The Creative Society – and the Price Americans Paid for It

Examines the nation's emerging ranks of professional experts – including doctors, lawyers, scientists and administrators – and their role in shaping modern America.

Louis Galambos (Author)

9781107013179, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 December 2011

336 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

'Louis Galambos is equally adept as storyteller and historian. Witty, readable, illuminating, and sometimes highly personal, this is a history book with the drama of a novel. Professor Galambos charts twentieth-century American development in four broad areas – urbanization, innovation, economic security, and internationalism – and weaves throughout these concurrent narratives an astonishing array of detail. His cast of characters is America's self-proclaimed and educated professionals. Lawyers, economists, nurses, urban planners, mining engineers, teachers, and even military strategists act out a historical pageant that boasts winners and losers. Most vividly, Galambos stirs his own family story into the mix. His small-town Ohio clan of bustling Hungarian emigrants shares the stage with prominent twentieth-century figures like Emma Goldman, George Marshall, and Robert Moses. And in a masterstroke of history writing, he invites us, his readers, to enhance his storytelling with reflections on our own American experience.' Mary Yeager and John Lithgow, Los Angeles, California

The Creative Society is the first history to look at modern America through the eyes of its emerging ranks of professional experts, including lawyers, scientists, doctors, administrators, business managers, teachers, policy specialists and urban planners. Covering the period from the 1890s to the early twenty-first century, Louis Galambos examines the history that shaped professionals and, in turn, their role in shaping modern America. He considers the roles of education, anti-Semitism, racism and elitism in shaping and defining the professional cadre and examines how matters of gender, race and ethnicity determined whether women, African Americans and immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East were admitted to the professional ranks. He also discusses the role professionals played in urbanizing the United States, keeping the economy efficient and innovative, showing the government how to provide a greater measure of security and equity, and guiding the world's leading industrial power in coping with its complex, frequently dangerous foreign relations.

Preface
1. 1931
2. Life, death, and learning in the cities
3. Toward a new economy, 1890–1930
4. State crafting – American style
5. Confronting the world
6. Winners and losers, 1890–1930
7. New Deal experiments
8. Fighting on God's side
9. A new aristocracy, 1946–1969
10. The suburban conquest of the 1960s
11. Empire in the American century
12. The tattered empire of the 1970s
13. Cracked core
14. The American solution
15. Conservatism – rhetoric and realities, 1981–2001
16. The hegemony trap
17. The American dream, 1981–2001
18. The creative society in danger.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]