This resource of primary documents and commentary spans the Hayes and McKinley administrations, selecting and describing five to ten of the foremost issues of the day. The actual texts of the presidents' positions, along with the opposing viewpoints, are presented. Helpful background information and commentary clarifies the primary sources, accurately depicting this dynamic time in the country's past and providing an invaluable resource to any student of American history. The period from 1877 to 1901 marked the end of one United States-a country still reeling from the Civil War, a divided nation of Reconstruction, a land of economic depression, sectional hostility, and governmental corruption. A new United States was emerging. It was an empire, an international power that both negotiated with and fought against European nations with great success, and a country with a rebounding economy, vigorous industry, and restored faith. During this Gilded Age, the nation expanded as settlers moved west and displaced native populations. Immigrants entered at the highest rate in the country's history. Geographic expansion gave rise to mighty railroads, and industrial expansion brought corporations, company towns, and monopolies. This unprecedented industrialism bolstered urban growth, yet economic hardships afflicted rural countrysides. Labor and agrarian interests organized.
As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as responsible for spreading the virus. Evangelical leaders, public health officials, and the Reagan administration quickly capitalized on widespread fear of the new disease to call for quarantines, immigration bans, and deportations, scapegoating and blaming HIV-positive migrants—even as the rest of the world regarded the US as the primary exporter of the virus. In The Borders of AIDS, Karma Chávez demonstrates how such calls proliferated and how failure to impose a quarantine for HIV-positive citizens morphed into the successful enactment of a complete ban on the regularization of HIV-positive migrants—which lasted more than twenty years. News reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveal how queer groups and migrant communities built fragile coalitions to fight against the alienation of themselves and others, asserting their capacity for resistance and resiliency. Building on existing histories of HIV/AIDS, public health, citizenship, and immigration, Chávez establishes how politicians and public health officials treated different communities with HIV/AIDS and highlights the work these communities did to resist alienation.
The United States has had a tumultuous monetary and banking history. The bitter Bank War during Andrew Jackson’s presidency meant that the country never developed a central bank in the 1800s. The pre–Civil War monetary standard was deflationary until the fortuitous California gold discovery. Political turmoil erupted later in the nineteenth century over whether the government should freely coin silver. Meanwhile, Congress imposed a banking system that virtually drove bank reserves into stock market speculation. Even when the Federal Reserve was finally established in 1913, it was initially decentralized and unable to effectively respond to the Great Depression. From this narrative emerges a money supply increasingly managed by central banking authorities and increasingly nationalized with the end of the gold standard. Efficient Macro Concept: U.S. Monetary, Industrial, and Foreign Exchange Policies shows that the next step forward is a set of industrial and foreign exchange policy options for driving real growth in the economy. Stronger economic growth is possible through specialized institutions and transactions rooted in the tradition of central banking but flexible and compatible with free enterprise and balanced budgets.
Haiti has long been both a source of immense pride--because of the Haitian Revolution--and of profound disappointment--because of the unshakable realities of poverty, political instability, and violence--to the black diasporic imagination. Charting the long history of these multiple meanings is the focus of Millery Polyne's rich and critical transnational history of U.S. African Americans and Haitians. Stretching from the thoughts and words of American intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Moton, and Claude Barnett to the Civil Rights era, Polyne's temporal scope is breathtaking. But just as impressive is the thematic range of the work, which carefully examines the political, economic, and cultural relations between U.S. African Americans and Haitians. From Douglass to Duvalier examines the creative and critical ways U.S. African Americans and Haitians engaged the idealized tenets of Pan Americanism--mutual cooperation, egalitarianism, and nonintervention between nation-states--in order to strengthen Haiti's social, economic, and political growth and stability. The depth of Polyne's research allows him to speak confidently about the convoluted ways that these groups have viewed modernization, "uplift," and racial unity, as well as the shifting meanings and importance of the concepts over time.