American Higher

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for 100 years.

Through historical newspaper accounts and the personal letters of soldiers, the events leading up to the battle and the battle itself are stunningly recreated. You will enter the mind of Robert E. Lee as he makes the fateful decision to cross the Potomac River and take the offensive. You will feel the frustration of Abraham Lincoln as he struggles to convince George McClellan to fight. And you will stand side-by-side with foot soldiers as the peaceful Maryland countryside explodes.

Pattie Mae adores and admires Uncle Buddy. He unsettles the dust and brings fresh ideas to Rehobeth Road. But when Buddy's deliberate inattention to the protocol of 1947 North Carolina lands him in jail for a crime against a white woman that he didn't commit, Pattie Mae and her family are suddenly set to journeying on the long, hard road that leads from loss and rage to forgiveness and pride.

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Before Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967, it was generally believed that the Revolution was driven both by social conflict between colonial settlers and the ruling British government, and by differences between classes in American society. Bailyn had a different view. He said that it was radical ideas that fired the American Revolution, and that the Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, and political struggle.

The era after World War II saw America's urban planners treat the lives of city-dwellers with disdain. It spawned a philosophy of urban renewal that valued the efficient movement of cars more than it valued the lives of people, and that wiped out entire neighborhoods dismissed by bureaucrats as slums. Published in 1961, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities examines the shortsightedness and failure of this philosophy. The book turns away from strict statistical study and abstract planning theory in favor of observations.

It was the vast frontier stretching out to the west of the developed land on the North American continent that shaped the American character - and the course of US history. That's the argument in historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Anthologized and reprinted many times, it gave historians a new lens with which to analyze the United States.