Humanities & Social Sciences
Description
An illuminating account of how Americans have been divided by the very value that unites them.
America today is being torn apart by the struggle over a single concept, deeply rooted in the country's sense of self: freedom. Battered by wave after wave of crises, ordinary people of all political persuasions have come to feel that their freedom is under threat - and with it, nothing less than the soul of the nation.
In The trouble with freedom, journalist and researcher Melissa Butcher takes a trip into the ferociously polarised world of American politics, hoping to find out what's going on beneath the surface. Criss-crossing the country, she talks to a wide range of people: Democrat and Republican, gay and straight, urban and rural, immigrants, First Nations, Black, white, the incarcerated.
What she discovers is that political conflict is often the outcome of very personal experiences of managing cultural change. Exploring the different ways freedom has been used to define what it means to be American, Butcher encounters anger and distrust, but also untapped possibilities for empathy and care.
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America today is being torn apart by the struggle over a single concept, deeply rooted in the country's sense of self: freedom. Battered by wave after wave of crises, ordinary people of all political persuasions have come to feel that their freedom is under threat - and with it, nothing less than the soul of the nation. In The trouble with freedom, journalist and researcher Melissa Butcher takes a trip into the ferociously polarised world of American politics, hoping to find out what's going on beneath the surface. Criss-crossing the country, she talks to a wide range of people: Democrat and Republican, gay and straight, urban and rural, immigrants, First Nations, Black, white, the incarcerated. What she discovers is that political conflict is often the outcome of very personal experiences of managing cultural change. Exploring the different ways freedom has been used to define what it means to be American, Butcher encounters anger and distrust, but also untapped possibilities for empathy and care.
Author Biography
Melissa Butcher is Education Programme Director at the social enterprise Cumberland Lodge and Professor Emeritus of Social and Cultural Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. A former journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, she is the author of two books, five edited collections and numerous pieces of journalism and travelogues.
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Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press is a leading UK publisher known for excellent research in the humanities and social sciences.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Manchester University Press
- Publication Date January 2026
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781526185419 / 1526185415
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- FormatPrint PDF
- Pages296
- ReadershipCollege/higher education; Professional and scholarly
- Publish StatusPublished
- Dimensions234 X 156 mm
- Biblio NotesDerived from Proprietary 6324
- Reference Code16846
