Perceptions of China and White House Decision-Making, 1941-1963

Perceptions of China and White House Decision-Making, 1941-1963

Author: Adam S.R. Bartley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1000766489

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This book assesses and evaluates the decision-making behavior of United States presidents and their chief advisers from Roosevelt to Kennedy pertaining to China. Seeking to dispel with the notion that each administration sought policy outcomes on the basis of a rational decision-making model, Bartley highlights the contradictions of adopted presidential decision-making processes and the nature of domestic politics as playing prejudicial and debilitating roles. The book demonstrates that elite decision-making processes interacted with assumptions made about Chinese behavior, interests, and attitudes only superficially and in some cases not at all. Misinformation and misperception were the natural outcomes. Reinforced by the politics of McCarthyism at home, intellectual debate on China policy was squashed, parochialism and nuance were shunned, and information was closed off. Ultimately, a divorce between the norm of behavior and the search for rational policy was registered in each administration. The net result was a lasting and destructive cognitive dissonance: to fit expectations of a China reality constructed, information was ignored, overlooked, and distorted. Offering new insights into the China policies of consecutive administrations from 1941 to 1963, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of American foreign policy, security studies, and international relations.


A Brief History of the Subordination of African Americans in the U.S.

A Brief History of the Subordination of African Americans in the U.S.

Author: Alexander Polikoff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-07

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 100003500X

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This "brief history" presents the essential story of the subordination of African Americans in the U.S., captured in a 1968 cartoon by Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti. The drawing is of a black man handcuffed to a wall with cuffs labeled "White Racism." The caption reads, "Why don’t they lift themselves up by their own bootstraps like we did?" Bootstraps shows just how little lift-up there has been, and how the handcuffs of white racism have been and continue to be the cause. Unique in its combination of comprehensiveness and brevity, Bootstraps is written in language for the general reader; yet its extensive endnotes will make it useful to both scholars and students. Its succinct overview of the subordination history includes an in-depth treatment of residential segregation – a legacy of slavery and a central problem of our time – and a response to the view that today’s racial inequality is due largely to African Americans’ own moral and cultural failures. By addressing a serious omission in the way we have educated our children, the book’s narration of our white racism history may make a contribution to a much-needed confrontation with our racist past.


The Digital Global Condition

The Digital Global Condition

Author: Elizabeth Kath

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-06-21

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 9811999805

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This book explores how globalization and ubiquity of digital technology combine to create specific global impacts, challenges and opportunities. Although globalization is already associated with the speeding up of interactions and change, digital globalization is characterized by immediacy. The utter pervasiveness opens new global vulnerabilities at international, national, social and personal levels. The Digital Global Condition examines the nature of digital globalization, enabling us to not only inhabit a digital world, but also to understand it, even to live well in it.


An Unfamiliar America

An Unfamiliar America

Author: Ari Helo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1000218333

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This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies, given that it has been recently challenged by the influential memory studies boom. As much as identity-building appears to be the central concern for much of the current practice in American history writing, it is worth keeping in mind that historical truth may not always directly contribute to one's identity-building. The researcher’s constant quest for truth does not equate to already possessing it. History changes all the time, because it consists of our constant reinterpretation of the past. It is only the past that does not change. This collection aims at keeping these two apart, while scrutinizing a variety of contested topics in American history, from xenophobic attitudes toward eighteenth-century university professors, Apache masculinity, Ku Klux Klan, Tom Waits's lyrics, and the politics of the Trump era.


Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America

Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America

Author: James O’Neil Spady

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1000047334

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This is the first historical monograph to demonstrate settler colonialism’s significance for Early America. Based on a nuanced reading of the archive and using a comparative approach, the book treats settler colonialism as a process rather than a coherent ideology. Spady shows that learning was a central site of colonial struggle in the South, in which Native Americans, Africans, and European settlers acquired and exploited each other’s knowledge and practices. Learned skills, attitudes, and ideas shaped the economy and culture of the region and produced challenges to colonial authority. Factions of enslaved people and of Native American communities devised new survival and resistance strategies. Their successful learning challenged settler projects and desires, and white settlers gradually responded. Three developments arose as a pattern of racialization: settlers tried to prohibit literacy for the enslaved, remove indigenous communities, and initiate some of North America's earliest schools for poorer whites. Fully instituted by the end of the 1820s, settler colonization’s racialization of learning in the South endured beyond the Civil War and Reconstruction.


George W Bush Administration Propaganda for an Invasion of Iraq

George W Bush Administration Propaganda for an Invasion of Iraq

Author: Larry Hartenian

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-28

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1000382362

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Hartenian’s history of George W Bush propaganda for an invasion of Iraq returns the administration’s approach to its conceptual origins. Hartenian places "evidence" in the center of his analysis, showing that Rumsfeld’s "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" meant that no evidence was necessary to justify an invasion. The 9/11 attacks, indeed, "changed everything" for the Bush administration and in its aftermath the time for regime change in Iraq had simply come. With no good evidence to support its fears, the administration was certain of a post-9/11-conceived Iraq–al Qaeda "nexus," just as with no evidence except the "absence of evidence" it was certain of Iraqi mastery of "denial and deception" that hid "Saddam’s" "evil" activities. Resting on Cheney’s "one percent doctrine," administration "certainty" of the threat from Iraq required a US invasion. The policy offices of Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, with the help of George Tenet at CIA, would generate a case of such fright and enormity—the "mushroom cloud"—that required administration action. Manipulating intelligence and ignoring the growing body of evidence undermining its case, the Bush administration invaded Iraq to bring about "regime change."


The Overseers of Early American Slavery

The Overseers of Early American Slavery

Author: Laura R. Sandy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-03

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1000048969

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Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.


Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770–1870

Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770–1870

Author: Kay Retzlaff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1000479285

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Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770–1870: Bridget's Belfast examines how Irish immigrants shaped and reshaped their identity in a rural New England community. Forty percent of Irish immigrants to the United States settled in rural areas. Achieving success beyond large urban centers required distinctive ways of performing Irishness. Class, status, and gender were more significant than ethnicity. Close reading of diaries, newspapers, local histories, and public papers allows for nuanced understanding of immigrant lives amid stereotype and the nineteenth century evolution of a Scotch-Irish identity.


Deterrence Theory and Chinese Behavior

Deterrence Theory and Chinese Behavior

Author: Abram N. Shulsky

Publisher: Rand Corporation

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 9780833028532

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China's recent reforms have led to unprecedented economic growth; if this continues, China will be able to turn its great potential power into actual power. The result could be, in the very long term, the rise of China as a rival to the United States as the world's predominant power; in the nearer term, China could become a significant rival in the East Asian region. In this context, the issue for U.S. policy is how to handle a rising power, a problem that predominant powers have faced many times throughout history. It is the contention of this report that the future Sino-U.S. context will illustrate many of the problems of deterrence theory that have been discussed in recent decades; deterrence theory will be, in general, more difficult to apply than it was in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War context. The key may be to seek nonmilitary means of deterrence, i.e., diplomatic ways to manipulate the tension to China's disadvantage.


Congressional Record

Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress

Publisher:

Published: 1952

Total Pages: 1414

ISBN-13:

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The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)