Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reaganwas an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screencareer was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation(GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show General ElectricTheater, where each week his voice and face reached into tens ofmillions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism andfree enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country onbehalf of GE—visiting factories, making speeches at schools, anddoing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence—promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion andantigovernment vision.

Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that theirbrutality was in no way unusual by the standards of their time, buttheir democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.

Turner's sectionalism essays are collected in The Significance of Sections in American History, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1933. Turner's sectionalism thesis had almost as much influence among historians as his frontier thesis, but never became widely known to the general public as did the frontier thesis. He argued that different ethnocultural groups had distinct settlement patterns, and this revealed itself in politics, economics and society.

Roberts (II, D) argues thatprinted commonplace books demonstrate a fundamental early modern modeof reading, that of extractingsententiaefrom texts, and thus erasing theoriginal context of these passages in favor of creating new uses for digestiblecouplets.

How America Fractured Into Four PartsPeople in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?