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.
What happens when there’s no middle ground?
John M. Lund via Getty Images
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.
A. P. Giannini photographed in March 1927, and the Hollywood sign.
Agence Rol. Agence photographique/Shutterstock
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.
Biden laid out an ambitious agenda to Congress with a historic backdrop.
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP
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.
Robert Redford played the golden Gatsby in 1974.
IMDB
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.
Millennials are less likely to own a home than previous generations were at the same age.
Andy Dean Photography/shutterstock.com
Americans are increasingly struggling to save enough for retirement. If Social Security isn’t saved, growing old in poverty will likely become more common.
Some countries seem to provide more equitable opportunities in schools and society in general. Others have work to do if they want to advance the adage that hard work and education afford success regardless of one’s existing social status.
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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.
Will they disrupt the tech sector?
Reuters/Eduardo Munoz
Americans’ widespread belief that they live in a meritocracy where anyone can get ahead actually makes inequality even worse, particularly in terms of gender.
Students at Berkeley campus.
AP Photo/Ben Margot, File
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.
While Prop 13 may have saved the California dream for some, it destroyed it for many others.
AP Photo/Lennox McLendon
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.
The 2016 Standing Rock protest was only the most recent manifestation of the indigenous American values inherited by European settlers on this land.
James MacPherson
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.
Old West, as seen through 1967 Orange County eyes.
Orange County Archives
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.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard died of complications from ALS on July 27, 2017, at his home in Kentucky.
Jakub Mosur/AP
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