Fighting Words

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1930s
20th century
A01=Nancy F. Cott
adults
Age Group_Uncategorized
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americans abroad
Author_Nancy F. Cott
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biography
books
Category1=Non-Fiction
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Category=DNBH
Category=DNBZ
Category=KNTJ
Category=KNTP2
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
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europe adventure
foreign correspondents
Gatsby era
history
interwar period
jazz age
journalism
Language_English
media
memoir
men
nonfiction
PA=Available
paris
political
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
sexual revolution books
softlaunch
women
world war one two

Product details

  • ISBN 9781541699335
  • Weight: 620g
  • Dimensions: 158 x 236mm
  • Publication Date: 16 Apr 2020
  • Publisher: Basic Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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At a time when print media reigned supreme and newspapers were legion, Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, and Rayna Raphaelson Prohme impulsively left their homes to reinvent themselves as international journalists and adopt the power of the press as their own. In Fighting Words, acclaimed historian Nancy F. Cott follows these four largely unknown young Americans to reveal how foreign journalism shaped America's sense of its place in the world.

Dorothy, John, Vincent, and Rayna serve as a counter to the devil-may-care jazz babies of the 1920s who scandalized their elders to no purpose beyond frivolity. Instead, the four directly confronted major political challenges that still reverberate today- democracy versus authoritarianism, global responsibility versus isolationism, press objectivity versus propaganda. They revealed the political instability that circled most of the globe as a legacy of the redrawing of world order after World War I. By the early 1930s, unlike Americans at home fixated on the Depression and New Deal, they were in the antifascist vanguard, well aware of Hitler's impending menace. At the same time, they were actively rethinking relationships between men and women. All four navigated sexual affairs and frictions, marriages and divorces. Their experiences traced the development not only of international journalism but also the making of the modern self at a time when the value of sexual freedom grated against traditional morality.

A group biography of four extraordinary Americans abroad, and a paean to a golden age of journalism, Fighting Words shows how these young cosmopolitans reshaped America's sense of its own place in the world.

Nancy F. Cott is a professor of American history at Harvard University and the former director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of six previous books, including Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.