Diane Winston, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
In 1984, the album was atop the charts, and Ronald Reagan, running for reelection, told a New Jersey audience that he and the Boss shared the same American dream. Springsteen vehemently disagreed.
Diane Winston, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Reagan and Trump − two of the most media-savvy Republican presidents − used religion to advance their political visions, but their messages and missions could not be more different.
Mike Davis’s radical urban history of LA was a trailblazing book that remains startlingly relevant to those of us who live in other supersizing cities in the early 21st century.
African evangelism is born from – and often funded by – American evangelism, and with it comes a damaging cocktail of rightwing ideologies, especially during the Donald Trump years.
Status anxiety and conspicuous consumption generate a dazzling, often surreal poetry in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But Gatsby’s rise and fall exposes deep fissures underlying the American Dream.
Americans are increasingly struggling to save enough for retirement. If Social Security isn’t saved, growing old in poverty will likely become more common.
Middle-class houses in the US have grown ever larger. The average single-family home is almost twice the size of a home in the 1960s. It’s time to consider the downsides of sizing up.
Americans’ widespread belief that they live in a meritocracy where anyone can get ahead actually makes inequality even worse, particularly in terms of gender.
Post-World War II California built an unrivalled system of higher education combining access, affordability and choice. Then a contraction of the vision came in the 1980s.
Manuel Pastor, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
In 1978, Californians voted to pass Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and ushered in an era of underinvestment, ending the ‘California dream’ for many.
Anti-immigrant policies ignore that American ideals like liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness can be traced back to the indigenous pioneers who once moved freely across North America.
Knott’s Berry Farm and others romanticize the state’s past and influence visitors’ sense of history. But their ideology reflects mid-20th-century political conservatism more than settlers’ reality.
Professor of Public Theology in the Department of Beliefs and Practices, Faculty of Theology, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Free University of Amsterdam), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam