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Set against a backdrop of mounting anticommunism, Red Apple documents the personal, physical, and psychological effects of McCarthyism on six political activists with ties to New York City. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, McCarthyism disfigured the American political landscape. Under the altar of anticommunism, domestic Cold War crusaders undermined civil liberties, curtailed equality before the law, and tarnished the ideals of American democracy. In order to preserve freedom, they jettisoned some of its tenets. Congressional committees worked in tandem, although not necessarily in collusion, with the FBI, law firms, university administrations, publishing houses, television networks, movie studios, and a legion of government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels to target “subversive” individuals. By examining real-life experiences at the “ground level,” Red Apple illuminates the human consequences of the widespread paranoia that gripped a nation. It explores how these six activists experienced, responded to, and suffered from one of the most savage assaults on civil liberties in American history. Their collective stories reveal the personal costs of holding dissident political beliefs in the face of intolerance and moral panic that is as relevant today as it was seventy years ago.

The Routes Not Built discusses the unrealized plans to extend New York City’s subway and commuter rail system beyond the limits of the system as it now exists. It examines the reasons why the transit system did not expand and the people who played a role in the planning process. Emphasis is given to several proposes lines in particular and the impact that those plans had on growth and development of the areas that they would have served. Maps diagramming some of these lines are included. The Routes Not Taken also looks at how the subway and rail system has actually contracted in size, rather than expanded over the past 75 years through the elimination of a number of elevated lines without the construction of underground lines to replace them and the closure of other lines.

Süssen is Now Free of Jews offers a close look at the legacy of two Jewish families in the village of Süssen, Württemberg, from 1902 to 1941. Coincidentally, two very different Jewish men, cattle dealer Jakob Lang and industrialist Alfred Ottenheimer established themselves in the village of Süssen in 1902. This micro-history of rural Jewish life chronicles the property of the Langs and the Ottenheimers, their personal inventory, building permits and business ventures. Hugo Lang describes their family’s daily routine, changes under the Nazis including forced labor in Eislingen, and his life in the United States. Shortly after Hugo’s departure for the U.S., his parents, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins were deported to Riga, where all but three of them perished. Ruth’s search for and joy over discovering family after her liberation tells a very moving tale. Conceived of as a social and cultural history of two Jewish families up to the Holocaust, this study turned into far more than a micro-history of Jewish life in southern Germany. A decade of research in local, regional, and state archives revealed a treasure of documents that eventually evolved into a compelling story of births and deaths, marriages, daily life, business dealings, education, religious practices, community relations, deception, escape, deportation, larceny, murder, and finally requisitions, restitution, and reparations – a very sordid affair.

This book brings together a collection of chapters offering a fresh examination of American participation in World War II, including a long overdue reconsideration of such seminal topics as the forces leading the United States to enter World War II, the role of the American military in the Allied victory, and war-time planning for the postwar world. The book also tackles new inquiries into life on the home front and America's commemoration of one of the most controversial and climatic events of the war—the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The chapters cover crucial moments such as: Franklin D. Roosevelt's pivotal, if at times indecisive, role in leading the United States; the miscalculation of Japanese intentions by American diplomats and the failure of deterrence in preventing war in the Pacific; the experiences and contributions of conscientious objectors to American society in this time of total war; the decision of the United States to fight with an ineffective battle tank at the expense of American lives; the Coast Guard's contribution to the D-Day Landing; and how elite foreign policy organizations prior to V-J Day sought to influence American occupation policies regarding Japan.

This book looks at Italian American campaigns to reform American immigration laws from 1945 to 1965. It argues that even while Italian Americans were members of a coalition that pushed for liberal immigration reforms, their campaigns reflected a mix of liberalism and conservatism. Italian American immigration reformers invoked both secular principles of democratic liberalism and arguments based on Catholic social thought to call for a more humane and equal system of regulating immigration than the one in place based on a system of National Origins quotas. Yet in practice, Italian American campaign rhetoric and legislative strategies often reflected a socially and racially conservative vision of Americanism. Through displays of anti-communism, household mass consumption, assimilation, and advancing narratives of immigrant contributions to the nation, Italian Americans largely asserted their group’s fitness for immigration and citizenship rights in the United States. Each of those displays was highly racialized and hardly contested accepted political and social boundaries, but rather reaffirmed them. Those actions demonstrated that Italian Americans were just as concerned with their group’s political and social equality with older-stock whites as they were with liberalizing American immigration laws.