Lehrman American Studies Center

Books (Go back)

• Dynamics of World History by Christopher Dawson
  • 5/5 Stars

  Several major themes run through Dawson's work, including the interdependence of history and sociology; the need to go beyond nationalist history toward a history of the entire process of cultural development; the need to study not abstract Man but particular…

• 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…

• Doomed Bourgeois In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman by Mark C. Henrie
  • 5/5 Stars

  Critics have praised the films of writer/director Whit Stillman for their exceptionally intelligent portrayal of the lives and loves of the "urban haute bourgeoisie." His three comedies of manners-"Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "The Last Days of Disco"-sparkle with urbane and ironic…

• Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge—A Reader by John Lukacs
  • 5/5 Stars

  Among the most accomplished historians of his generation, John Lukacs has written more than twenty books and hundreds of essays and reviews. His scholarship encompasses the history of the modern age, focusing especially on the political, ideological, intellectual, and military…

• Tolerance in the 21st Century: Prospects and Challenges by Gerson Moreno-Riano
  • 5/5 Stars

  Tolerance in the 21st Century investigates some of the key philosophical and practical dilemmas surrounding the implementation and realization of tolerance in the 21st century.

• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
  • 5/5 Stars

  Though now over thirty years old, Postman still provides one of the best explanations of contemporary culture by tracing the transformation of the United States from a typographic culture to a visual one. Simple but profound.

• Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies—And Why They Disappeared by Allan C. Carlson
  • 0/5 Stars

  Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great…

• The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation by Richard M. Gamble
  • 0/5 Stars

  "They died to save their country and they only saved the world." This line, the final one in G. K. Chesterton's poem, "The English Graves," serves for Richard M. Gamble as an interpretive key to a peculiarly important moment in…

• The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis by Robert P. George
  • 0/5 Stars

  It is a common supposition among many of our cultural elites that a constitutional "wall of separation" between church and state precludes religious believers from bringing their beliefs to bear on public matters. This is because secular liberals typically assume…

• Moral Enterprise: Politics, Reason, and the Human Good by Kenneth L. Grasso and Robert P. Hunt
  • 0/5 Stars

  Francis P. Canavan has been described by Gerard V. Bradley as "one of the great political theorists of the past thirty years," and Robert P. George has hailed him as our "most incisive and trenchant critic" of liberal judicial activism.…

• Rallying The Really Human Things : Moral Imagination In Politics Literature & Everyday Life by Vigen Guroian
  • 0/5 Stars

  For Vigen Guroian, contemporary culture is distinguished by its relentless assault on the moral imagination. In the stories it tells us, in the way it has degraded courtship and sexualized our institutions of higher education, in the ever-more-radical doctrines of…

• Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader by James M. Kushiner
  • 0/5 Stars

  Launched in 1987, Touchstone magazine has served as an indispensable forum for the ecumenical consideration of matters of crucial importance to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians. In Creed & Culture, James M. Kushiner brings together twenty-one essays that originally appeared…

• Stuck With Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future by Peter Augustine Lawler
  • 0/5 Stars

  Cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell harvesting-are we on the path to a Huxley-like Brave New World? Not really, argues political philosopher and Kass Commission member Peter Augustine Lawler in Stuck with Virtue: The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future, even as…

• Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller
  • 0/5 Stars

  From the http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn9780300123654 Yale University Press website: Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2006 by Choice Magazine Essayist Stephen Miller pursues a lifelong interest in conversation by taking an historical and philosophical view of the subject. He chronicles the…

• The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash
  • 0/5 Stars

  First published in 1976, and revised in 1996, George H. Nash's celebrated history of the postwar conservative intellectual movement has become the unquestioned standard in the field. This new edition, published in commemoration of the volume's thirtieth anniversary, includes a…

• On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing by James V. Schall S.J
  • 0/5 Stars

  Echoing philosophers such as Josef Pieper, Schall explains how the modern world has inverted the rational order of human affairs, devaluing the activities of leisure and placing an exaggerated emphasis on utilitarian concerns. Though he does not deny the importance…

• The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat by Roger Scruton
  • 0/5 Stars

  Scruton shows how the different religious and philosophical roots of Western and Islamic societies have resulted in those societies' profoundly divergent beliefs about the nature of political order. For one thing, the idea of the social contract, crucial to the…

• Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture In Modern American Social Thought, Revised Edition by Christopher Shannon
  • 0/5 Stars

  From Amazon: Originally published in 1996 and newly revised, Conspicuous Criticism is a ringing defense of the need for religion and tradition in contemporary society. Writing with moral passion and critical verve, Christopher Shannon offers a convincing indictment of the…

• A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse: Why There Is No Cultural War in America and Why We Will Perish Nonetheless by Eduardo Velásquez
  • 0/5 Stars

  What accounts for the apocalyptic angst that is now so clearly present among Americans who do not subscribe to any religious orthodoxy? Why do so many popular television shows, films, and music nourish themselves on this very angst? And why…

• Darwin Day In America: How Our Politics and Culture have been Dehumanized in the Name of Science by John G. West
  • 0/5 Stars

  At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that science-especially Darwinian biology-would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty to sexual maladjustment. Instead, politics and culture were dehumanized…

• God, Man, and Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from The Birth of a Nation to The Passion of the Christ by Mark Royden Winchell
  • 0/5 Stars

  It takes no great powers of observation to see that Hollywood has long been far to the left of the general American public. Even in stories that have no overt political content, the social and moral assumptions in films rated…

• Family and Civilization by Carle C. Zimmerman
  • 0/5 Stars

  Family and Civilization is the magnum opus of Carle Zimmerman, a distinguished sociologist who taught for many years at Harvard University. In this unjustly forgotten work Zimmerman demonstrates the close and causal connections between the rise and fall of different…