This first biography of V.F. Calverton gives an intellectual history of the American radical movement from 1920 to 1940 and shows how he and his Modern Quarterly led the forefront in wars of ideas about sex, lit, and party. This lively study of the career and times of Calverton examines basic questions about the relationships between literature and politics, feminist agendas, and political theory in ways that are still relevant. Students of political thought, American history, and American literature will find this biography a provocative one that brings the period alive in new ways. A short introduction shows how Calverton yearned to be an American Lenin-Cassanova-Pericles. Philip Abbott then follows Calverton's participation in a series of intellectual wars fought in the 1920s and the 1930s. Thus does Abbott reassess American radicalism and the development of American bohemia and socialism. Calverton was the central figure in two efforts to found an American radical republic, both of which were rejected by his colleagues--famous writers and thinkers of his time. One attempt sought to create a republic of being in which participants explored the capacities of sexual liberation as an agent for change. Another involved the creation of a republic of doing in which radical citizens acted out revolutionary roles. This biography of a neglected theorist reevaluates radical projects in politics, psychology, and the arts in America in a seminal period in their development.

This is a study in failed colonialism and an evocative exploration of a number of questions that go to the heart of explaining the tragedy that engulfed Vietnam in the postwar era. Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources that have only recently become available, Scott McCon-nell examines the causes and consequences of the Vietnamese student migration to France after World War I.When the student exodus from Vietnam began, a victorious France was more conscious and proud of its status as an imperial power than ever before. It commanded the loyalty of many of its subjects: during World War I, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the colonies had served France in the trenches, and afterwards many came to study in French schools and universities. But some of the leading figures among them learned not to appreciate French values, but to have contempt for them, and they sought to turn the knowledge they had gained in France against French rule.How did this occur? Why did so many Vietnamese who came to France during the Stalin era join the Communist movement? Why was the Communist party so much more successful than other parties in recruiting Vietnamese students? And why were the Vietnamese so much more receptive to the Communist message than students from other French colonies? McConnell believes the answers lie in the kinds of experiences that young Vietnamese had when they came to France. He shows that the French government's policies uere inconsistent and ineffectual, and French attitudes toward these young men changed from pride to hostility as they began to seem less the flowering of the French imperial idea than an ungrateful cadre of rebels.Leftward Journey records the birth of "Third World" politics on the Parisian Left Bank, and shows how its first echoes fed into allegiance to communism. The book vividly portrays the superior energy and sense of direction of the French Communist party during the thirties, and shows how the Communists outdid their socialist and bourgeois rivals in winning Vietnamese recruits. As a contribution to Vietnamese history, this book will be of intense interest to professional scholars. Students and teachers of twentieth-century European colonialism will also find it useful. It provides important background to American intervention in Vietnam and to those who are interested in Third World Communist and nationalist movements.

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.

In the early 1930s, the American Communist Party attracted support from a wide range of liberal and radical intellectuals, partly in response to domestic politics, and also in opposition to the growing power of fascism abroad. The Long War, a social history of these intellectuals and their political institutions, tells the story of the rift that developed among the groups loosely organized under the umbrella of the Party--representing communist supporters of the People's Front and those who would become anti-Stalinists--and the evolution of that rift into a generational divide that would culminate in the liberal anti-communism of the post-World War II era. Judy Kutulas takes us into the debates and outright fights between and within the ranks of organizations such as the League of American Writers, the John Reed Clubs, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. Showing how extremist views about the nature and value of communism triumphed over more moderate ones, she traces the transfer of the left's leadership from one generation to the next. She describes how supporters of the People's Front were discredited by the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and how this opened the way for a new generation of leaders better known as the New York intellectuals. In this shift, Kutulas identifies the beginnings of the liberal anti-communism that would follow World War II. A book for students and scholars of the intersection of politics and culture, The Long War offers a new, informed perspective on the intellectual maneuvers of the American left of the 1930s and leads to a reinterpretation of the time and its complex legacy.

From the bestselling authors of The Right Nation, a visionary argument that our current crisis in government is nothing less than the fourth radical transition in the history of the nation-state Dysfunctional government: It’s become a cliché, and most of us are resigned to the fact that nothing is ever going to change. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge show us, that is a seriously limited view of things. In fact, there have been three great revolutions in government in the history of the modern world. The West has led these revolutions, but now we are in the midst of a fourth revolution, and it is Western government that is in danger of being left behind. Now, things really are different. The West’s debt load is unsustainable. The developing world has harvested the low-hanging fruits. Industrialization has transformed all the peasant economies it had left to transform, and the toxic side effects of rapid developing world growth are adding to the bill. From Washington to Detroit, from Brasilia to New Delhi, there is a dual crisis of political legitimacy and political effectiveness. The Fourth Revolution crystallizes the scope of the crisis and points forward to our future. The authors enjoy extraordinary access to influential figures and forces the world over, and the book is a global tour of the innovators in how power is to be wielded. The age of big government is over; the age of smart government has begun. Many of the ideas the authors discuss seem outlandish now, but the center of gravity is moving quickly. This tour drives home a powerful argument: that countries’ success depends overwhelmingly on their ability to reinvent the state. And that much of the West—and particularly the United States—is failing badly in its task. China is making rapid progress with government reform at the same time as America is falling badly behind. Washington is gridlocked, and America is in danger of squandering its huge advantages from its powerful economy because of failing government. And flailing democracies like India look enviously at China’s state-of-the-art airports and expanding universities. The race to get government right is not just a race of efficiency. It is a race to see which political values will triumph in the twenty-first century—the liberal values of democracy and liberty or the authoritarian values of command and control. The stakes could not be higher.

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement. Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of their responses.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry comprises original essays by eighteen distinguished scholars. It offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century, in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define modern American poetry. The Companion stretches the narrow term of 'literary modernism' - which encompasses works published from approximately 1890 to 1945 - to include a more capacious and usable account of American poetry's evolution from the twentieth century to the present. The essays collected here seek to account for modern American verse against the contexts of broad political, social, and cultural fields and forces. This volume gathers together major voices that represent the best in contemporary critical approaches and methods.