Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition

Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition PDF

Author: Robert David Johnson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780674260603

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Gruening is perhaps best known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. However, as Johnson shows here, it's Gruening's sixty-year public career in its entirety that provides an opportunity for historians to explore continuity and change in dissenting thought in twentieth-century America.

The Global Interior

The Global Interior PDF

Author: Megan Black

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0674989600

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Megan Black argues that the U.S. Department of the Interior, known for managing domestic natural resources and operating public parks, constantly supports and projects American power abroad. In the guise of sharing expertise globally, Interior has helped the U.S. maintain key benefits of empire without the burden of playing the imperialist villain.

Peace, War, and Partnership

Peace, War, and Partnership PDF

Author: William A. Taylor

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1648431380

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Covering the period from World War II through the Trump presidency, Peace, War, and Partnership: Congress and the Military since World War II unpacks the vital and dynamic relationship between Congress and the military, two entities that have worked together, at times with different purposes, to solve myriad important issues impacting the United States in both peace and war. Congress and the military have had their periods of cooperation. However, they have also had alternating periods of resistance to each other, based on distinct conceptions of national interests and divergent strategies. Their partnership has been a symbiotic relationship in which one entity or the other has ebbed and flowed in power depending on the circumstances. They have altered each other in far-reaching ways and transformed American society as a result of their liaisons. Peace, War, and Partnership analyzes the significant, powerful, and central relationship between Congress and the military. It investigates intersections of policy, politics, and society to theorize the impact of this relationship on the United States in the modern era. This work also offers a better understanding of earlier attempts by policy makers in Congress and the military to provide national security, contextualizing highly relevant current issues such as military service, proliferation, foreign intervention, national security, joint operations, diplomacy, alliances, mobilization, post-conflict resolution, citizenship, and military innovation. It illuminates crucial questions involving military policies in American democracy, and their sway on America historically and today, sparking and informing public debate about its implications now and for the future.

The Silence of the Rational Center

The Silence of the Rational Center PDF

Author: Stefan Halper

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2007-02-13

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0786722290

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What has happened to American foreign policy? Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke argue that the members of what used to be called the foreign policy establishment are no longer doing the job of keeping our foreign policy informed and rational. Instead, hungry to coin the next Big Idea, they are in the business of advancing simplistic, glib mythologies. The result is that Americans are often presented with a fantasy world of nightmare scenarios rather than with explanations that lead to rational choices. Taking to task such well-known figures as Samuel Huntington, Noam Chomsky, and Jeffrey Sachs, Halper and Clarke argue for a revival of integrity within our foreign policy elite so that America's standing in the world can be restored. A book that pulls no punches, The Silence of the Rational Center is both a penetrating diagnosis and a stirring call to reform in what is possibly the most important area of American political life.

Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West

Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West PDF

Author: Steven L. Danver

Publisher: CQ Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 888

ISBN-13: 1506354912

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The Encyclopedia of Politics in the American West is an A to Z reference work on the political development of one of America’s most politically distinct, not to mention its fastest growing, region. This work will cover not only the significant events and actors of Western politics, but also deal with key institutional, historical, environmental, and sociopolitical themes and concepts that are important to more fully understanding the politics of the West over the last century.

The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War

The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War PDF

Author: David L. Anderson, John Ernst

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0813127300

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More than three decades after the withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War still resonates in political and cultural discourse and still motivates vibrant historical inquiry. [In this book, the editors] present the newest perspectives on the war in Vietnam, from the homefront to Ho Chi Minh City, from the government halls to the hotbeds of activist opposition. The seventeen essays compiled by David L. Anderson and John Ernst examine Vietnamese as well as American experiences of the grueling conflict, breaking new ground on questions relating to gender, religion, ideology, media, and public opinion. The [book] sheds new light on the evolving historical meanings of the Vietnam War, its enduring impact, and its potential to influence future political and military decision-making, in times of peace as well as war.-Dust jacket.

How to Hide an Empire

How to Hide an Empire PDF

Author: Daniel Immerwahr

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0374715122

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Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

Hope and Fear in Margaret Chase Smith's America

Hope and Fear in Margaret Chase Smith's America PDF

Author: Gregory P. Gallant

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-09-24

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0739179861

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Hope and Fear in Margaret Chase Smith's America: A Continuous Tangle provides a fresh interpretation of the life, career, and legacy of former United States Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman elected to both houses of the U.S. Congress. The book examines the critical connections made by Smith to key policymakers, links that allowed her to overcome opposition and prejudice to gain access, influence, and power in Washington, D.C. Highlighting the tangle of personalities and events in America from 1940 to 1972, the book focuses on Smith’s courageous and often solitary efforts on behalf of women during the 1940s, and her stand during the McCarthy era which earned her a national reputation for civility in public discourse. It also examines her key interactions with the group of U.S. Senators who were elected with her in 1948 and their work to forge public policy in the aftermath of McCarthyism, including domestic and international policy following Sputnik, the creation of the Space Program, civil rights, Vietnam, and Medicare. Against these events and activities, the book demonstrates the impact of the nation’s commitment to anticommunism and nuclear weapons which allowed politicians like Margaret Chase Smith to embrace contradictory stances on political dissent, military policy, and the role of government in American society.

Charlie Brown's America

Charlie Brown's America PDF

Author: Blake Scott Ball

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0190090480

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Despite--or because of--its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang. In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years, Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table. Most people have come to associate Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, not the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some have even argued that Peanuts was so beloved because it was apolitical. The truth, as Blake Scott Ball shows, is that Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of a nuclear world, Peanuts was a daily conversation about very real hopes and fears and the political realities of the Cold War world. As thousands of fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents reveal, Charles Schulz used his comic strip to project his ideas to a mass audience and comment on the rapidly changing politics of America. Charlie Brown's America covers all of these debates and much more in a historical journey through the tumultuous decades of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.