The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge

by Robert H. Ferrell

1998

The first book-length assessment of Coolidge's presidency in thirty years draws on the recently opened papers of his White House physician for hitherto unknown personal information. Ferrell (history, Indiana U.) exonerates Coolidge for the failures of his party's foreign policy, but holds him accountable for having had insufficient economic savvy to warn Wall Street against the overspeculation that caused the Depression. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Prairie University

by Robert E. Knoll

1995 · U of Nebraska Press

Founded in 1869, the University of Nebraska was given the awesome responsibility of educating a new state barely connected by roads and rail lines. Established as a comprehensive university, uniting the arts and sciences, commerce and agriculture, and open to all regardless of "age, sex, color, or nationality, " it has as its motto Literis dedicata et omnibus artibus-dedicated to letters and all the arts. The University at first was confined to four city blocks and didn't have a building until 1871. Cows grazed the campus. But soon the high aspirations of the state began to be realized. Nebraska boasted the first department of psychology west of the Mississippi River, and its faculty included national prominent scholars like botanist Charles Bessey and linguist A. H. Edgren (later a member of the Nobel Commission). Willa Cather, Roscoe Pound, Mari Sandoz, and Louise Pound ranked among its early graduates. And it developed a reputation for excellence in collegiate athletics. Written by a beloved member of the faculty, this history shows both why Robert E. Knoll is so devoted to the University as well as the tests such devotion must endure. Its history is hardly one of placid growth and unimpeded progress. Its regents, administration, faculty, and students have periodically fought one another: sometimes over matters as crucial as the University's purpose, shape, and destination. More often, battles waged over personalities. It is to these personalities that Knoll directs most of his attention. The author focuses on the men and women who made a difference, for good or ill. He locates the University's place in the changing intellectual and academic context of the United States and chartsits passage through hard times and prosperity. He notes the contributions of the University to Nebraska, from the early experiments in sugar beet cultivation to the national fame of its football team. Most important, its education of generations of Nebraskans has lifted state goals and achievement, and its outreach has made the University an international community. Robert E. Knoll is D. B. and Paula Varner Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of numerous books and editor of the letters of Weldon Kees. His articles have appeared in journals such as American Speech, College English, Hudson Review, and Prairie Schooner.

The Great Depression

by Robert S. McElvaine

1993 · Crown

One of the classic studies of the Great Depression, featuring a new introduction by the author with insights into the economic crises of 1929 and today. In the twenty-five years since its publication, critics and scholars have praised historian Robert McElvaine’s sweeping and authoritative history of the Great Depression as one of the best and most readable studies of the era. Combining clear-eyed insight into the machinations of politicians and economists who struggled to revive the battered economy, personal stories from the average people who were hardest hit by an economic crisis beyond their control, and an evocative depiction of the popular culture of the decade, McElvaine paints an epic picture of an America brought to its knees—but also brought together by people’s widely shared plight. In a new introduction, McElvaine draws striking parallels between the roots of the Great Depression and the economic meltdown that followed in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. He also examines the resurgence of anti-regulation free market ideology, beginning in the Reagan era, and argues that some economists and politicians revised history and ignored the lessons of the Depression era.

Social Thought in American Fundamentalism, 1918-1933

by Robert E. Wenger

2007 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

At a time when fundamentalist evokes an image of a militant social reactionary, it is important to examine the original nature of historical American fundamentalism, from which the term originated. Rejecting as simplistic the stereotypes of fundamentalism in social, political, regional, economic, or psychological categories, this study argues that in the 1920s it was a complex social composite unified by common theological concerns. Among all the social issues confronting Americans in the rapidly changing and uncertain 1920s, fundamentalists reached a consensus only on those that had a direct connection with their biblical faith. The only theme that approximated their theological agreement was their nationalism, and only to the extent that it added urgency to their task of saving America from spiritual ruin. Even in this fundamentalists differed among themselves as to how biblical truth should affect the nation. An examination of fundamentalists' viewpoints toward the intellect, the minorities, and social reform further demonstrates that their common denominator was not a set of cultural characteristics or ideas. It was, rather, a biblically based core of Christian theology. A loose alliance by nature, fundamentalism would have had no cohesiveness at all apart from this core. While fundamentalists by no means escaped cultural influence, the fundamentals of the faith shaped their view of culture far more than culture shaped their theology. In a generation when the religious faith of many was becoming little more than the American way of life, they purported to speak to their contemporaries from an external authority--a divinely-inspired Bible.