David M. Oshinsky

Here David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and beyond. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. He also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family.Oshinsky offers an insightful look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor, it revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America. Oshinsky also shows how the polio experience revolutionized the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in baby-booming America--increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed--the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of terror over daily life.Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto postwar America.

David Oshinsky chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort.

Prisons in the deep South, with chain gangs, shotguns, and bloodhounds, have been immortalized in movies, blues music, and fiction. Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary was the grandfather of them all, a hellhole where conditions were brutal. This epic history fills the gap between slavery and the civil rights era, showing how Parchman and Jim Crow justice proved that there could be something worse than slavery.

Acclaimed historian David Oshinsky's chronicling of the life of Senator Joe McCarthy has been called both "nuanced" and "masterful." In this new paperback edition Oshinsky presents us with a work heralded as the finest account available of Joe McCarthy's colorful career. With a storyteller's eye for the dramatic and presentation of fact, and insightful interpretation of human complexity, Oshinsky uncovers the layers of myth to show the true McCarthy. His book reveals the senator from his humble beginnings as a hardworking Irish farmer's son in Wisconsin to his glory days as the architect of America's Cold War crusade against domestic subversion; a man whose advice if heeded, some believe, might have halted the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and beyond.A Conspiracy So Immense reveals the internal and external forces that launched McCarthy on this political career, carried him to national prominence, and finally triggered his decline and fall. More than the life of an intensly- even pathologically- ambitious man however, this book is a fascinating portrait of America in the grip of Cold War fear, anger, suspician, and betrayal. Complete with a new Foreword, A Conspiracy So Immense will continue to keep in the spotlight this historical figure-a man who worked so hard to prosecute "criminals" whose ideals work against that of his- for America.

In his first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story, renowned historian David Oshinsky takes a new and closer look at the Supreme Court's controversial and much-debated stances on capital punishment-in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia.Career criminal William Furman shot and killed a homeowner during a 1967 burglary in Savannah, Georgia. Because it was a "black-on-white" crime in the racially troubled South, it also was an open-and-shut case. The trial took less than a day, and the nearly all-white jury rendered a death sentence. Aided by the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, Furman's African-American attorney, Bobby Mayfield, doggedly appealed the verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1972 overturned Furman's sentence by a narrow 5-4 vote, ruling that Georgia's capital punishment statute, and by implication all other state death-penalty laws, was so arbitrary and capricious as to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."Furman effectively, if temporarily, halted capital punishment in the United States. Every death row inmate across the nation was resentenced to life in prison. The decision, however, did not rule the death penalty per se to be unconstitutional; rather, it struck down the laws that currently governed its application, leaving the states free to devise new ones that the Court might find acceptable. And this is exactly what happened. In the coming years, the Supreme Court would uphold an avalanche of state legislation endorsing the death penalty. Capital punishment would return stronger than ever, with many more defendants sentenced to death and eventually executed.Oshinsky demonstrates the troubling roles played by race and class and region in capital punishment. And he concludes by considering the most recent Supreme Court death-penalty cases involving minors and the mentally ill, as well as the impact of international opinion. Compact and engaging, Oshinsky's masterful study reflects a gift for empathy, an eye for the telling anecdote and portrait, and a talent for clarifying the complex and often confusing legal issues surrounding capital punishment.

In 1935, the abrupt dismissal of a German professor at Rutgers University received national attention, arousing the interest of the FBI, ACLU and N.J. state officials, and inciting a university hearing and report. Twenty-six-year-old Lienhard Bergel's contract was terminated, allegedly because of lack of funding, but in fact Bergel's politics clashed with department chair Friedrich J. Hauptmann's pro-Nazi views. Bergel's departure from Rutgers occurred amid a flurry of controversy that polarized students and administrators alike. Alan Silver, who had been a student activist in 1935, republicized the Bergel incident in 1985, prompting this volume. The authors, all Rutgers history faculty, here offer a chronicle of the school as well as re-create the political climate of those earlier times. However, a larger story never emerges from their assembled details. Vital matters, such as freedom of speech, the politics of academia and the activities of student peace groups, are obscured by a long roster of names and dates. Bergel's involvement with the FBI (he gave the agency information on Hauptmann's Nazi activities) is considered only in passing. Hauptmann's collaboration with the Nazis, a fascinating story, and his eventual repatriation during the war to Germany, is told too briefly. Though perhaps a document useful to Rutgers academics, the book is unlikely to command widespread attention. Illustrations not seen by PW.

AMERICAN PASSAGES places a unique emphasis on time as the defining nature of history--how events lead to other events, actions, changes, and often-unexpected outcomes. The authors offer students a sensible, step-by-step, compelling narrative with balanced coverage of political, economic, social, cultural, military, religious, and intellectual history. Available in the following split options: AMERICAN PASSAGES, BRIEF, Fourth Edition (Chapters 1-30), ISBN: 978-0-495-90921-7; Volume I: To 1877 (Chapters 1-15), ISBN: 978-0-495-91520-1; Volume II: Since 1865 (Chapters 15-30), ISBN: 978-0-495-91521-8.Kindle textbooks are functionally equivalent to the print textbook. In some cases, individual items such as ancillary images or multimedia have been removed for digital delivery due to rights restrictions.

Describes the efforts of organized labor to combat the conservative influence on American politics of the former Wisconsin senator and illustrates the effect of labor's measures on McCarthy's career

American Passages, International Edition places a unique emphasis on time as the defining nature of history - how events lead to other events, actions, changes, and often-unexpected outcomes. The authors offer students a sensible, step-by-step, compelling narrative with balanced coverage of political, economic, social, cultural, military, religious, and intellectual history. Available split into 2 volumes.

Conspiracy So Immense by Oshinsky. Oxford University Press,2006

New Jersey Volume 100, Numbers 1-2 (Spring/Summer 1982), edited by Mark E. Lender. Paperback periodical. "Fort Monmouth and The Victims Remember" by David M. Oshinsky; "The European Origins of New Jersey's Eighteenth-Century Population" by Thomas L. Purvis; "New Jersey Wealth-holding and the Republican Congressional Victory of 1800" by Lee Soltow & Kenneth W. Keller; "Bimson's Or, How the Paterson Police Helped to Spread the 1913 Strike" by Steve Golin, plus book reviews.

A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy is the Hardeman Prize winning book by David Oshinsky first published in 1983 by Free Press and later reprinted by Oxford University Press. The book covers the life of Joseph McCarthy from his birth to his death.