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Between 1939-1941, from the time that Germany invaded Poland until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans engaged in a debate as intense as any in U.S. history. In Storm on the Horizon, prominent historian Justus D. Doenecke analyzes the personalities, leading action groups, and major congressional debates surrounding the decision to participate in World War II. Doenecke is the first scholar to place the anti-interventionist movement in a wider framework, by focusing on its underlying military, economic, and geopolitical assumptions. Doenecke addresses key questions such as: how did the anti-interventionists perceive the ideology, armed potential, and territorial aspirations of Germany, the British Empire, Japan, and the Soviet Union? To what degree did they envision Nazi Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union? What role would the U.S. play in a world increasingly composed of competing economic blocs and military alliances? Storm on the Horizon is certain to become the standard study of this tumultuous time and will require readers to reevaluate their understanding of the United States entry into World War II.
With war on the horizon in the late 1930s, many Americans, still angry over the outcome of the Great War, determined not to get involved in another global conflict. Called isolationists or anti-interventionists, many of them, especially the America First Committee, focused their attention on the European war when it broke out in September 1939. Most were less interested in Japan’s aggression in East Asia, which left an opening for another isolationist group, the Committee on Pacific Relations, which opposed war with Japan right up to the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In this first full study of pro-Japan isolationists, Roger B. Jeans provides a detailed history of the committee, which was launched in September 1941, a scant ten weeks before the beginning of the war. Its driving force was Missourian Orland Kay “O. K.” Armstrong, who traveled widely during the late 1930s and early 1940s recruiting prominent Americans for his movement against war with Japan. He and his colleagues were often critical of US policies and of China, the victim of Japanese aggression. As a result, they were often ostracized as pro-Japanese. Jeans draws on previously untapped sources—the personal letters of committee members and the dossiers the FBI compiled on them—to paint a rich picture of this little-known group.
In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France to Hitler's advancing troops, opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy organized their many divergent groups into the powerful and vocal America First Committee (AFC). The committee coordinated all anti-interventionist efforts to block Roosevelt's proposals for providing lend-lease assistance abroad, arming merchant ships, and escorting war supplies to Allied ports. The AFC held huge public rallies, distributed tons of literature, supplied research data to members of Congress, and sponsored coast-to-coast radio speakers to support the anti-interventionist position. By the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the AFC had 450 units and at least 250,000 members. Many historians believe the AFC's massive and efficient campaign was responsible for delaying US entry into World War II. In Danger Undaunted, based on 338 manuscript boxes deposited in 1942 in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, conveys the logic, complexity, and passion of the anti-interventionist movement. The book illustrates the dramatic impact this well-organized and vocal group had on US foreign policy and on the political behavior of many of America's most prominent statesmen of the prewar years.
The 1920s and 30s were key decades for the history of American social science. The success of such quantitative disciplines as economics and psychology during World War I forced social scientists to reexamine their methods and practices and to consider recasting their field as a more objective science separated from its historical foundation in social reform. The debate that ensued, fiercely conducted in books, articles, correspondence, and even presidential addresses, made its way into every aspect of social science thought of the period and is the subject of this book. Mark C. Smith first provides a historical overview of the controversy over the nature and future of the social sciences in early twentieth-century America and, then through a series of intellectual biographies, offers an intensive study of the work and lives of major figures who participated in this debate. Using an extensive range of materials, from published sources to manuscript collections, Smith examines "objectivists"--economist Wesley Mitchell and political scientist Charles Merriam--and the more "purposive thinkers"--historian Charles Beard, sociologist Robert Lynd, and political scientist and neo-Freudian Harold Lasswell. He shows how the debate over objectivity and social purpose was central to their professional and personal lives as well as to an understanding of American social science between the two world wars. These biographies bring to vivid life a contentious moment in American intellectual history and reveal its significance in the shaping of social science in this country.
Gold Winner for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Performing Arts & Music Category "Sharkey is the natural artist, performing his magic for nothing but love." — Wolcott Gibbs, the New Yorker Sharkey tells the compelling story of an unusually gifted, trained sea lion who shared the stage with practically every important performer of the first half of the twentieth century—from Bob Hope to Ella Fitzgerald, from Broadway to Hollywood and beyond. Readers follow Sharkey and his flippered colleagues as they travel the world with stops at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, vaudeville houses, Manhattan during the Harlem Renaissance, burlesque nightclubs, movie palaces, Radio City Music Hall, and the legendary studios of early radio, movies, and television, meeting a who's who of showbiz entertainers, sports superstars, and even a US president. Meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated, Sharkey is a quirky slice of New York and entertainment history sure to delight fans of vintage pop culture and Americana, as well as animal lovers.
John T. Flynn, a prolific writer, columnist for the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Collier's Weekly, radio commentator, and political activist, was described by the New York Times in 1964 as “a man of wide-ranging contradictions.” In this new biography of Flynn, John E. Moser fleshes out his many contradictions and profound influence on U.S. history and political discourse. In the 1930s, Flynn advocated extensive regulation of the economy, the breakup of holding companies, and heavy taxes on the wealthy. A mere fifteen years later he was denouncing the New Deal as “creeping socialism,” calling for an abolition of the income tax, and hailing Senator Joseph McCarthy and his fellow anticommunists as saviors of the American Republic. Yet throughout his career he insisted that he had remained true to the principles of liberalism as he understood them. It was America's political culture that changed, he argued, and not his values and views. Drawing on Flynn’s life and his prolific writings, Moser illuminates how liberalism in America changed during the mid-twentieth century and considers whether Flynn’s ideological odyssey was the product of opportunism, or the result of a set of deep-seated principles that he championed consistently over the years. In addition, Right Turn examines Flynn’s role in laying the foundations for the “culture war” that would be played out in American society for the rest of the century, helping to define modern American conservatism.