Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989 explores the successes and limitations of the so-called Reagan Revolution, chronicling its legacy through subsequent presidencies.

Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

History

Jacobs, Meg

Zelizer, Julian

Americas

Bedford/St.Martin's

Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945 & Black Protest and the Great Migration & Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism 2e & Conservatives in ... 1981-1989 & How the Other Half Lives 2e

Arnesen, Eric

Leviatin, David

Zelizer, Julian E.

Schulman, Bruce J.

Polenberg,Richard

"How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as Pocketbook Politics dramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern.
 In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living.
 Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them.
 This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s.
 Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.

Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Modern America)

Business & Money

Economics

Princeton University Press

An authoritative history of the energy crises of the 1970s and the world they wrought
In 1973, the Arab OPEC cartel banned the export of oil to the United States, sending prices and tempers rising across the country. Dark Christmas trees, lowered thermostats, empty gas tanks, and the new fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all suggested that America was a nation in decline. “Don’t be fuelish” became the national motto. Though the embargo would end the following year, it introduced a new kind of insecurity into American life―an insecurity that would only intensify when the Iranian Revolution led to new shortages at the end of the decade.
As Meg Jacobs shows, the oil crisis had a decisive impact on American politics. If Vietnam and Watergate taught us that our government lied, the energy crisis taught us that our government didn’t work. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter promoted ambitious energy policies that were meant to rally the nation and end its dependence on foreign oil, but their efforts came to naught. The Democratic Party was divided, with older New Deal liberals who prized access to affordable energy squaring off against young environmentalists who pushed for conservation. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans argued that there would be no shortages at all if the government got out of the way and let the market work. The result was a political stalemate and panic across the country: miles-long gas lines, Big Oil conspiracy theories, even violent strikes by truckers.
Jacobs concludes that the energy crisis of the 1970s became, for many Americans, an object lesson in the limitations of governmental power. Washington proved unable to design an effective national energy policy, and the result was a mounting skepticism about government intervention that set the stage for the rise of Reaganism. She offers lively portraits of key figures, from Nixon and Carter to the zealous energy czar William Simon and the young Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Jacobs’s absorbing chronicle ends with the 1991 Gulf War, when President George H. W. Bush sent troops to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf. It was a failure of domestic policy at home that helped precipitate military action abroad. As we face the repercussions of a changing climate, a volatile oil market, and continued turmoil in the Middle East, Panic at the Pump is a necessary and lively account of a formative period in American political history.

Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s

Industries

Hill and Wang

Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism 2e & Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989 & Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945-2000

Story, Ronald

Laurie, Bruce

What Did the Constitution Mean To Early Americans? & Confessions of Nat Turner & Talking Back to Civilization & To Secure These Rights & Violence in ... & Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years

Turner, Nat

Countryman, Edward

Hoxie, Frederick E.

Lawson, Steven F.

Godbeer, Richard

Johnson, Marilynn S.

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Books by Jacobs, Meg