V . 1. Social and political life -- v. 2. Cultural and religious life

Presenting a detailed look at the individuals, themes, and moments that shaped this important Progressive Era in American history, this valuable reference spans 25 years of reform and provides multidisciplinary insights into the period. During the Progressive Era, influential thinkers and activists made efforts to improve U.S. society through reforms, both legislative and social, on issues of the day such as working conditions of laborers, business monopolies, political corruption, and vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few. Many Progressives hoped for and tirelessly worked toward a day when all Americans could take full advantage of the economic and social opportunities promised by U.S. society. This two-volume work traces the issues, events, and individuals of the Progressive Era from approximately 1893 to 1920. The entries and primary sources in this set are grouped thematically and cover a broad range of topics regarding reform and innovation across the period, with special attention paid to important topics of race, class, and gender reform and reformers. The volumes are helpfully organized under five categories: work and economic life; social and political life; cultural and religious life; science, literature, and the arts; and sports and popular culture.

Reforming America, 1815-1860 offers insights into one of the most complex and dynamic periods in American history.

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, natural to party dissension...is itself a frightful despotism." -- George Washington George Washington's nightmare has been realized. Despite his warning about the negative effects of party loyalties, the U.S. government has become paralyzed by partisanship, allowing national challenges to go unaddressed. As an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in 2018, Neal Simon witnessed the destructive nature of modern American politics. He experienced firsthand the perverse incentives that push candidates and lawmakers to ideological extremes. He watched as party leaders resisted pragmatic solutions to our nation's problems. He saw politicians prioritize loyalty to their party bases over progress for the American people. In this comprehensive analysis of United States politics, Simon shows how degradations in party primaries, campaign finances, and election rules have caused American self-government to collapse into gridlock and divisiveness. However, the American promise is so much greater. As the first U.S. president noted in his famed address, "The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government." Capitalizing on personal insight derived from Simon's political campaign along with extensive research, Contract to Unite America provides specific, practical solutions for an improved government and a better tomorrow.

In partnership with the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, Baker Academic is proud to offer the second volume of Herman Bavinck's complete Reformed Dogmatics in English for the very first time. This masterwork will appeal to scholars, students, pastors, and laity interested in Reformed theology and to research and theological libraries. "Bavinck was a man of giant mind, vast learning, ageless wisdom, and great expository skill. Solid but lucid, demanding but satisfying, broad and deep and sharp and stabilizing, Bavinck's magisterial Reformed Dogmatics remains after a century the supreme achievement of its kind."-J. I. Packer, Regent College

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.