Here are 100 books that The Republican Reversal fans have personally recommended if you like
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Since my late teens, I have traveled extensively in wilderness areas across the United States and Alaska, as well as in Canada, Switzerland, and Patagonia. Backpacking, technical mountain climbing, and canoeing have led me to appreciate wilderness for its own sake and to become a fierce advocate for its protection. Since moving to Seattle in 1982, I have hiked extensively in the western mountains and experienced a profound sense of peace and wonder in the wild. The listed books have deepened my appreciation of the wild's intrinsic value. I have tried to convey this appreciation to my readers in my three novels set in the American West.
In John McPhee’s classic defense of environmental sanity and wilderness protection, the archdruid is David Brower, in his day among the planet’s most fervent environmentalists and defenders of nature.
Charles Fraser, a resort developer, labeled Brower a “druid”: i.e., “ a religious figure who sacrifices people and worships trees,” and I know of no other book that so starkly contrasts the urge to develop everything—even the Grand Canyon!—with the counter urge to preserve as much as possible of the wild before it is all gone.
I deeply appreciate McPhee’s format: a series of dialogues in which Brower and his three opponents extol their arguments fully and then engage in rigorous debate about their wildly contrasting values.
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.
The Beatles are widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history and their career has been the subject of many biographies. Yet the band's historical significance has not received sustained academic treatment to date. In The Beatles and the 1960s, Kenneth L. Campbell uses The…
I grew up in a small town, with a barn behind our house and an orchard across the street; nature was always part of my life. What made me more conscious of this was three canoe trips in the Quetico wilderness with my Boy Scout troop, where we saw loons, bears, and clear, sparkling lakes. I later became a political science professor, but I always hiked and camped, and eventually helped start an environmental studies program to share my passion with my students. I also learned about the growing threats we face from environmental destruction. These books helped shape my understanding of the problem and how to solve it.
I loved this book because it showed me the importance of grassroots organizing. The people in Appalachia were horrified by what strip mining was doing to their farms and communities, but couldn’t get help from their elected officials.
Even the big environmental interest groups were more interested in getting an agreement than in stopping the destruction of the land. They got some of what they wanted, but are still fighting to stop strip mining.
Surface coal mining has had a dramatic impact on the Appalachian economy and ecology since World War II, exacerbating the region's chronic unemployment and destroying much of its natural environment. Here, Chad Montrie examines the twentieth-century movement to outlaw surface mining in Appalachia, tracing popular opposition to the industry from its inception through the growth of a militant movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience and industrial sabotage. Both comprehensive and comparative, To Save the Land and People chronicles the story of surface mining opposition in the whole region, from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Though many accounts of environmental activism…
We grew up, brothers, in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode – Cincinnati – and so we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home. Despite the many differences, both cities experienced the urban crisis. Richard, a journalist, was drawn to the story of Cleveland’s frequently burning river. How did the Cuyahoga become a poster child for the environmental movement? And David, an environmental historian, was drawn to Carl Stokes, a Black man with the skills to become mayor of a predominantly white city in 1968. How did he propose to solve the many problems running through the urban environment? We both wanted to know what Cleveland’s changing relationship with its river could tell us about environmental politics.
The history of politics can be dry stuff. But Frank Zelko is a natural storyteller – and a gifted historian. His subjects, Greenpeace and the men and women who formed it, provide access to the evolution of North American environmentalism from the 1960s through the 1980s. In vivid detail, Zelko narrates the drama at the heart of the Greenpeace strategy, the “mind bombs” that would activate citizens around the globe to stop whaling – at least mostly. Zelko makes us feel the urgency among these activists, their fear of nuclear testing, and their love of whales. Even among this relatively small group of activists, however, personality conflicts and philosophical differences reveal the difficulty of creating and maintaining a countercultural organization. For many of these folks, organization is not their thing. But action was. And throughout, Zelko’s fine-grained narrative reminds us that individual action is at the heart of all political…
The emergence of Greenpeace in the late 1960s from a loose-knit group of anti-nuclear and anti-whaling activists fundamentally changed the nature of environmentalism-its purpose, philosophy, and tactics-around the world. And yet there has been no comprehensive objective history of Greenpeace's origins-until now.
Make It a Green Peace! draws upon meeting minutes, internal correspondence, manifestos, philosophical writings, and interviews with former members to offer the first full account of the origins of what has become the most recognizable environmental non-governmental organization in the world. Situating Greenpeace within the peace movement and counterculture of the 1960s, Frank Zelko provides a much deeper…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
We grew up, brothers, in Cleveland’s Ohio antipode – Cincinnati – and so we knew Cleveland mostly in contrast to our home. Despite the many differences, both cities experienced the urban crisis. Richard, a journalist, was drawn to the story of Cleveland’s frequently burning river. How did the Cuyahoga become a poster child for the environmental movement? And David, an environmental historian, was drawn to Carl Stokes, a Black man with the skills to become mayor of a predominantly white city in 1968. How did he propose to solve the many problems running through the urban environment? We both wanted to know what Cleveland’s changing relationship with its river could tell us about environmental politics.
The subtitle to Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands is Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City, and it’s Sullivan’s adventures exploring the vast New Jersey wetlands that make the book so entertaining. But Sullivan is right to use the word “wilderness” to describe the 32 square miles of swamp, landfills, and rusting industrial debris along the Hackensack River where it flows into Newark Bay just five miles from the Empire State Building in New York City. Like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, the Meadowlands have been abused and degraded for centuries but also show the resilience of nature and how people’s attitudes toward it have changed. “Now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-bill grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs,” Sullivan writes, “even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.” Sullivan’s loving description…
Imagine a grungy north Jersey version of John McPhee's classic The Pine Barrens and you'll get some idea of the idiosyncratic, fact-filled, and highly original work that is Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. Just five miles west of New York City, this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station--and maybe, just ,maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa. Robert Sullivan proves himself to be this fragile yet amazingly resilient region's…
I’ve long been interested in politicians who challenged ideological orthodoxy and crossed partisan lines. That interest led me to research the seeming disappearance of moderate Republican elected officials. I was also curious about the generations of voters who supported them. Since I started asking questions about the mid-twentieth-century GOP, I have become interested in the history of the Republican Party dating back to its origins in the 1850s. The Republican Party’s transformation since the days of Abraham Lincoln is fascinating and provides insight into US history, governance, and race relations in nuanced ways that are helpful for understanding the US today.
Nicole Hemmer’s insightful look at and redefinition of the Reagan Era is the type of political history I admire the most. It proves the power of historical context for reexamining contemporary politics. This book is much more than an explainer for Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, but it demystifies his rise by tracing the power struggles waged by ultra-partisan Republicans in the 1990s.
It makes a chaotic and norm-breaking era in our politics legible and compelling. This very recent history will come into clearer view over time, but for now, Hemmer provides a great service by weighing in early and helping us decipher the nature of today’s politics.
A bold new history of modern conservatism that finds its origins in the populist right-wing politics of the 1990s
Ronald Reagan has long been lionized for building a conservative coalition sustained by an optimistic vision of Americanexceptionalism, small government, and free markets. But as historian Nicole Hemmer reveals, the Reagan coalition was short-lived; it fell apart as soon as its charismatic leader left office. In the 1990s — a decade that has yet to be recognized as the breeding ground for today’s polarizing politics — changing demographics and the emergence of a new political-entertainment media fueled the rise of combative…
Well before I trained as a scholar, I was an activist motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights and social justice. Those commitments continued throughout my academic career and have now morphed into a resolve to write about recent threats to liberal order, democracy, and justice. The election results of 2016 – the triumph of “leave” in the Brexit vote and of Donald Trump in the Presidential election, forced me to rethink the history of things I have come to cherish – liberal order, democracy, and social and racial justice – how support for them has ebbed, and why they now require vigorous and informed defense.
Hacker and Pierson argue that “plutocratic populism,” their term for what currently ails the United States and other democracies, is the latest solution to a structural dilemma in modern democracy.
Conservatives are regularly determined to protect wealth and privilege but need to win over voters who typically lack wealth and privilege to elect them. That means a continual effort to craft appeals that, in effect, disguise their aims.
The recent turn to populism means relying on non-economic issues – race, nativism, and various culture war issues concerning sex and gender most potently – to attract voters to support parties whose first allegiance is to the economic interests of elites.
This strategy can also lead, at times, to attacks on democracy and voting as well.
The Republican Party appears to be divided between a tax-cutting old guard and a white-nationalist vanguard-and with Donald Trump's ascendance, the upstarts seem to be winning. Yet how are we to explain that, under Trump, the plutocrats have gotten almost everything they want, including a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, regulation-killing executive actions, and a legion of business-friendly federal judges? Does the GOP represent "forgotten" Americans? Or does it represent the superrich?
In Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: the Republican Party serves its plutocratic masters…
With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time…
I’ve long been interested in politicians who challenged ideological orthodoxy and crossed partisan lines. That interest led me to research the seeming disappearance of moderate Republican elected officials. I was also curious about the generations of voters who supported them. Since I started asking questions about the mid-twentieth-century GOP, I have become interested in the history of the Republican Party dating back to its origins in the 1850s. The Republican Party’s transformation since the days of Abraham Lincoln is fascinating and provides insight into US history, governance, and race relations in nuanced ways that are helpful for understanding the US today.
Rich in detailed scene-setting, Dan T. Carter’s biography of George Wallace is as much about the governor of Alabama as it is about everyone who attended his rallies and cast ballots with his name. I love biography as a medium for rethinking standard periodization, blurring boundaries, whether that be regional or cultural, among others, and using one person’s life to clarify sweeping societal trends.
This book explains, as much as possible, the extreme contradictions of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential firebrands. Carter demonstrates how unadulterated racism and commitment to white supremacy could be repackaged in the 1960s as an answer to a myriad of ills. In my opinion, Wallace is the prime example of the dangers posed by an ambitious politician who exploits divisiveness and weaponizes the worst of our inclinations.
Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace's story with a look at the politician's death and the…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I found this book so helpful in explaining why it wasn’t “the economy stupid” but values that moved voters. His work was helpful in illuminating my own extensive work on how values move voters.
Frank is especially good at describing the role of the evangelical movement in putting cultural issues, including abortion, front and center in our politics. I found that he was onto something important and that has helped my understanding of today’s politics. A very readable, down-to-earth book.
Reveals how conservatism became the preferred national political ideology, exploring the origins of this philosophy in the upper classes and tracing its recent popularity within the middle class.
I’m a professor of modern US and global history at Hartwick College in upstate New York. I have been reading and researching the history of conservative and right-wing movements in the United States and the wider world for almost two decades. My first book, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War, was published by University of North Carolina Press in 2018. My articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Jacobin, Diplomatic History, Terrorism and Political Science, H-War, and H-Diplo. I’m currently at work on two projects: a history of the transatlantic white power movement and a film documentary about the short-lived white supremacist nation of Rhodesia and its contemporary legacies.
This is a field-defining work. First published in 2001, McGirr’s book prompted a generation of historians to reexamine the rise and evolution of modern American conservatism. Focused on the suburbs of Orange County, California, Suburban Warriors explored how grassroots conservative activists mobilized to reshape the politics of the nation. Through the stories of ordinary people--housewives and defense workers, evangelical worshippers, and anti-communist activists--we learn how the modern American right evolved from a fringe movement into arguably the most powerful political force in the United States.
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…
The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.
Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…
I have been reading, researching, and writing on the limitations of market capitalism and the unique and important role of government in meeting public needs for almost 30 years. I have come to firmly believe that we can’t – as a nation and planet – solve our most pressing problems without rebuilding trust in government and the capacity and authority of governing institutions. We can’t eliminate poverty, eradicate structural racism, protect our environment and the planet without democratic institutions that have the power to do so. We need markets, but transferring too much power to the market has created many of the problems we face today.
This book had an enormous impact on my understanding about the long road economic conservatives and corporations took to establish the dominance of neoclassical and neoliberal economic approaches in the U.S.
It tells a detailed story about a small group of American businessmen who ultimately succeeded in building a political movement that transformed the country. It describes what they were heading for and the ways they went about it.
In the wake of the profound economic crisis known as the Great Depression, a group of high-powered individuals joined forces to campaign against the New Deal-not just its practical policies but the foundations of its economic philosophy. The titans of the National Association of Manufacturers and the chemicals giant DuPont, together with little-known men like W. C. Mullendore, Leonard Read, and Jasper Crane, championed European thinkers Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and their fears of the "nanny state." Through fervent activism, fundraising, and institution-building, these men sought to educate and organize their peers as a political force to…