How the son of Italian immigrants created the Bank of America, and funded early Hollywood in the process.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on American Dream
Displaying 1 - 20 of 26 articles
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.
Three scholars examine President Biden’s rhetoric, the symbolism and the several ambitious plans he proposed in his first address to Congress.
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.
As millennials flock to certain parts of the US, home prices in those areas are surging.
Americans are increasingly struggling to save enough for retirement. If Social Security isn’t saved, growing old in poverty will likely become more common.
Conventional wisdom across much of the Western world says there’s a strong link between education and upward social mobility. Really?
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.
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.
To the recently deceased playwright, the nation’s greatest tragedy was its move from an agricultural society to an urban, industrial one.
One of Trump’s selling points was that he would ‘make America great again’: this meant bringing back the American dream.
‘American Idol’ fittingly appeared nine months after 9/11 – and ends just in time for Donald Trump’s rise.
We kick off our collaboration with Point Taken, a new debate program from WGBH TV.
Falling homeownership rates, stagnant wages and diminishing retirement savings mean that for more and more Americans, the middle-class dream is slowly dying – if it’s not already gone.
Talk about the future of work is in the air these days, but will all the chatter lead to action and better living standards for tomorrow’s workers?
Top contributors
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Lecturer in Economics and Social Statistics, UCL
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Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Brookings Institution Senior Fellow and College Park Professor, University of Maryland
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Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sheffield
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Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin
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Professor of Management, Co-Director of the MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, MIT Sloan School of Management
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PhD candidate at the LSE and Research Fellow at the Superpower Institute, The University of Melbourne
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Assistant Professor of Sociology, Birmingham-Southern College
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Senior Lecturer in Twentieth to Twenty-First-Century Writing, Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Bowling Green State University
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Associate Professor of the Practice of Engineering, Brown University
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Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University
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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
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Archaeologist, Leiden University
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Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and Dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, Cornell University
