Readinglist
Required Books:
Robert D. Putnam: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Touchstone, 2000 (300 pages approximately).
Robert H. Wiebe: Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 (150 pages approximately).
Kenneth D. Durr: Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003 (180 pages approximately).
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Why Americans Hate Politics, New York: Touchstone, 1992 (250 pages approximately).
Selections on Reserve or in Course Reader:
* Jeffrey C. Goldfarb: "Cynicism and the American Way of Politics," in The Cynical Society: The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 1-12 (12 pages).
* Alan Keenan: "The Twilight of the Political?: A Contribution to the Democratic Critique of Cynicism", Theory and Event 2:1, 1998 (29 pages approximately).
* Lizabeth Cohen: "Citizens and Consumers in the Century of Mass Consumption", in Harvard Sitkoff (ed.): Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 145-161 (16 pages).
* Lisa Gidlow: "Delegitimizing Democracy: ?Civic Slackers,' the Cultural Turn, and the Possibilities of Politics", Journal of American History 89:3, December 2002, pp. 922-957 (35 pages).
* George Lipsitz: "Corporate Culture, Conformity, and Commodities," in Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, pp. 253-278 (25 pages).
* Lisa McGirr: "The Birth of Populist Conservatism", in Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 187-216 (29 pages).
* David Farber: "The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution", in David Farber (ed.): The Sixties: From Memory to History, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994, pp. 291-316 (25 pages).
* William Chaloupka: "The Age of Resentment", in Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 143-154 (11 pages).
* Steven Gregory: "The State and the War on Politics", in Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 85-106 (21 pages).
* Martin P. Wattenberg: "A Worldwide Turnout Problem", in Where Have All the Voters Gone?, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 11-35 (24 pages).
Texts marked with * : in Course Reader. The Course Reader is for sale in the bookstore Akademika.