Background
Nugent, Walter Terry King was born on January 11, 1935 in Watertown, New York, United States. Son of Clarence A. and Florence (King) Nugent.
(After decades of conservative dominance, the election of ...)
After decades of conservative dominance, the election of Barack Obama may signal the beginning of a new progressive era. But what exactly is progressivism? What role has it played in the political, social, and economic history of America? This very timely Very Short Introduction offers an engaging overview of progressivism in America--its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. A many-sided reform movement that lasted from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. Progressive national leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald answered the growing call for change. They fought for worker's compensation, child labor laws, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation; they enacted anti-trust laws, improved living conditions in urban slums, instituted the graduated income tax, won women the right to vote, and laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's New Deal. Nugent shows that the progressives--with the glaring exception of race relations--shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed. Offering a succinct history of the broad reform movement that upset a stagnant conservative orthodoxy, this Very Short Introduction reveals many parallels, even lessons, highly appropriate to our own time. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019531106X/?tag=2022091-20
( A political movement rallies against underregulated ban...)
A political movement rallies against underregulated banks, widening gaps in wealth, and gridlocked governments. Sound familiar? More than a century before Occupy Wall Street, the People’s Party of the 1890s was organizing for change. They were the original source of the term “populism,” and a catalyst for the later Progressive Era and New Deal. Historians wrote approvingly of the Populists up into the 1950s. But with time and new voices, led by historian Richard Hofstadter, the Populists were denigrated, depicted as demagogic, conspiratorial, and even anti-Semitic. In a landmark study, Walter Nugent set out to uncover the truth of populism, focusing on the most prominent Populist state, Kansas. He focused on primary sources, looking at the small towns and farmers that were the foundation of the movement. The result, The Tolerant Populists, was the first book-length, source-based analysis of the Populists. Nugent’s work sparked a movement to undo the historical revisionism and ultimately found itself at the center of a controversy that has been called “one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography.” This timely re-release of The Tolerant Populists comes as the term finds new currency—and new scorn—in modern politics. A definitive work on populism, it serves as a vivid example of the potential that political movements and popular opinion can have to change history and affect our future.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022605408X/?tag=2022091-20
(Discussions abound today about the state of the union, it...)
Discussions abound today about the state of the union, its place in the world, and the founding fathers’ intentions. Did they want the United States to become a republic or an empire? Thomas Jefferson, after all, called the young nation an “empire for liberty.” Later words through two centuries all evoked empire: “manifest destiny” in the 1840s, “benevolent assimilation” in 1898, and “our responsibility to lead” in 2002. Indeed, since Jefferson’s day, Americans have proudly proclaimed liberty and cherished democracy even as they have often behaved imperially. Habits of Empire documents this expansionist behavior by examining each of the nation’s territorial acquisitions since the first in 1782—how the land was acquired, how its previous occupants were removed or reduced, and how it was then settled and stabilized. By 1853, when the continental United States was fully established from sea to shining sea, the nation’s habit of empire-building had become firmly formed. Each of the acquisitions is a story in itself. In Paris in 1782, the American negotiators—the crafty Benjamin Franklin, the crabby John Adams, and the crooked John Jay—stubbornly and with much luck pushed the new country’s western boundary to the Mississippi River and almost gained southern Canada as well. Hardly any Americans yet lived west of the Appalachians, and their armies had not conquered the region, but they won it nevertheless. That allowed Robert Livingston and James Monroe in 1803 to accept Napoleon’s astonishing offer to sell all of Louisiana. Through a volatile mix of leadership, luck, aggression, chicanery, rampant population growth, and self-confident ideology came the further acquisitions of Florida, Texas, Oregon, and the Southwest. From the 1850s through the 1920s, America’s empire-building reached across the Pacific (from Alaska through Hawaii and Samoa to the Philippines) and around the Caribbean (from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and several “protectorates” to the Panama Canal and the Virgin Islands). After 1945, American expansion took a new global form, military and economic, and built on the need to contain the Soviet Union in the Cold War. After 2001 and the start of the “war on terror, ” it became both defensive and assertive. Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent shows how the United States, asserting republican virtue but employing imperial force, has long lived with the contradiction inherent in Jefferson’s famous phrase “empire for liberty.” Enlightening, empathetic, comprehensive, and well-sourced, this book explains the deep roots of America’s imperialism as no other has done.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004JZWLWM/?tag=2022091-20
Nugent, Walter Terry King was born on January 11, 1935 in Watertown, New York, United States. Son of Clarence A. and Florence (King) Nugent.
Bachelor of Arts, St. Benedict's College, 1954; Doctor of Literature, St. Benedict's College, 1968; Master of Arts, Georgetown University, 1956; Doctor of Philosophy, University Chicago, 1961.
Instructor history, Washburn U., 1957-1958;
assistant professor, Kansas State University, 1961-1963;
assistant professor of history, Indiana U., 1963-1964;
associate professor, Indiana U., 1964-1968;
professor, Indiana U., 1968-1984;
associate dean College Arts and Sciences, Indiana U., 1967-1971;
director overseas study, Indiana U., 1967-1976;
chairman history department, Indiana U., 1974-1977;
Andrew V. Tackes professor of history, U. Notre Dame, since 1984. Paley lecturer, Fulbright visiting professor Hebrew U., Jerusalem, 1978-1979. Visiting professor U. Hamburg, 1980, U. Warsaw, 1982.
Mary Ball Washington Fulbright professor of University College, Dublin, 1991-1992. Summer seminar director National Endowment for Humanities, 1979, 84, 86. Board member United States- Israel Ednl.
Foundation, 1985-1989. United States Information Agency academic specialist, lecturer, Brazil, 1996.
(After decades of conservative dominance, the election of ...)
(Discussions abound today about the state of the union, it...)
( A political movement rallies against underregulated ban...)
(The money question as it took shape in America during Rec...)
( "Nugent’s study, well illustrated and documented... wil...)
(American History, out of print book)
Board directors United States-Israel Educational Foundation, 1985—1989. Member of Society Historians the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (president 2000-2002), Society of America Historians, Western History Association 2005-2006, (honorary life member).
Married Suellen Hoy, 1986. Children from previous marriage: Katherine, Rachel, David, Douglas, Terry, Mary.