San Antonio College Library

"In The Democratic Century, Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason Lakin combine social, cultural, economic, and institutional analyses to explain why democracy has succeeded in some countries and failed in others." "Defining democracy as a political system in which all adults may vote in contested elections to choose their representatives, Lipset and Lakin argue that the mainstays of a successful system are institutions that encourage the diffusion of power...

"In the late nineteenth century, the United States underwent an extremely rapid industrial expansion that moved the nation into the front ranks of the world economy. At the same time, the nation maintained democratic institutions as the primary means of allocating political offices and power. As the combination of robust democratic institutions and rapid industrialization is rarely found in world history, this book explains how development and democracy...

"Over the course of our history, freedom has been a living truth for some Americans and a cruel mockery for others. In Eric Foner's stirring history, freedom's story is not the simple unfolding of a timeless truth, but an open-ended history of accomplishment and failure. Its impetus lies in the aspirations and sacrifice of millions of Americans, celebrated and anonymous, who have sought freedom's blessings. Its meaning is shaped not only in congressional...

"Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened, to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle." "Finding racism embedded within...