
By Sean Wilentz
One of many nation's prime historians bargains a groundbreaking and provocative chronicle of America's political heritage because the fall of Nixon. The earlier thirty-five years have marked an period of conservatism. even if in short interrupted within the overdue Seventies and quickly reversed within the Nineties, a robust surge from the fitting has ruled American politics and govt. within the Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz money owed for a way a conservative stream as soon as deemed marginal controlled to grab strength and carry it, and the momentous outcomes that undefined. Ronald Reagan has been the only most vital political determine of this age. with no Reagan, the conservative stream might have by no means been as profitable because it was once. In his political character in addition to his guidelines, Reagan embodied a brand new fusion of deeply right-leaning politics with a number of the rhetoric or even slightly the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In American political background there were a number of best figures who, for greater or worse, have positioned their political stamp indelibly on their occasions. They contain Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt—and Ronald Reagan. A conservative hero in a conservative age, Reagan has been so prominent by way of a minority of historians and so disliked through the others that it's been tricky to guage his management with detachment. Drawing on a variety of fundamental files which were ignored or just recently published to the general public, in addition to on rising historic paintings, Wilentz bargains helpful revelations approximately conservatism's ascendancy and the period during which Reagan used to be the preeminent political determine. brilliant, authoritative, and illuminating from begin to end, The Age of Reagan increases profound questions and opens passionate debate approximately our nation's fresh prior.