Made in America : A Social History of American Culture and Character ISBN: 9780226251455 Platform/Publisher: PQ ebrary / University of Chicago Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a time Subjects: National characteristics American.;
The more America changes, the more it stays the same, according to this engrossing historical survey. Drawing on everything from economic data and mortality statistics to studies of colonial portraiture, University of California-Berkeley sociologist Fischer assesses broad trends across four centuries of American life. His measured but upbeat view of the evolving American experience will disappoint the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd: he finds that Americans have grown more religious and charitable over time, and markedly less violent and nomadic, while remaining roughly unchanged in their propensity toward greed and consumerism. Through it all, he discerns a benignly Tocquevillian trait that he calls "voluntarism," an individualism softened by unforced solidarity that fulfills itself by freely building communities, be they frontier villages, dissenting churches, egalitarian families, or Internet chat groups. While vast gains in health, wealth, and political freedoms have transformed our lives, they have, he contends, made Americans more voluntaristic and thus "more characteristically ¿American'... insistently independent but still sociable, striving, and sentimental." Fischer's lively prose argues these propositions with a wealth of hard evidence and illustrates them with piquant vignettes of people of all eras muddling through. The result is a shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Claude Fischer is a French-born American sociologist. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and currently teaches sociology at the University of California, at Berkeley. Most of Fischer's work focuses on urban society. He has written extensively on structural changes in modern society and has researched social networks and the displacement of traditional territorially based communities by new communities of human association.
Fischer is also interested in the impact of technology on social relations and social institutions; most recently, he has investigated the social history of the telephone.
