Gary Gerstle

Na sombra do Vietnã: o nacionalismo liberal e o problema da guerra

This essay discusses how a group of post-Vietnam filmmakers and historians, in an attempt to reinvigorate liberal nationalism, began to celebrate the figure of the citizen soldier in Americas past. These efforts were popular and acclaimed but failed to generate a critique of Americas post-Vietnam professionalized military and the adventurist foreign policy that this military has helped to make possible.

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation: The American Experience

This essay offers a historical overview of processes of immigrant political incorporation in the United States. It identifies three dimensions of incorporation—legal, cultural, and institutional—and argues that the unevenness of progress among these three dimensions has rendered the process of incorporation fraught and frequently marked by contradiction. It also distinguishes between “acquiescent” and “transformational” modes of incorporation and stresses that the latter, though often perceived as threatening by the native-born, is often the more enduring and meaningful way of becoming American. Finally, it assesses the prospects for incorporation among immigrants in the United States today.

Reflections on Americanism

Charles Williamss essay on the nature of progressive Americanism takes me back to where my quest to understand this phenomenon began: the labor movement of the 1930s. The broad nature and intensity of working-class rebellion and mobilization during the Depression decade once led the historian Irving Bernstein to label this period, the “Turbulent Years.” I was part of a group of self-described “new labor historians” that set out to penetrate the mysteries of this movement and especially the consciousness of the workers who participated in it. Most of us undertook community or single industry studies, out of the conviction that the kind of in-depth investigations that such focused work allowed would yield fully realized portraits of working-class insurgencies and of the workplaces and communities out of which they emerged. I chose to explore a New England textile city while others opted to work on transit workers in New York City, dockworkers in West Coast port cities, electrical workers in Pittsburgh and Schenectady, teamsters in Minneapolis, and a broad range of industrial workers in Chicago. All of us, however, had one eye on the automobile industry in Detroit and its environs, for this industry had produced what became, arguably, the most successful, innovative, and progressive CIO union, the United Automobile Workers (UAW).

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980.

The description for this book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, will be forthcoming.