Search results for ""author steven mintz""

An introduction synthesizes the latest anthropological, archaeological, historical, and sociological scholarship and the 95 carefully edited selections provide students with an overview of Native American history from the earliest migrations to the present. The volume includes a chronology, glossary, and bibliography, making it a valuable teaching tool.

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A succinct, up-to-date overview of the history of slavery that places American slavery in comparative perspective. Provides students with more than 70 primary documents on the history of slavery in America Includes extensive excerpts from slave narratives, interviews with former slaves, and letters by African Americans that document the experience of bondage Comprehensive headnotes introduce each selection A Visual History chapter provides images to supplement the written documents Includes an extensive bibliography and bibliographic essay

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The decades before the Civil War saw the first secular efforts in history to remake society through reform. Reformers launched unprecedented campaigns reform criminals and prostitutes, to educate the deaf and the blind, guarantee women's rights, and abolish slavery. Our modern systems of free public schools, prisons, and hospitals for the mentally ill are all legacies of this era. Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform-combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analysis of religion, politics, and society. Arguing that the reform impulse grew out of the era's peculiar mix of fear and hope, Steven Mintz shows that reform arose not only from fears of social disorder, family fragmentation, and widening class divisions, but also from a millennialist sense of possibility rooted in new religious and philosophical ideas. He then examines three distinct responses to pre-Civil War America's pressing social problems. Moral reform sought to create a Christian moral order using moral suasion. Social reform combatted poverty, crime, and ignorance through new institutions offering non-authoritarian forms of social control. Radical reform sought to regenerate American society by eliminating fundamental sources of inequality such as slavery and racial and sexual discrimination. In an epilogue, Mintz fits antebellum reform into the larger context of America's liberal tradition. Mintz concludes that America's pre-Civil War reformers were at once moral critics and cultural modernizers. As exponents of a distinctly modern set of values, reformers attacked outmoded customs, smoothed the transition from a preindustrial to an industrial order, and devised modern bureaucratic systems of criminal justice, public education, and social welfare. The first comprehensive account antebellum reform to appear in twenty years, Moralists and Modernizers is a rich and rewarding work of synthesis and interpretation which draws upon the most recent historical research. "This book charts a middle ground between those who regard reform as a form of class-based social control and those who stress reformers' benevolent intentions. It emphasizes the duality of antebellum reform, which blended impulses toward social and moral uplift with impulses to impose new codes of personal conduct, shape character, and construct new institutions of social control."-from Moralists and Modernizers

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This short, comprehensive collection of primary documents provides an indispensable introduction to Mexican American history and culture. Includes over 90 carefully chosen selections, with a succinct introduction and comprehensive headnotes that identify the major issues raised by the documents Emphasizes key themes in US history, from immigration and geographical expansion to urbanization, industrialization, and civil rights struggles Includes a 'visual history' chapter of images that supplement the documents, as well as an extensive bibliography

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Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.The Prime of Life puts today’s challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood’s joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood’s realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.

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Like Huck’s raft, the experience of American childhood has been both adventurous and terrifying. For more than three centuries, adults have agonized over raising children while children have followed their own paths to development and expression. Now, Steven Mintz gives us the first comprehensive history of American childhood encompassing both the child’s and the adult’s tumultuous early years of life.Underscoring diversity through time and across regions, Mintz traces the transformation of children from the sinful creatures perceived by Puritans to the productive workers of nineteenth-century farms and factories, from the cosseted cherubs of the Victorian era to the confident consumers of our own. He explores their role in revolutionary upheaval, westward expansion, industrial growth, wartime mobilization, and the modern welfare state. Revealing the harsh realities of children’s lives through history—the rigors of physical labor, the fear of chronic ailments, the heartbreak of premature death—he also acknowledges the freedom children once possessed to discover their world as well as themselves.Whether at work or play, at home or school, the transition from childhood to adulthood has required generations of Americans to tackle tremendously difficult challenges. Today, adults impose ever-increasing demands on the young for self-discipline, cognitive development, and academic achievement, even as the influence of the mass media and consumer culture has grown. With a nod to the past, Mintz revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood. An odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth, this book suggests a vision of childhood that embraces risk and freedom—like the daring adventure on Huck’s raft.

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A succinct, up-to-date overview of the history of slavery that places American slavery in comparative perspective. Provides students with more than 70 primary documents on the history of slavery in America Includes extensive excerpts from slave narratives, interviews with former slaves, and letters by African Americans that document the experience of bondage Comprehensive headnotes introduce each selection A Visual History chapter provides images to supplement the written documents Includes an extensive bibliography and bibliographic essay

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Fully revised, updated, and extended, the fifth edition of Hollywood’s America provides an important compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents that allows students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events. A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film history This fifth edition contains nine new chapters, with a greater overall emphasis on recent film history, and new primary source documents which are unavailable online Entries range from the first experiments with motion pictures all the way to the present day Well-organized within a chronological framework with thematic treatments to provide a valuable resource for students of the history of American film

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