The Fair American


Book Description

Pierre, sole survivor of an aristocratic family in the French Revolution, escapes to America aboard the Fair American with the aid of Sally, Andrew, and Andrew's father.




Fair America


Book Description

Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping, and transportation schemes. Billed by their promoters as “encyclopedias of civilization,” the expositions impressed tens of millions of fairgoers with model environments and utopian visions. Setting more than 30 world’s fairs from 1853 to 1984 in their historical context, the authors show that the expositions reflected and influenced not only the ideals but also the cultural tensions of their times. As mainstays rather than mere ornaments of American life, world’s fairs created national support for such issues as the social reunification of North and South after the Civil War, U.S. imperial expansion at the turn of the 20th-century, consumer optimism during the Great Depression, and the essential unity of humankind in a nuclear age.




What's Fair?


Book Description

Using a long questionnaire and in-depth interviews, Hochschild examines the ideals and contemporary practices of Americans on the subject of distributive justice, and discovers neither the rich nor the nonrich support the downward redistribution of wealth.




America the Fair


Book Description

What makes a person liberal or conservative? Why does the Democratic Party scare off so many possible supporters? When does our "injustice trigger" get pulled, and how can fairness overcome our human need to look for a zero-sum outcome to our political battles? Tapping into a pop culture zeitgeist linking Bugs Bunny, Taylor Swift, and John Belushi; through popular science and the human brain; to our political predilections, arguments, and distrusts, Daniel Meegan suggests that fairness and equality are key elements missing in today's society. Having crossed the border to take up residency in Canada, Meegan, an American citizen, has seen first-hand how people enjoy as rights what Americans view as privileges. Fascinated with this tension, he suggests in America the Fair that American liberals are just missing the point. If progressives want to win the vote, they need to change strategy completely and champion government benefits for everyone, not just those of lower income. If everyone has access to inexpensive quality health care, open and extensive parental leave, and free postsecondary education, then everyone will be happier and society will be fair. The Left will also overcome an argument of the Right that successfully, though incongruously, appeals to the middle- and upper-middle classes: that policies that help the economically disadvantaged are inherently bad for others. Making society fair and equal, Meegan argues, would strengthen the moral and political position of the Democratic Party and place it in a position to revive American civic life. Fairness, he writes, should be selfishly enjoyed by everyone.




The Fair Chase


Book Description

An award-winning historian tells the story of hunting in America, showing how this sport has shaped our national identity. From Daniel Boone to Teddy Roosevelt, hunting is one of America's most sacred-but also most fraught-traditions. It was promoted in the 19th century as a way to reconnect "soft" urban Americans with nature and to the legacy of the country's pathfinding heroes. Fair chase, a hunting code of ethics emphasizing fairness, rugged independence, and restraint towards wildlife, emerged as a worldview and gave birth to the conservation movement. But the sport's popularity also caused class, ethnic, and racial divisions, and stirred debate about the treatment of Native Americans and the role of hunting in preparing young men for war. This sweeping and balanced book offers a definitive account of hunting in America. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of our nation's foundational myths.




Our Fair Share


Book Description

America's economy does not currently live up to our country's core values. We are a nation founded on the ideals of coming together across differences to forge a common future. Yet over the past fifty years, our economy has been pulling us apart at unprecedented rates. By allowing top income earners and the wealthiest Americans to hoard wealth like almost never before, we belie what makes our country great. This is a threat to our well-being, our democracy, and our values. Brian C. Johnson combines accessible scholarship on wealth and income inequality in America with deeply personal accounts of six Americans of diverse backgrounds who are each wrestling with what it means to survive and thrive in this new economic world. In so doing, he offers a solution that is as visionary as it is practical. Dubbed the Citizen Dividend, this revolutionary model assumes that economic growth is built off of the wealth we have created together as a country, and together we all reap its benefits. In Our Fair Share, Johnson lays the groundwork for implementing this solution, detailing what the Citizen Dividend is, offering examples of similar existing models, outlining the benefits of such systems, tackling some of the common concerns that arise, and offering a path toward making it a reality. Ultimately, Our Fair Share calls on each of us to claim what is uniquely American, building a common future that embraces and celebrates our differences. This is our revolutionary inheritance. May we all benefit from it.




All the World's a Fair


Book Description

Robert W. Rydell contends that America's early world's fairs actually served to legitimate racial exploitation at home and the creation of an empire abroad. He looks in particular to the "ethnological" displays of nonwhites—set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists—which lent scientific credibility to popular racial attitudes and helped build public support for domestic and foreign policies. Rydell's lively and thought-provoking study draws on archival records, newspaper and magazine articles, guidebooks, popular novels, and oral histories.




American Fair


Book Description

The nostalgic glamor of the American fairs attracts visitors of all ages, every year in the USA.




Tomorrow-Land


Book Description

Motivated by potentially turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "Master Builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964-65 World' s Fair was a Sixties flashpoint in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, the New York Times bestseller Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the Fair. It fetched Disney's empire from California and Michelangelo's La Pieta from Europe; and displayed flickers of innovation from Ford, GM, and NASA—from undersea and outerspace colonies to personal computers. It housed the controversial work of Warhol (until Governor Rockefeller had it removed); and lured Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Meanwhile, the Fair—and its house band, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians—sat in the musical shadows of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who changed rock-and-roll right there in Queens. And as Southern civil rights efforts turned deadly, and violent protests also occurred in and around the Fair, Harlem-based Malcolm X predicted a frightening future of inner-city racial conflict. World's Fairs have always been collisions of eras, cultures, nations, technologies, ideas, and art. But the trippy, turbulent, Technicolor, Disney, corporate, and often misguided 1964-65 Fair was truly exceptional.




American Fair Trade


Book Description

Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness - not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state's public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyzes how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age of laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.