Kauffman's perspective on progress in America―from the point of view of those who lost―revives forgotten figures and reinvigorates dormant causes as he examines the characters and arguments from six critical battles that forever altered the American landscape: the debates over child labor, school consolidation, women's suffrage, the back-to-the-land movement, good roads and the Interstate Highway System, and a standing army. The integration of these subjects and the presentation of the anti-Progress case as a coherent political tendency encompassing several issues and many years is unprecedented. With wit, passion, and an arsenal of long-neglected sources, Kauffman measures the cost of progress in 20th-Century America and exposes the elaborate plans behind seemingly inevitable reforms.
Kauffman brings to life such people and places as Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who thought that suffrage would ruin women; Onward, Indiana, the town that took up arms to defend its high school from death by consolidation; and the motley band of agrarian poets and ghetto dwellers who tried to stop the bulldozers that paved over America. He maintains that these forlorn causes―usually regarded as quaint, archaic, and hopeless―rested, in large part, upon quintessential American ideals: limited government, human-scale community, and family autonomy. The victory of progress has uprooted our citizens, swollen the central state at the expense of liberty, and sucked much of the life from what was once a nation of small communities.

With Good Intentions?: Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America (Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series; 32)

History

Kauffman, Bill

Americas

Praeger

Bill Kauffman, a self-proclaimed "placeist" who believes that things urban are homogenizing our national scene, returned to his roots after a bumpy ride on the D.C. fast track. Rarely has he ventured forth since. Here he illuminates the place he loves, traveling from Batavia's scenic vistas to the very seams of its grimy semi-industrial pockets, from its architecturally insignificant new mall to the pastoral grounds of its internationally known School for the Blind. Not one to shy from controversy, Kauffman also investigates his town's efforts to devastate its landmarks through urban renewal, the passions simmering inside its clogged political machinery, and the sagging fortunes of its baseball heroes, the legendary Muckdogs.

Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive

Picador

Country Towns of New York: Charming Small Towns and Villages to Explore

Travel

United States

NTC Pub. Group

A hilarious, sometimes touching tribute to an endangered American town under constant siege from the modern world Bill Kauffman is a new addition to the American chorus of small-town voices. Think Garrison Keillor for 2003; Thornton Wilder, thornier and wilder; Mark Twain in a world gone Wal-Mart. Now, without the slightest nod to etiquette, discretion, or political correctness, Kauffman uses his beloved but beleaguered hometown of Batavia, New York, to assess the state of small-town life in these big-city times. Kauffman, a self-proclaimed "placeist" who believes that things urban are homogenizing our national scene, returned to his roots after a bumpy ride on the D.C. fast track. Rarely has he ventured forth since. Here he illuminates the place he loves, traveling from Batavia's scenic vistas to the very seams of its grimy semi-industrial pockets, from its architecturally insignificant new mall to the pastoral grounds of its internationally known School for the Blind. Not one to shy from controversy, Kauffman also investigates his town's efforts to devastate its landmarks through urban renewal, the passions simmering inside its clogged political machinery, and the sagging fortunes of its baseball heroes, the legendary Muckdogs. Kauffman has created a truly memorable book about American community-with lots of hilarity and lots of heart.

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Henry Holt and Co.

From "the finest literary stylist of the American right," a surprising and spirited account of how true conservatives have always been antiwar and anti-empire (Allan Carlson, author of The American Way) Conservatives love war, empire, and the military-industrial complex. They abhor peace, the sole and rightful property of liberals. Right? Wrong. As Bill Kauffman makes clear, true conservatives have always resisted the imperial and military impulse: it drains the treasury, curtails domestic liberties, breaks down families, and vulgarizes culture. From the Federalists who opposed the War of 1812, to the striving of Robert Taft (known as "Mr. Republican") to keep the United States out of Korea, to the latter-day libertarian critics of the Iraq war, there has historically been nothing freakish, cowardly, or even unusual about antiwar activists on the political right. And while these critics of U.S. military crusades have been vilified by the party of George W. Bush, their conservative vision of a peaceful, decentralized, and noninterventionist America gives us a glimpse of the country we could have had--and might yet attain. Passionate and witty, Ain't My America is an eye-opening exploration of the forgotten history of right-wing peace movements--and a clarion manifesto for antiwar conservatives of today.

Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

Metropolitan Books

Traces the past, present, and political future of America's nationalist movement, from its roots in the populism and isolationism of the early twentieth century to such contemporary figures as Ross Perot. 40,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo. IP.

America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics

Prometheus+books

Every Man a King: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Soho Pr Inc

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986-2014

Bill Kauffman has carved out an idiosyncratic identity quite unlike any other American writer. Praised by the likes of Gore Vidal, Benjamin Schwarz, and George McGovern, he has, with a distinctive and slashingly witty, learnedly allusive style, illumed forgotten corners of American history, articulated a defiant and passionate localism, and written with love and dark humor of his repatriation.Poetry Night at the Ballpark gathers the best of Bill Kauffman's essays and journalism in defense and explication of his alternative America--or Americas. Its discrete pieces are bound by a thematic unity and propulsive energy and are full of unexpected (yet startlingly apposite) connections and revelatory linkages. Whether he's writing about conservative Beats, backyard astronomers, pacifist West Pointers, or Middle America in the movies, Bill Kauffman will challenge, maybe even change, the way you look at American politics and the American provinces.

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America

History & Criticism

Front Porch Republic Books

Discover the quaint shops, down-home cooking, and relaxed lifestyles of America's historic country burghs and villages. Small towns make great day trips or weekend destinations, and these unique guides point readers to wonderful places for antiquing, touring a 19th century mansion, or eating a soda-fountain sundae. Each title explores the quiet streets and unravels the secrets of a dozen or more fascinating rural communities.

Country Roads of New York: Charming Small Towns and Villages to Explore

Tougias, Michael J.

Sheridan, Victoria

Food, Lodging & Transportation

Country Roads Pr

The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us—if he is known at all—as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman's rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers' intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy. In Martin's view, the Constitution was the tool of a counterrevolution aimed at reducing the states to ciphers and at fortifying a national government whose powers to tax and coerce would be frightening. Martin delivered the most forceful and sustained attack on the Constitution ever levied—a critique that modern readers might find jarringly relevant. And Martin's post-convention career, though clouded by drink and scandal, found him as defense counsel in two of the great trials of the age: the Senate trial of the impeached Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase and the treason trial of his friend Aaron Burr. Kauffman's Luther Martin is a brilliant and passionate polemicist, a stubborn and admirable defender of a decentralized republic who fights for the principles of 1776 all the way to the last ditch and last drop. In remembering this forgotten founder, we remember also the principles that once animated many of the earliest—and many later—American patriots.

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (Lives of the Founders)

Historical

ISI Books

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Books by Kauffman, Bill