Jennifer Delton
Biographic Data
| ID | 329294 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Delton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Delton |
| SIGNATURE | DELTON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Skidmore College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Courteous Capitalism
The Bosses Union
This is an extraordinarily well-researched and informative history of how US employers’ associations sought to impede unions before the New Deal era. Significantly, it is also a history of the “closed shop,” the main target of early twentieth-century union-fighting employers, which sets it apart from previous work on organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the National Civic Federation (NCF) during this era.I hav…
Winter in America
Journal Article Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution Get access Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution. By Daniel Robert McClure. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xvi, 448 pp. Cloth, $95.00. Paper, $34.95.) Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works …
American Exceptionalism Redux
A medical anthropologist’s analysis of pandemic attitudes in her Midwestern hometown draws on social science to explain lack of trust in expertise. But Americans had much greater trust in science and vaccines in the mid-twentieth century
Keneshia N. Grant. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Keneshia Grant’s The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century examines how the 6.5 million Black migrants who left the South between 1915 and 1965 helped transform political regimes in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Grant is a political scientist, which means her primary arguments and methodologies are situated in political science. But historians of urban history, polit…
Beyond the New Deal Order
In 1989, Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, a collection of essays that provided a much-needed framework (and name) for an era bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and defined by the ideas and political networks of a liberal, reform-oriented Democratic Party. Anchored by the voting power of labor unions and dedicated to the progressive potential of a strong federal government, the New Deal …
Global Development
This is a wide-ranging, transnational history of “development” during the Cold War era from the perspective of both powerful donor countries and “Third World” recipient countries. One of the book's most valuable contributions is this reframing, in which the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union are all in one boat, using foreign aid to further their own political and economic agendas, while leaders of recipient, target countries were consum…
The Industrialists
Founded in 1895, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) helped make manufacturing the basis of the US economy and a major source of jobs in the twentieth century. This book traces the history of the advocacy group from its origins to today, examining its role in shaping modern capitalism, while also highlighting the many tensions and contradictions within the organization that sometimes hampered its mission. The book argues that NAM—an o…
The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago
Review of: The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire, by Robert E. Weems, Jr
Oliver Ayers. Laboured Protest
Oliver Ayers’s well-researched and smartly argued book Laboured Protest: Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit during the New Deal and Second World War challenges the idea that there was a meaningful “proletarian turn” to black activism during the 1930s and 1940s or even any concrete achievements that could be attributed to what some historians have called “the long civil rights movement.” The author is circumspect and diplomatic in pre…
Red, Black, White
Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950. By Mary Stanton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. xiv, 215 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, $29.95.) Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 1031–1032,…
Who Tells Your Story
From 1948 to 1960, an executive secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) attempted to persuade NAM leaders to commission an “objective” history of the organization. The project never came to fruition, but the story reveals a fundamental split within the NAM between its professional staff and its conservative leadership over the organization’s mission. It thus offers a unique perspective on the NAM not as a powerful lobby, but …
From Selma to Moscow
As its title suggests, this book argues that human rights activists transformed U.S. foreign policy during the “long sixties” (1961–1977). Covering the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the book details human rights activism in the United States, including Americans' response to white rule in Rhodesia, the plight of Soviet Jews, and military coups in Greece, South Korea, and Chile. Sarah B. Snyder researc…
David Goldfield. The Gifted Generation
In The Gifted Generation David Goldfield argues that when America was “great”—back in the 1950s and 1960s—it was because its government embraced a public-minded activism that gifted an entire generation with the benefits of education, infrastructure, economic opportunity, scientific discoveries, and expanding notions of inclusiveness. The first part of the book is a narrative history of the post–World War II era based mainly on secondary sources …
Why the American Center Held—and Then Fell Apart
What was remarkable about the era of liberal consensus was not just its relative economic equality, but also the widespread, bipartisan, cross-class agreement about the nature of politics and government
Spider Web
"Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism by Nick Fischer." Canadian Journal of History, 52(3), pp. 616–617
Racial Realignment
Apparently these are political scientists who argue that national party elites were responsible for the civil rights realignment that, they say, occurred in the 1960s. The political scientist Eric Schickler challenges this view, arguing instead that a coalition of African Americans, labor activists, and urban liberals had already aligned economic liberalism and civil rights within the Democratic party by the late 1930s, consolidating power in non…
Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace
Rethinking the 1950s
Historians generally portray the 1950s as a conservative era when anticommunism and the Cold War subverted domestic reform, crushed political dissent, and ended liberal dreams of social democracy. These years, historians tell us, represented a turn to the right, a negation of New Deal liberalism, an end to reform. Jennifer A. Delton argues that, far from subverting the New Deal state, anticommunism and the Cold War enabled, fulfilled, and even su…
Jonathan Bell. California Crucible
In this ambitious book, Jonathan Bell argues that the New Deal was alive and well in California in the 1950s; that neither the Cold War nor the Right killed it; and that a new generation of left-liberal activists adapted New Deal ideas about welfare, labor, and social rights to a subsequent era of political inclusion in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas most historians see a disjuncture between the economic politics of the 1930s and the identity polit…
Constructing affirmative action
Constructing affirmative action: the struggle for equal employment opportunity, by David Hamilton Golland." Labor History, 53(2), pp. 316–317
Inventing Equal Opportunity
Historians of civil rights and affirmative action may be familiar with Frank Dobbin’s 1998 article in the American Journal of Sociology, where he argued that in a “weak state” civil rights reforms won in the political arena were actually created and implemented in the private sector by personnel managers and human resources departments (Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State”). Dobbin builds on that argument in this book, …
Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990
In the space of about thirty years – from 1964 to 1994 – American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasi…
Before the EEOC
This article examines how the human-relations managerial techniques of the 1950s prepared large companies for the mandated racial integration required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after 1964. Drawing from management's “howto” publications, as well as archival materials from the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation, the article expands on recent work that has emphasized the importance of internal labor markets,…
Right Turn
This book is an informative, insightful account of the career of a once-popular opinion-maker named John T. Flynn. Flynn began his career in the late 1920s, writing columns on economics for Colliers, the Globe, and eventually the New Republic. His condemnations of American business gained him a reputation as a liberal, even a leftist. He was an editor for John Dewey's journal Common Sense, and his lectures were broadcast on socialist stations. Jo…
Red, Black, White
Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950. By Mary Stanton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. xiv, 215 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, $29.95.) Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 1031–1032,…
Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace
From Selma to Moscow
As its title suggests, this book argues that human rights activists transformed U.S. foreign policy during the “long sixties” (1961–1977). Covering the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the book details human rights activism in the United States, including Americans' response to white rule in Rhodesia, the plight of Soviet Jews, and military coups in Greece, South Korea, and Chile. Sarah B. Snyder researc…
Inventing Equal Opportunity
Historians of civil rights and affirmative action may be familiar with Frank Dobbin’s 1998 article in the American Journal of Sociology, where he argued that in a “weak state” civil rights reforms won in the political arena were actually created and implemented in the private sector by personnel managers and human resources departments (Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State”). Dobbin builds on that argument in this book, …
Before the EEOC
This article examines how the human-relations managerial techniques of the 1950s prepared large companies for the mandated racial integration required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after 1964. Drawing from management's “howto” publications, as well as archival materials from the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation, the article expands on recent work that has emphasized the importance of internal labor markets,…
Right Turn
This book is an informative, insightful account of the career of a once-popular opinion-maker named John T. Flynn. Flynn began his career in the late 1920s, writing columns on economics for Colliers, the Globe, and eventually the New Republic. His condemnations of American business gained him a reputation as a liberal, even a leftist. He was an editor for John Dewey's journal Common Sense, and his lectures were broadcast on socialist stations. Jo…
The Quiet Voices
By exploring the motivations and subsequent behavior of a variety of rabbis in different parts of the South both before and during the civil rights struggle, the contributors in this volume provide a more complete understanding of the involvement of southern rabbis with black civil rights. The essays in this volume are among the first detailed case studies of both well-known and hitherto little-known individuals whose actions were based on their …
The Politics of Equality
Journal Article The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle. By Timothy N. Thurber. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xii, 352 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-231-11046-4. Paper, $18.50, ISBN 0-231-11047-2.) Get access Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volum…
Right Turn
This book is an informative, insightful account of the career of a once-popular opinion-maker named John T. Flynn. Flynn began his career in the late 1920s, writing columns on economics for Colliers, the Globe, and eventually the New Republic. His condemnations of American business gained him a reputation as a liberal, even a leftist. He was an editor for John Dewey's journal Common Sense, and his lectures were broadcast on socialist stations. Jo…
Before the EEOC
This article examines how the human-relations managerial techniques of the 1950s prepared large companies for the mandated racial integration required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after 1964. Drawing from management's “howto” publications, as well as archival materials from the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation, the article expands on recent work that has emphasized the importance of internal labor markets,…
Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990
In the space of about thirty years – from 1964 to 1994 – American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasi…
Constructing affirmative action
Constructing affirmative action: the struggle for equal employment opportunity, by David Hamilton Golland." Labor History, 53(2), pp. 316–317
Inventing Equal Opportunity
Historians of civil rights and affirmative action may be familiar with Frank Dobbin’s 1998 article in the American Journal of Sociology, where he argued that in a “weak state” civil rights reforms won in the political arena were actually created and implemented in the private sector by personnel managers and human resources departments (Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State”). Dobbin builds on that argument in this book, …
Rethinking the 1950s
Historians generally portray the 1950s as a conservative era when anticommunism and the Cold War subverted domestic reform, crushed political dissent, and ended liberal dreams of social democracy. These years, historians tell us, represented a turn to the right, a negation of New Deal liberalism, an end to reform. Jennifer A. Delton argues that, far from subverting the New Deal state, anticommunism and the Cold War enabled, fulfilled, and even su…
Jonathan Bell. California Crucible
In this ambitious book, Jonathan Bell argues that the New Deal was alive and well in California in the 1950s; that neither the Cold War nor the Right killed it; and that a new generation of left-liberal activists adapted New Deal ideas about welfare, labor, and social rights to a subsequent era of political inclusion in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas most historians see a disjuncture between the economic politics of the 1930s and the identity polit…
Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace
Why the American Center Held—and Then Fell Apart
What was remarkable about the era of liberal consensus was not just its relative economic equality, but also the widespread, bipartisan, cross-class agreement about the nature of politics and government
Spider Web
"Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism by Nick Fischer." Canadian Journal of History, 52(3), pp. 616–617
Racial Realignment
Apparently these are political scientists who argue that national party elites were responsible for the civil rights realignment that, they say, occurred in the 1960s. The political scientist Eric Schickler challenges this view, arguing instead that a coalition of African Americans, labor activists, and urban liberals had already aligned economic liberalism and civil rights within the Democratic party by the late 1930s, consolidating power in non…
David Goldfield. The Gifted Generation
In The Gifted Generation David Goldfield argues that when America was “great”—back in the 1950s and 1960s—it was because its government embraced a public-minded activism that gifted an entire generation with the benefits of education, infrastructure, economic opportunity, scientific discoveries, and expanding notions of inclusiveness. The first part of the book is a narrative history of the post–World War II era based mainly on secondary sources …
Who Tells Your Story
From 1948 to 1960, an executive secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) attempted to persuade NAM leaders to commission an “objective” history of the organization. The project never came to fruition, but the story reveals a fundamental split within the NAM between its professional staff and its conservative leadership over the organization’s mission. It thus offers a unique perspective on the NAM not as a powerful lobby, but …
From Selma to Moscow
As its title suggests, this book argues that human rights activists transformed U.S. foreign policy during the “long sixties” (1961–1977). Covering the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford, the book details human rights activism in the United States, including Americans' response to white rule in Rhodesia, the plight of Soviet Jews, and military coups in Greece, South Korea, and Chile. Sarah B. Snyder researc…
The Industrialists
Founded in 1895, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) helped make manufacturing the basis of the US economy and a major source of jobs in the twentieth century. This book traces the history of the advocacy group from its origins to today, examining its role in shaping modern capitalism, while also highlighting the many tensions and contradictions within the organization that sometimes hampered its mission. The book argues that NAM—an o…
The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago
Review of: The Merchant Prince of Black Chicago: Anthony Overton and the Building of a Financial Empire, by Robert E. Weems, Jr
Oliver Ayers. Laboured Protest
Oliver Ayers’s well-researched and smartly argued book Laboured Protest: Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit during the New Deal and Second World War challenges the idea that there was a meaningful “proletarian turn” to black activism during the 1930s and 1940s or even any concrete achievements that could be attributed to what some historians have called “the long civil rights movement.” The author is circumspect and diplomatic in pre…
Red, Black, White
Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950. By Mary Stanton. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. xiv, 215 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, $29.95.) Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 1031–1032,…
Beyond the New Deal Order
In 1989, Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, a collection of essays that provided a much-needed framework (and name) for an era bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and defined by the ideas and political networks of a liberal, reform-oriented Democratic Party. Anchored by the voting power of labor unions and dedicated to the progressive potential of a strong federal government, the New Deal …
Global Development
This is a wide-ranging, transnational history of “development” during the Cold War era from the perspective of both powerful donor countries and “Third World” recipient countries. One of the book's most valuable contributions is this reframing, in which the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union are all in one boat, using foreign aid to further their own political and economic agendas, while leaders of recipient, target countries were consum…
American Exceptionalism Redux
A medical anthropologist’s analysis of pandemic attitudes in her Midwestern hometown draws on social science to explain lack of trust in expertise. But Americans had much greater trust in science and vaccines in the mid-twentieth century
Keneshia N. Grant. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Keneshia Grant’s The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century examines how the 6.5 million Black migrants who left the South between 1915 and 1965 helped transform political regimes in Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Grant is a political scientist, which means her primary arguments and methodologies are situated in political science. But historians of urban history, polit…
Winter in America
Journal Article Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution Get access Winter in America: A Cultural History of Neoliberalism, from the Sixties to the Reagan Revolution. By Daniel Robert McClure. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. xvi, 448 pp. Cloth, $95.00. Paper, $34.95.) Jennifer Delton Jennifer Delton Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Search for other works …
Political science (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Race, History, and American Society (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · History (8 works) · American History and Culture (7 works)