UNITED STATES HISTORY, VOLUME 2: Taking Sides--Clashing Views in United States History, Volume 2, Thirteenth Edition
Preliminary Table of ContentsUnit 1 The Last West, Cities, Immigrants, and The Industrial Revolution
ISSUE 1. Is History True?
YES: Oscar Handlin, from Truth in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1979)
NO: William H. McNeill, from “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review (February 1986)
Oscar Handlin insists that historical truth is absolute and knowable by historians who adopt the scientific method of research to discover factual evidence that provides both a chronology and context for their findings. William McNeill argues that historical truth is general and evolutionary and is discerned by different groups at different times and in different places in a subjective manner that has little to do with a scientifically absolute methodology.
ISSUE 2. Was the Wild West More Violent than the Rest of the Nation?
YES: David T. Courtright, from “Frontier,” in Ronald Gottesman and Richard Maxwell Brown, eds., Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999) (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999)
NO: Robert R. Dykstra, from “To Live and Die in Dodge City: Body Counts, Law and Order and the Case of Kansas V. Gill,” in Michael A. Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination, Violence and Brutality in American History (New York City Press, 1999)
Professor of history David T. Courtwright argues that the cattle, mining and lumbering western frontiers were extremely violent because these regions were populated by young, single, transient males who frequented saloons and prostitutes, and engaged in fights with the local Indians and Chinese, as well as with each other. Professor Robert R. Dykstra argues that Dodge City had a low crime rate in the decade 1876-1885 and in the murder case of Kansas v. Gill conducted a jury trial “according to conventions nurtured through a thousand years of Anglo-American judicial traditions.”
New! ISSUE 3. Were American Workers in the Gilded Age Conservative Capitalists?
New! YES: Carl N. Degler, from Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, 3rd ed. (Harper & Row, 1984)
New! NO: Herbert G. Gutman, from Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing American: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976)
Professor of history Carl N. Degler maintains that the American labor movement accepted capitalism and reacted conservatively to the radical organizational changes brought about in the economic system by big business. Professor of history Herbert G. Gutman argues that from 1843 to 1893, American factory workers attempted to humanize the system through the maintenance of their traditional, artesian, preindustrial work habits.
ISSUE 4. Were Late-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants “Uprooted”?
YES: Oscar Handlin, from The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, 2d ed. (Little Brown and Company, 1973)
NO: Mark Wyman, from Round Trip to America: The Immigrants’ Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Cornell University Press, 1993)
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Oscar Handlin asserts that immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century were alienated from the cultural traditions of the homelands they had left as well as from those of their own country. Professor Mark Wyman argues that immigrants never gave up the fight for the personal autonomy. Many not only transplanted their old-world culture in ethnic enclaves, but also saw a sizeable number return to their old countries often much richer with antagonistic attitudes towards their former employers and landlords.
ISSUE 5. Was City Government in Late-Nineteenth-Century America a “Conspicuous Failure”?
YES: Ernest S. Griffith, from A History of American City Government: The Conspicuous Failure, 1870-1900 (National Civic League Press, 1974)
NO: Jon C. Teaford, from The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
Professor of political science and political economy Ernest S. Griffith (1896–1981) focuses upon illegal and unethical operations of the political machine and concludes that the governments controlled by the bosses represented a betrayal of the public trust. Professor of history Jon C. Teaford argues that scholars traditionally have overlooked the remarkable success that municipal governments in the late nineteenth century achieved in dealing with the challenges presented by rapid urbanization. Unit 2 The Response to Industrialism: Reform, War, and Depression
New! ISSUE 6. Did Booker T. Washington’s Philosophy and Actions Betray the Interests of African Americans?
New! YES: Donald Spivey, from Schooling for the New Slavery: Black Industrial Education, 1868-1915 (Greenwood Press, 1978)
New! NO: Robert J. Norrell, from “Understanding the Wizard: Another Look at the Age of Booker T. Washington,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later (University of Florida Press, 2003)
Donald Spivey contends that Booker T. Washington alienated both students and faculty at Tuskegee Institute by establishing an authoritarian system that failed to provide an adequate academic curriculum to prepare students for the industrial workplace. Robert J. Norrell contends that Booker T. Washington struggled valiantly against great odds in a society dominated by the doctrine of white supremacy to improve the public image of African Americans and to challenge the worst abuses perpetrated against blacks in the age of Jim Crow.
New! ISSUE 7. Did the Progressives Fail?
New! YES: Richard M. Abrams, from “The Failure of Progressivism,” in Richard Abrams and Lawrence Levine, eds., The Shaping of the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Little, Brown, 1971)167
New! NO: Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, from Progressivism (Harlan Davidson, 1983)
Professor of history Richard M. Abrams maintains that progressivism was a failure because it tried to impose a uniform set of values upon a culturally diverse people who never seriously confronted the inequalities that still exist in American society. Professors of history Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick argues that the Progressives were a diverse group of reformers who confronted and ameliorated the worst abuses that emerged in urban industrial America during the early 1900s.
ISSUE 8. Was Woodrow Wilson Responsible for the Failure of the United States to Join the League of Nations?
YES: Thomas A. Bailey, from “Woodrow Wilson Wouldn’t Yield,” in Alexander De Conde and Armin Rappaport, eds., Essays Diplomatic and Undiplomatic of Thomas A. Bailey, (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969)
NO: William G. Carlton, from “A New Look at Woodrow Wilson,” The Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1962)
The long-time leader of diplomatic history, the late Thomas A. Bailey argues that a physically inform Woodrow Wilson was unable to make the necessary compromises with the United States Senate to join the League of Nations and convince an ill-informed, isolationist, and disillusioned American public that the United States should play a major role in world affairs. But William G. Carlton believed that Woodrow Wilson understood better than his nationalistic opponents the new internationalist role that the United States would play in world affairs.
ISSUE 9. Was Prohibition a Failure?
YES: David E. Kyvig, from Repealing National Prohibition, 2d ed. (The University of Chicago Press, 1979, 2000)
NO: John C. Burnham, from “New Perspectives on the Prohibition ‘Experiment’ of the 1920s,” Journal of Social History, Volume 2 (Fall 1968)
David E. Kyvig admits that alcohol consumption declined sharply in the prohibition era but that federal actions failed to impose abstinence among an increasingly urban and heterogeneous populace that resented and resisted restraints on their individual behavior. John C. Burnham states that the prohibition experiment was more a success than a failure and contributed to a substantial decrease in liquor consumption, reduced arrests for alcoholism, fewer alcohol-related diseases and hospitalizations, and destroyed the old-fashioned saloon that was a major target of the law’s proponents.
New! ISSUE 10. Was the New Deal an Effective Answer to the Great Depression?
New! YES: Roger Biles, from A New Deal for the American People (Northern Illinois University Press, 1991)
NO: Gary Dean Best, from Pride, Prejudice, and Politics: Roosevelt Versus Recovery, 1933-1938 (Praeger, 1990)
Professor of history Roger Biles contends that, in spite of its minimal reforms and non-revolutionary programs, the New Deal created a limited welfare state that implemented economic stabilizers to avert another depression. Professor of history Gary Dean Best argues that Roosevelt established an antibusiness environment with the creation of the New Deal regulatory programs, which retarded the nation’s economic recovery from the Great Depression until World War II.
New! ISSUE 11. Was Franklin Roosevelt a Reluctant Internationalist?
New! YES: Robert A. Divine, from Roosevelt and World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969)
New! NO: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., from “The Man of the Century,” American Heritage (May/June 1994)
Diplomatic historian Robert A. Divine argues that even after France fell to Nazi Germany in June 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt remained a reluctant internationalist who spoke belligerently but acted timidly because he sincerely hated war. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., maintains that from a 1990s perspective, Roosevelt—not Stalin, Churchill, or anyone else—was the only wartime leader who saw clearly the direction and shape of the new world that the leaders were trying to create. Unit 3 The Cold War and Beyond
ISSUE 12. Was President Truman Responsible for the Cold War?
YES: Arnold A. Offner, from “‘Another Such Victory’: President Truman, American Foreign Policy, and the Cold War,” Diplomatic History Spring 1999)
NO: John Lewis Gaddis, from We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Professor Arnold A. Offner argues that Harry S. Truman was a parochial nationalist whose limited vision of foreign affairs precluded negotiations with the Russians over cold war issues. John Lewis Gaddis argues that after a half century of scholarship, Joseph Stalin was uncompromising and primarily responsible for the cold war.
ISSUE 13. Was Rock and Roll Responsible for Dismantling America’s Traditional Family, Sexual, and Racial Customs in the 1950s and 1960s?
YES: Glen C. Altschuler, from All Shook Up: How Rock and Roll Changed America (Oxford University Press, 2003)
NO: J. Ronald Oakley, from God’s Country: America in the Fifties (Dembner Books, 1986, 1990)
Professor Glen C. Altschuler maintains that rock and roll’s “switchblade beat” opened up wide divisions in American society along the fault lines of family, sexuality and race. Writer J. Ronald Oakley argues that although the life-styles of youth departed from their parents, their basic ideas and attitudes were still the conservative ones that mirrored the conservativism of the affluent age in which they grew up.
ISSUE 14. Did the Brown Decision Fail to Desegregate and Improve the Status of African Americans?
YES: Peter Irons, from Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (Viking Press, 2002)
NO: Richard Kluger, from Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, 2004)
Peter Irons argues that, despite evidence that integration improves the status of African Americans, the school integration prescribed by the Brown decision was never seriously tried, with the consequence that major gaps between white and black achievement persist and contribute to many of the social problems confronting African Americans today. Richard Kluger concludes that fifty years after the Brown decision, African Americans are better educated, better housed, and better employed than they were before 1954 in large part because the Supreme Court’s ruling spawned the modern civil rights movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and many programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that were designed to improve the status of African Americans.
New! ISSUE 15. Was the Americanization of the War in Vietnam Inevitable?
New! YES: Brian VanDeMark, from Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 1991)
New! NO: H.R. McMaster, from Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (HarperCollins, 1997)
Professor of history Brian VanDeMark argues that President Lyndon Johnson failed to question the viability of increasing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War because he was a prisoner of America’s global containment policy and because he did not want his opponents to accuse him of being soft on communism or endanger support for his Great Society reforms. H.R. McMaster, an active-duty army tanker, maintains that the Vietnam disaster was not inevitable but a uniquely human failure whose responsibility was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisers.
ISSUE 16. Has the Women’s Movement of the 1970s Failed to Liberate American Women?
New! YES: Carolyn Graglia, from Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism (Spence, 1998)
NO: Sara M. Evans, from “American Women in the Twentieth Century,” in Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Writer and lecturer F. Carolyn Graglia argues that women should stay at home and practice the values of “true motherhood” because contemporary feminists have discredited marriage, devalued traditional homemaking, and encouraged sexual promiscuity. But, according to Professor Sara M. Evans, despite class, racial, religious, ethnic and regional differences, women in America experienced major transformations in their private and public lives in the twentieth century.
ISSUE 17. Were the 1980s a Decade of Affluence for the Middle Class?
YES: J. David Woodard, from “A Rising Tide,” in The America that Reagan Built (Praeger, 2006)
NO: Thomas Byrne Edsall, from “The Changing Shape of Power: A Realignment in Public Policy,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1989)
According to Professor J. David Woodard, supply-side economics unleashed a wave of entrepreneurial and technological innovation that transformed the economy and restored America’s confidence in the Golden Age from 1983-1992. Political journalist Thomas B. Edsall argues that the Reagan revolution brought about a policy realignment that reversed the New Deal and redistributed political power and economic wealth to the top 20 percent of Americans.
