The present volume chronicles Austrian immigration to the United States against the backdrop of bilateral relations between the two countries, across the centuries. While it shows the larger themes and epochs in the ongoing relationship, the individuals that came to America and made their contributions over time are also highlighted. The book is accompanied by a website that provides additional information and multimedia content, allowing for a more complete picture of Austrians in the United States over time.
Political gridlock in Washington... the lingering effects of the financial crisis . . . structural problems such as unemployment and the skills gap of our work force . . . the mediocre K-12 educational system. Are our best days behind us? Joel Kurtzman persuasively shows why all the talk about America's decline is not only baseless but dead wrong. Our best days, are, in fact, ahead of us. Four transformational forces -- unrivaled manufacturing depth, soaring levels of creativity, massive new energy sources, and gigantic amounts of capital waiting to be invested -- have been gathering steam. When combined they will provide the foundation for a much stronger economy, robust growth, and broad-based prosperity that will propel the United States to new heights. One endlessly repeated anxiety is that "we don't make anything here, anymore." The reality, though, is that the US is the world's dominant manufacturing power -- and growing. American companies produce 20 percent of the world's goods in the US and perhaps another 15 to 20 percent outside our country. And much of what we make is recession-proof -- such as software, jetliners, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and food. Kurtzman reveals the stories of the unsung heroes who are the creative force leading the second American century, describing the payoff of the investment in our best minds. American companies have stunning levels of talent and creativity at work in the world's fastest growing economic sectors -- biotech, pharmaceuticals, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, advanced manufacturing, materials science, and aeronautical and space engineering. In these fields, Americans are without peer and consistently break new ground. We are coming to the realization that America is no longer beholden to the despots of foreign energy. Thanks to advances in technology developed in the US, we now have among the world's largest energy reserves, and are richer in energy resources than Saudi Arabia and second only to Russia. These three strengths -- manufacturing, soaring levels of creativity, and energy independence -- will be magnified and synergistically combined with the unprecedented amount of capital that now lies idle. US companies of all types are hoarding cash and securities worth more than 4 trillion -- an amount larger than the world's fourth largest economy, Germany. When the money starts flowing and is invested, it will rapidly propel every part of the economy forward.
This book interrogates the nature of anti-Americanism today and over the last century. It asks several questions: How do we define the phenomenon from different perspectives: political, social, and cultural? What are the historical sources and turning points of anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere? What are its links with anti-Semitic sentiment? Has anti-Americanism been beneficial or self-destructive to its “believers”? Finally, how has the United States responded and why? The authors, scholars from a multitude of countries, tackle the potential political consequences of anti-Americanism in Eastern and Central Europe, the region that has been perceived as strongly pro-American.
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
This is America's story as it has never been told before, with award-winning editor and journalist Harold Evans documenting and celebrating the last hundred years with more than 900 original photographs, cartoons and illustrations.
The hero's journey is a process of (re)discovery of the principles that make up the national identity of a country. These principles must then be applied in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. For the seventh time in its history, America has discovered a grand synthesis of power and morality in projecting its resources and principles into the global arena. This makes possible a more assertive, moral foreign policy course in responding to a range of foreign policy challenges. Of these challenges, Salla asserts, the most profound in terms of the scale of human suffering around the planet is that concerning violations of the rights of ethnic minorities. Ethnic conflicts and the humanitarian crises and massive human rights violations they generate form a foreign policy challenge that will preoccupy the minds of policy makers for much of the 21st century. NATO's intervention in the Kosovo crisis is the high water mark for America's seventh hero's journey. The intervention sends a decisive signal to all governments that the U.S. and its allies will no longer remain inactive in the face of states attempting to militarily repress the aspirations of their ethnic minorities. This moral interventionism can safely be extended well into the 21st century if policy makers wisely combine the moral principles and foreign policy challenges that make up both the Second American Century and America's (Seventh) Hero's journey. This provocative analysis will be of interest to all scholars, students, and researchers involved with the development of American foreign policy.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap "Riveting . . . The most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In The Bin Ladens, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Coll continues where Ghost Wars left off, shedding new light on one of the most elusive families of the twenty-first century. Rising from a famine-stricken desert into luxury, private compounds, and even business deals with Hollywood celebrities, the Bin Ladens have benefited from the tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, suddenly thrust into a world awash in oil, money, and the temptations of the West. But what do these incongruities mean for globalization, the War on Terror, and America's place in the Middle East? Meticulously researched, The Bin Ladens is the story of a remarkably varied and often dangerous family that has used money, mobility, and technology to dramatically different ends.
In 1941 the magazine publishing titan Henry R. Luce urged the nation’s leaders to create an American Century. But in the post-World-War-II era proponents of the American Century faced a daunting task. Even so, Luce had articulated an animating idea that, as William O. Walker III skillfully shows in The Rise and Decline of the American Century, would guide United States foreign policy through the years of hot and cold war. The American Century was, Walker argues, the counter-balance to defensive war during World War II and the containment of communism during the Cold War. American policymakers pursued an aggressive agenda to extend U.S. influence around the globe through control of economic markets, reliance on nation-building, and, where necessary, provision of arms to allied forces. This positive program for the expansion of American power, Walker deftly demonstrates, came in for widespread criticism by the late 1950s. A changing world, epitomized by the nonaligned movement, challenged U.S. leadership and denigrated the market democracy at the heart of the ideal of the American Century. Walker analyzes the international crises and monetary troubles that further curtailed the reach of the American Century in the early 1960s and brought it to a halt by the end of that decade. By 1968, it seemed that all the United States had to offer to allies and non-hostile nations was convenient military might, nuclear deterrence, and the uncertainty of détente. Once the dust had fallen on Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and Richard M. Nixon had taken office, what remained was, The Rise and Decline of the American Century shows, an adulterated, strategically-based version of Luce’s American Century.
