{"product_id":"the-american-century-9780375709388","title":"The American Century","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"In a style at once trenchant and easygoing  Harold Evans leads us on a walk through the century now drawing to a close  taking us back over ground that far too many of us have let slip from our memories.\" --Shelby Foote  author of The Civil War  The American Century is an epic work. With its spectacular illustrations and incisive and lucid writing  it is as exciting and inspiring as the hundred years it surveys. Harold Evans has dramatized a peoples struggle to achieve the American Dream  but also offers a thoughtful and provocative analysis of the great movements and events in Americas rise to a position of political and cultural dominance. There are 900 photographs  several hundred brought to light for the first time  and the richly researched narrative offers many surprises.  In 1889  when the United States entered the second hundred years of its existence  it was by no means certain that a nation of such diverse peoples  manifold beliefs  and impossible ideals could survive its own exceptional experiment in democracy or manage to avoid a headlong slide into oblivion. Evans describes what happened to the democratic ideal amid the clash of personalities and the convulsions of great events. Here are assessments of the centurys nineteen presidents  from Benjamin Harrison  who brought the Stars and Stripes into American life in 1889  to the movie star who waved it so vigorously a hundred years later. Here are the muckrakers who exposed the evils of rampant capitalism  and the women who fought to make a reality of the rhetoric of equality. Here are the robber barons--the Carnegies  the Rockefellers  and the Morgans -- carving out great empires of unparalleled wealth  turning their millions into foundations for public benefit. Here are Al Capone and J. Edgar Hoover  Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan  Joe McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower. Here is the American heartland at peace (but on the wagon)  America in two world wars  and at war with itself in the sixties.  Evans analyzes the central questions of the era. Among them: How did the tradition arise that government should not meddle in business? How did anti-colonial America become an imperial power? How much was democracy threatened by the influence of money? What was the nature of American isolationism? Why did Woodrow Wilson take the United States into World War I? What caused the Great Depression  and why did it last so long? Did Franklin Roosevelts New Deal succeed or fail? Did the protests of the sixties go too far? Was Vietnam a noble cause? Has the Watergate scandal been blown up out of all proportion? Who deserves the credit for the end of the Cold War?  Throughout  Harold Evans lets us see how America prospered because of the power of an idea: the idea of freedom. The nation did not simply become the largest economic and military power  send men to the moon and jeans and consumer capitalism to Red Square--it strengthened Western society through acts of courage  generosity  and vision unequaled in history.  The British may claim the nineteenth century by force  and the Chinese may cast a long shadow over the twenty-first  but the twentieth century belongs to the United States. This is Americas story as it has never been told before.  With 900 photographs\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647039004725,"sku":"ByrdShop_037570938X","price":25.28,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780375709388.jpg?v=1781686556","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-american-century-9780375709388","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}