Lehrman American Studies Center

Books

• The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
  • 5/5 Stars

  This essay argues that Americans have become estranged from the land, suffered a loss of community, devalued labour and become enslaved to the pursuit of profit. Berry, a farmer as well as a well-known contemporary essayist, has an accessible though…

• Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
  • 5/5 Stars

  Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit-the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to…

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber, translated by Talcott Parsons
  • 4.5/5 Stars

  This well-known text argues that the Protestant ethic peculiarly enabled and encouraged the development of Western capitalism.

• Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life by Bernard Iddings Bell
  • 0/5 Stars

  It is truly unfortunate that, until now, the work of Canon Bernard Iddings Bell has been out of print for some time. For Bell's cultural criticism was an important impetus to the formation of the postwar traditionalist conservative synthesis, drawing…

• The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity by Allan C. Carlson
  • 0/5 Stars

  The United States of America is arguably more family-centered than any other Western nation. If polling data can be trusted, the vast majority of Americans-a higher percentage than in any other nation-would rather build society around the family and the…

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