Democracy as a Way of Life in America

Richard Schneirov is Professor of History at Indiana State University. He is the author of many books, including Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction with John B. Jentz.Gaston A. Fernandez is Professor of Political Science at Indiana State University.

• Introduction: Democracy as a Way of Life 1. The Three Waves of American Democracy 2. Democracy in Culture: American Individualisms 3. American Democracy in the Economy and Workplace 4. American Democracy and US Foreign Policy 5. The Neoliberal Era: Post-Industrial Society in a New Gilded Age 6. The Democratic Challenge Epilog: The Environment--Democracy's Fourth Wave Documents Bibliography

"Strongly challenging the notion that democracy is just an arrangement for selecting a governing elite, Schneirov and Fernandez look for democratic ideas and practices in corporations and families, in social movements and cultural productions, in education and childrearing. Their democratic America is a place of continual controversy over everything from corporate power to disco; their cast of characters ranges from the marginalized to the spectacularly successful, from those in power to the social movements that challenged them. As they turn their gaze to the early twenty-first century, they write of the inequalities of the Second Gilded Age and the movements for democratic renewal that confront them."– John Markoff, author of Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change