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"Fraser, Steve, 1945- author"
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Mongrel firebugs and men of property : capitalism and class conflict in American history
\"Stories about American history, its origins and unfolding, do not, conventionally, feature capitalism. Other tales about the country's history usually take priority. If capitalism figures in at all, it is to forefront opportunity, entrepreneurial vigor, material abundance and the seven league boots of manifest destiny. Conflict may rear its unseemly face but only episodically, as a kind of alien or aberrant detour off the main road of America's exceptional career through the world. Instances of serious social discord, when they draw notice, get transcended, a course correction allowing the utopian project to resume. In this collection, Steve Fraser corrects the record, rewriting the arc of the American saga with capitalism and the class conflict centerstage, mounting a serious challenge to the consoling fantasy of American exceptionalism. Working through the central concepts of political economics - unemployment and risk, unfree labor and household debt - he demonstrates that class is a deeply structuring feature of American political life, and an invaluable heuristic for reading American politics in the longue durâee\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Class matters : the strange career of an American delusion
No detailed description available for \"Class Matters\".
eBook
Class matters : the strange career of an American delusion
A uniquely personal yet deeply informed exploration of the hidden history of class in American life From the decks of the Mayflower straight through to Donald Trump's \"American carnage,\" class has always played a role in American life. In this remarkable work, Steve Fraser twines our nation's past with his own family's history, deftly illustrating how class matters precisely because Americans work so hard to pretend it doesn't. He examines six signposts of American history-the settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown; the ratification of the Constitution; the Statue of Liberty; the cowboy; the \"kitchen debate\" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev; and Martin Luther King's \"I Have a Dream\" speech-to explore just how pervasively class has shaped our national conversation. With a historian's intellectual command and a riveting narrative voice, Fraser interweaves these examples with his own past-including his false arrest on charges of planning to blow up the Liberty Bell during the Civil Rights era-to tell a story both urgent and timeless.
Book
Wall Street
Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad ambition?
This book recounts the colorful history of America's love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types-the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist-all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.
eBook