years. This edition contains both of Hofstadter’s famous essays on “anti-intellectualism” and “the paranoid style,” along with fifteen other essays.
Together for the first time: two masterworks on the undercurrents of the American mind by one of our greatest historians
Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics are two essential works that lay bare the worrying trends of irrationalism, demagoguery, destructive populism, and conspiratorial thinking that have long influenced American politics and culture. Whether underground or--as in our present moment--out in the open, these currents of resentment, suspicion, and conspiratorial delusion received their authoritative treatment from Hofstadter, among the greatest of twentieth-century American historians, at a time when many public intellectuals and scholars did…
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasn’t so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. I’m listing below a few of my favorites.
Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.
The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”
An “extraordinary rich correspondence” (The New York Times Book Review) between a seventeen-year-old aspiring writer at Oxford who would go on to become a Nobel Prize winning author and his sacrificing, beloved father.
At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before…
I am an economics professor at Victoria University of Wellington. As a previous Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury and Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, I have had quite a bit of experience watching economists’ ideas succeed and fail in the real world. I have written a number of books about policy economists and their lives in peace and wartime. (And a couple of novels too!)
This is the story of four (European and American) central bankers fighting the dramas and crises during the lead-up to the Great Depression. When crisis looms, Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman puts on a disguise and boards a cruise ship to consult with his friend Benjamin Strong in New York. If only financial crises could still be fought that way today! I liked it because I used to be a central bank governor myself!
"Erudite, entertaining macroeconomic history of the lead-up to the Great Depression as seen through the careers of the West's principal bankers . . . Spellbinding, insightful and, perhaps most important, timely." -Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"There is terrific prescience to be found in [Lords of Finance's] portrait of times past . . . [A] writer of great verve and erudition, [Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today." -The New York Times
I am a winegrower, farmer, writer, photographer, and pop-upeuse. I fell in love with food and wine while living and working in Italy, then returned stateside to create an homage to the people and place that embraced us and taught us so much. That endeavor--the restaurant osteria pane e salute opened with my chef husband Caleb Barber—was where I curated the wine program and became passionate about wines farmed artfully. I began working as a winegrower in 2007, a personal landscape experiment that led me down the rabbit hole of growing and making wine from hybrid varieties focused on regenerative viticulture and low intervention winemaking.
The Orchard is a mesmerizing story of one woman’s efforts to save her family farm in Depression-era Massachusetts. It is a glimmering and moving memoir of “Kitty” Robertson’s determination to save the small orchard she inherited from her father, the last thing that linked her family to their history. It is a story of struggle and determination, and she is a heroine who didn’t receive medals or accolades or fortune for accepting the bone-cold physical labor in winters, inherited debt, broken dreams. Somehow she is able to still see the beauty in the grit of farm life in a grim period, spring blossoms in the orchard, the green of summer, the kindness of neighbors as they help each other through challenge after challenge.
In the end, it is a narrative of redemption and victory and reminds me that the life of farming and writing is hard scrapple, but it is…
The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Recently discovered by the author's daughter, it tells the story of Adele "Kitty" Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter times. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect. Every day is a struggle, but every…
I discovered labor history during a decade-long hiatus between my first and second years in college. Before that, I had never enjoyed reading about the past, unless it was in a novel. Then I discovered slave narratives and they inspired wider reading about workers’ lives. I loved both the drama of stories about resistance to oppression and the optimism I derived from understanding working people as historical protagonists. Now, as a professional historian, I often approach the past in a more academic way, but dramatic stories continue to attract me and knowledge that working people united have achieved great things in the past still gives me hope for humanity’s future.
As a U.S. labor historian, I’ve read loads of books on the unionization of mass production during the Great Depression.
Labor’s New Millions stands above the rest for its power to make you feel like you’re right there at the picket lines, union halls, and other venues that the journalist Mary Heaton Vorse visited as she gathered material for this book about worker uprisings that put the Congress of Industrial Organizations on the map. As she shows in vivid detail, whole communities rallied to build the CIO, and campaigns for justice on the job spilled over into other realms.
Housewives going toe to toe against police, kids hand painting their own picket signs, strikers chanting “Freedom! Freedom”:Labor’s New Millions brings to life all of this and much more.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
A large part of my career has been devoted to foreign affairs. Edgar Snow, Negley Farson, and others whom I read as a young man kindled my interest. I have reported from overseas and at one point developed a specialty in reporting connections between American communities and events overseas. I have published a number of foreign correspondents’ memoirs that were buried in achieves or have been out-of-print and ignored. Most recently I wrote a history of foreign reporting. So, one can say that I have made a career of enjoying books like these.
When the Great Depression hit and jobs were scarce, there was no point in hanging around at home.
“Prices in Europe were down to rock bottom,” wrote Albion Ross of his first overseas trip in 1930. “In addition, Mussolini’s government, for some inscrutable Fascist reason, was offering students a fantastic third-class railway ticket that took you from the Channel ports round and about through France and Italy for next to nothing.”
He found a spot in Berlin with the New York Evening Post and later The New York Times. Apart from a stint in the military during the war, he remained an overseas reporter for years.
His memoir is extraordinary because it is short on derring-do and long on sensitivity about what he witnessed. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Ross nor his book are much remembered. I would not have known about it if he had…
I’m a career financial and business journalist, only recently turned novelist. I’m obsessed with the way that history repeats itself in the financial markets and that we never seem to learn our lessons. Fear and greed have always driven the behavior of bankers, traders, and investors; and they still do today, only barely inhibited by our regulatory system. I want to help people understand how markets work, and I like combining fiction with fact to explain these systems and how they’re abused. With that in mind, I work during the day as a reporter at NPR and by night as a scribbler of historical fiction with a financial twist.
I love it because it describes exactly how Wall Street used to work in the bad old days of the early 1900s, before the Great Crash and the Great Depression, before sweeping reforms turned it into what is today. I learned so much from this story about the characters who dominated the Street and set it up for failure.
I see all sorts of parallels with the growth of cryptocurrencies and the scams that surround that industry. I love the way Sinclair describes the Wild West, the ferociously greedy mentality of the players back then, and how he details the machinations of Ponzi schemers and fraudsters before there were any laws barring such scoundrels from doing whatever they pleased with gullible investors’ money.
