Hugh Davis Graham

Violence in America : historical and comparative perspectives

A total reworking of this 1968 bestseller, with nine entirely new chapters, taking into account the radical changes in American society and American violence over the last decade. Of interest to anyone concerned with the interpretation of Americas turbulent past and the assessment of its future.

The evolution of southern culture

The American South has long been a subject of endless scholarly fascination. Historians and social scientists have endeavored to decipher the enigma of the region and to identify the formative factors that have molded the southern experience.They have searched for a central theme that would explain southern behavior and have debated the extent to which the region was distinctive from the rest of the nation. More recently, historical scholarship has shown a growing interest in the evolution of southern culture and the forces that shaped it.The southern enigma is yet to be fully deciphered, but The Evolution of Southern Culture addresses questions crucial to an understanding of the regions history. The book brings together original, searching essays by nine of the nations most distinguished scholars: Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eric Foner, Nell Irvin Painter, George M. Frederickson, Joel Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era

In this book, more than a dozen eminent scholars provide a balanced overview of key elements of Carters presidency, examining the significance of his administration within the context of evolving American policy choices after World War II. They seek not only to understand the troubled Carter presidency but also to identify the changes that precipitated and accompanied the demise of the New Deal order. Grounded on research conducted at the Carter Library, The Carter Presidency is an incisive reassessment of an isolated Democratic administration from the vantage point of twenty years. It is a milestone in the historical appraisal of that administration, inviting us to take a new look at Jimmy Carter and see what his presidency represented for a dramatically changing America.

Structure and Governance in American Higher Education: Historical and Comparative Analysis in State Policy

Historians of public policy, who typically share a conviction that historical analysis can clarify the options available to policymakers, have witnessed this decades quickening debate over the role and control of American higher education with, in one of Yogi Berras immortal phrases, a sense of “ deja vu all over again.” Political leaders have continued, in a near vacuum of historical knowledge, to manipulate present variables and project them into the future with little awareness, beyond current political memory, of their past consequences, or of a legacy of political and cultural tradition that would constrain their manipulation. At the national level of debate, which is not where educational policy in the United States historically has been made, the level of historical awareness generally has been greater than at the state level. In the flurry of national commissions and foundation reports that probed the deficiencies of American higher education in 1984–85, the historical evolution of the college curriculum was addressed in reasonably informed historical terms.1 Even though the urgency of debate in the 1980s was fueled by the common pain of recession and post-baby-boom retrenchment, and also by fears of increasing vulnerability to oil boycotts and Japanese economic competition, the national elites who wrote the reports were mindful of the roots of Big Science in the Manhattan Project. Their ties to the academic establishment were intimate, and their historical memories embraced the wisdom of the liberal arts as well as the efficacy of land-grant agriculture and Silicon Valley.

Race, language, and social policy: Comparing the black and Hispanic experience in the U.S.

Recent studies project that most new U.S. workers by the year 2000 will be minorities, and warn that educational deficiencies among blacks and Hispanics may lead to a two-tiered society. Since the 1960s the U.S. government, prodded by a coalition of black and Hispanic rights organizations, has adopted a minority-discrimination model of equal opportunity that requires affirmative-action benefits for both protected groups to compensate for past discrimination. For Hispanics these programs have required separate, Spanish-language instruction in school.Since 1969, the availability of new survey data on ethnicity, family income, and Englishlanguage proficiency from the Census Bureau and the National Assessment for Educational Progress has permitted comparisons of social mobility by racial and ethnic groups. These studies show greater economic success among nonEnglish-speaking groups from Europe and Asia than among white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) groups, and they show similar upward mobility among Hispanics when proficiency in English is taken into account.These optimistic trends are tempered by the demands of the new global economy for high levels of literacy and numeracy in the knowledge-based industries of the future. In this job competition Asian-Americans, despite their language difficulties, have been most successful and blacks least successful. The political and ideological needs of black and Hispanic leaders have tied government policies to the minority-discrimination model and linked Hispanic remedies to Spanish-language programs, but the empirical data associate economic success with the acculturation model and English-language proficiency.