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The Age of Reagan

The Age of Reagan

A History, 1974-2008

by Sean Wilentz
Hardback
Publication Date: 06/05/2008

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One of the nation's leading historians offers a groundbreaking and provocativechronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon.

The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the right has dominated American politics and government. In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz accounts for how a conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize power and hold it, and the momentous consequences that followed.

Ronald Reagan has been the single most important political figure of this age. Without Reagan, the conservative movement would have never been as successful as it was. In his political persona as well as his policies, Reagan embodied a new fusion of deeply right-leaning politics with some of the rhetoric and even a bit of the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In American political history there have been a few leading figures who, for better or worse, have placed their political stamp indelibly on their times. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt--and Ronald Reagan. A conservative hero in a conservative age, Reagan has been so admired by a minority of historians and so disliked by the others that it has been difficult to evaluate his administration with detachment. Drawing on numerous primary documents that have been neglected or only recently released to the public, as well as on emerging historical work, Wilentz offers invaluable revelations about conservatism's ascendancy and the era in which Reagan was the preeminent political figure.

Vivid, authoritative, and illuminating from start to finish, The Age of Reagan raises profound questions and opens passionate debate about our nation's recent past.

ISBN:
9780060744809
9780060744809
Category:
Biography: historical
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
06-05-2008
Language:
English
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
228.6x152.4x33.45mm
Weight:
0.8kg
Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is the author of Bob Dylan in America (2010) and The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), for which he won the Bancroft Prize. He is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. Wilentz's father and uncle were co-owners of the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and he grew up in the world that Fred McDarrah captured with his lens. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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