Books by "Richard M. Freeland"
3 books found
The ^ARussians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
by Richard M. Fried
1999 · Oxford University Press
At a time when Americans dedicate their national holidays to barbecues, sporting events, and driving madly on crowded interstate highways to vacation homes and theme parks, it may be difficult to remember an era when patriotic observance was a matter of high seriousness and legislated pageantry. But now the memory is restored in fascinating detail by Richard M. Fried in this eye-opening book. After summarizing such patriotic developments as the sanctification of the American flag and the wide--and occasionally coercive--acceptance of the Pledge of Allegiance, Fried describes how the Ad Council, the American Heritage Foundation, and other organizations created "campaigns to sell America to the Americans" through carefully constructed "rededication" celebrations like "Know Your America" Weeks, Freedom Weeks, and traveling exhibitions such as the Freedom Train, which in the late 1940s brought original copies of seminal American documents directly to cities and towns across the country. He vividly recreates the spectacle of clashing New York City parades involving thousands of participants, as celebrants of the newly-created Loyalty Day marched in opposition to pro-Communist May Day demonstrations just blocks away. Most startling, though, is Fried's account of how Mosinee, Wisconsin was "invaded" by Communists in a staged media event sponsored by the American Legion. Citizens allowed themselves to be searched at random while local officials acted the part of Stalinists, and the town restaurants were required to serve only potato soup and black bread. Meticulously researched and colorfully told, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! recreates an absorbing--and revealing--dimension of American history.
Low-energy Excitations In Disordered Solids: A Story Of The 'Universal' Phenomena Of Structural Tunneling
by Richard B Stephens, Xiao Liu
2021 · World Scientific
The subject of low-energy excitations has evolved since two-level-tunneling systems were first proposed ~50 years ago. Initially they were used to explain the common anomalous properties of oxide glasses and polymers; now the subject includes a wide range of other materials containing disorder: amorphous semiconductors and metals, doped- mixed- and quasi-crystals, surface adsorbates, ... and topics such as dephasing of quantum states and interferometer noise. A fairly simple empirical description using a remarkably small range of parameters serves well to describe the effect of these excitations, but the structures causing these effects are known in only a few materials and the reasons for their similarity across disparate materials has only been qualitatively addressed.This book provides a unified, comprehensive description of tunneling systems in disordered solids suitable for graduate students/researchers wishing an introduction to the field. Its focus is on the tunneling systems intrinsic to glassy solids. It describes the experimental observations of 'glassy' properties, develops the basic empirical tunneling model, and discusses the dynamics changes on cooling to temperatures where direct excitation interactions become important and on heating to where tunneling gives way to thermal activation. Finally, it discusses how theories of glass formation can help us understand the ubiquity of these excitations.The Development of the basic tunneling model is the core of the book and is worked out in considerable detail. To keep the total within bounds of our expertise and the readers' patience, many related experimental and theoretical developments are only sketched out here; the text is heavily cited to allow readers to follow their specific interests in much more depth.
According to newspaper headlines and television pundits, the cold war ended many months ago; the age of Big Two confrontation is over. But forty years ago, Americans were experiencing the beginnings of another era--of the fevered anti-communism that came to be known as McCarthyism. During this period, the Cincinnati Reds felt compelled to rename themselves briefly the "Redlegs" to avoid confusion with the other reds, and one citizen in Indiana campaigned to have The Adventures of Robin Hood removed from library shelves because the story's subversive message encouraged robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. These developments grew out of a far-reaching anxiety over communism that characterized the McCarthy Era. Richard Fried's Nightmare in Red offers a riveting and comprehensive account of this crucial time. He traces the second Red Scare's antecedents back to the 1930s, and presents an engaging narrative about the many different people who became involved in the drama of the anti-communist fervor, from the New Deal era and World War II, through the early years of the cold war, to the peak of McCarthyism, and beyond McCarthy's censure to the decline of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1960s. Along the way, we meet the familiar figures of the period--Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, the young Richard Nixon, and, of course, the Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. But more importantly, Fried reveals the wholesale effect of McCarthyism on the lives of thousands of ordinary people, from teachers and lawyers to college students, factory workers, and janitors. Together with coverage of such famous incidents as the ordeal of the Hollywood Ten (which led to the entertainment world's notorious blacklist) and the Alger Hiss case, Fried also portrays a wealth of little-known but telling episodes involving victims and victimizers of anti-communist politics at the state and local levels. Providing the most complete history of the rise and fall of the phenomenon known as McCarthyism, Nightmare in Red shows that it involved far more than just Joe McCarthy.