LBJ's America

The Life and Legacies of Lyndon Baines Johnson

Mark Atwood Lawrence, Mark K. Updegrove

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009187398
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In innumerable ways, we still live in LBJ's America. More than half a century after his death, Lyndon Baines Johnson continues to exert profound influence on American life. This collection skillfully explores his seminal accomplishments—protecting civil rights, fighting poverty, expanding access to medical care, lowering barriers to immigration—as well as his struggles in Vietnam and his difficulty responding to other challenges in an era of declining US influence on the global stage. Sweeping and influential, LBJ's America probes the ways in which the accomplishments, setbacks, controversies and crises of 1963 to 1969 laid the foundations of contemporary America and set the stage for our own era of policy debates, political contention, distrust of government, and hyper-partisanship.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Power and Purpose: LBJ in the Presidency
• Chapter 2 LBJ and the Contours of American Liberalism
• Chapter 3 Lyndon Johnson and the Transformation of Cold War Conservatism
• Chapter 4 The Great Society and the Beloved Community: Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Partnership That Transformed a Nation
• Chapter 5 Lyndon Johnson, Mexican Americans,and the Border
• Chapter 6 The War on Poverty: How Qualitative Liberalism Prevailed
• Chapter 7 LBJ’s Supreme Court
• Chapter 8 “If I Cannot Get a Whole Loaf, I Will Get What Bread I Can”: LBJ and the Hart–Celler Immigration Act of 1965
• Chapter 9 “It’s Always Hard to Cut Losses”: The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam
• Chapter 10 Lyndon Johnson and the Shifting Global Order
• Chapter 11 “Through a Narrow Glass”: Compassion, Power, and Lyndon Johnson’s Struggle to Make Sense of the Third World
• Afterword: LBJ’s America
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index