Dixie Looks Abroad
Dixie Looks Abroad

Author: Joseph A. Fry

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780807127452

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As America's most self-conscious section, the South has exercised an important and often decisive influence on U.S. foreign relations, but the extent of this influence has been largely unexplored by historians. In this groundbreaking study, Joseph A. Fry provides a comprehensive overview of the South's role in U.S. international involvement from 1789 to 1973, revealing the enormous impact of southern pressure on broader national interests. In a gracefully written and engaging narrative, Fry chronicles the South's numerous foreign policy opinions over time, including its opposition to closer relations with Great Britain and war with France in the 1790s, its leadership in the War of 1812, its flawed diplomatic attempts during the years of the Confederacy, and its fifty-year protest against the increasingly assertive Republican-dominated political agenda following the Civil War. With the election of Woodrow Wilson, Fry shows, the South reversed its tendency toward isolationism and consistently supported Wilson's activist foreign policies. The South sustained this interventionist mind-set into the 1970s, ardently supporting cold war containment policy. Fry is careful to note that southerners seldom presented a completely united front on foreign affairs. Yet even while disagreeing among themselves, he argues, they consistently viewed the world through a distinctly southern lens and acted on a variety of perceived common interests, including a dedication to honor and patriotism, a determination to protect slavery, a proclivity for personal violence, a commitment to partisan politics, a concern for economics, and a preoccupation with race. Though the South's foreign policy opinions varied widely through the years, Fry's extraordinary work affirms that Dixie has always held considerable clout on the world stage.

Letters from the Southern Home Front
Letters from the Southern Home Front

Author: Joseph A. Fry

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2022-10-05

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0807178810

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Joseph A. Fry’s Letters from the Southern Home Front explores the diversity of public opinion on the Vietnam War within the American South. Fry examines correspondence sent by hundreds of individuals, of differing ages, genders, racial backgrounds, political views, and economic status, reflecting a broad swath of the southern population. These letters, addressed to high-profile political figures and influential newspapers, took up a myriad of war-related issues. Their messages enhance our understanding of the South and the United States as a whole as we continue to grapple with the significance of this devastating and divisive conflict.

Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era
Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era

Author: Joseph A. Fry

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2019-04-05

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0813177146

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The Civil War marked a significant turning point in American history—not only for the United States itself but also for its relations with foreign powers both during and after the conflict. The friendship and foreign policy partnership between President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Henry Seward shaped those US foreign policies. These unlikely allies, who began as rivals during the 1860 presidential nomination, helped ensure that America remained united and prospered in the aftermath of the nation's consuming war. In Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, Joseph A. Fry examines the foreign policy decisions that resulted from this partnership and the legacy of those decisions. Lincoln and Seward, despite differences in upbringing, personality, and social status, both adamantly believed in the preservation of the union and the need to stymie slavery. They made that conviction the cornerstone of their policies abroad, and through those policies, such as Seward threatening war with any nation that intervened in the Civil War, they prevented European intervention that could have led to Northern defeat. The Union victory allowed America to resume imperial expansion, a dynamic that Seward sustained beyond Lincoln's death during his tenure as President Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State. Fry's analysis of the Civil War from an international perspective and the legacy of US policy decisions provides a more complete view of the war and a deeper understanding of this crucial juncture in American history.

A Warring Nation
A Warring Nation

Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0813934753

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In this culminating work of a long and distinguished career, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown looks at the theme of honor—a subject on which he was the acknowledged expert—and places it in a broader historical and cultural context than ever before. Wyatt-Brown begins with the contention that honor cannot be understood without considering the role of humiliation, which not only sets victor apart from vanquished but drives the search for vindication that is integral to notions of honor. The American conception of honor is further deepened by issues of race. The author turns to the slave South to show how white and black concepts of honor differed from and contradicted each other, illuminating honor’s elusive but powerful role in our society. He then goes on to explore these themes within a wide range of military and political contexts, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, providing new insights on how honor drove decision making during many defining events in our history that continue to reverberate in the American mind.

The Cold War at Home and Abroad
The Cold War at Home and Abroad

Author: Andrew L. Johns

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2018-08-10

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0813175755

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From President Truman's use of a domestic propaganda agency to Ronald Reagan's handling of the Soviet Union during his 1984 reelection campaign, the American political system has consistently exerted a profound effect on the country's foreign policies. Americans may cling to the belief that "politics stops at the water's edge," but the reality is that parochial political interests often play a critical role in shaping the nation's interactions with the outside world. In The Cold War at Home and Abroad: Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy since 1945, editors Andrew L. Johns and Mitchell B. Lerner bring together eleven essays that reflect the growing methodological diversity that has transformed the field of diplomatic history over the past twenty years. The contributors examine a spectrum of diverse domestic factors ranging from traditional issues like elections and Congressional influence to less frequently studied factors like the role of religion and regionalism, and trace their influence on the history of US foreign relations since 1945. In doing so, they highlight influences and ideas that expand our understanding of the history of American foreign relations, and provide guidance and direction for both contemporary observers and those who shape the United States' role in the world. This expansive volume contains many lessons for politicians, policy makers, and engaged citizens as they struggle to implement a cohesive international strategy in the face of hyper-partisanship at home and uncertainty abroad.

Albert Gore, Sr.
Albert Gore, Sr.

Author: Anthony J. Badger

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0812250729

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In chronicling the life and career of Albert Gore, Sr., historian Anthony J. Badger seeks not just to explore the successes and failures of an important political figure who spent more than three decades in the national eye—and whose son would become Vice President of the United States—but also to explain the dramatic changes in the South that led to national political realignment. Born on a small farm in the hills of Tennessee, Gore served in Congress from 1938 to 1970, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate. During that time, the United States became a global superpower and the South a two party desegregated region. Gore, whom Badger describes as a policy-oriented liberal, saw the federal government as the answer to the South's problems. He held a resilient faith, according to Badger, in the federal government to regulate wages and prices in World War II, to further social welfare through the New Deal and the Great Society, and to promote economic growth and transform the infrastructure of the South. Gore worked to make Tennessee the "atomic capital" of the nation and to protect the Tennessee Valley Authority, while at the same time cosponsoring legislation to create the national highway system. He was more cautious in his approach to civil rights; though bolder than his moderate Southern peers, he struggled to adjust to the shifting political ground of the 1960s. His career was defined by his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, whose Vietnam policies Gore bitterly opposed. The injection of Christian perspectives into the state's politics ultimately distanced Gore's worldview from that of his constituents. Altogether, Gore's political rise and fall, Badger argues, illuminates the significance of race, religion, and class in the creation of the modern South.

Reconstructions
Reconstructions

Author: Thomas J. Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-11-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0190291915

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The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

Local Consequences of the Global Cold War
Local Consequences of the Global Cold War

Author: Jeffrey A. Engel

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780804759472

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Up to now the study of cold war history has been fully engaged in stressing the international character and broad themes of the story. This volume turns such diplomatic history upside down by studying how actions of international relations affected local popular life. Each chapter has its origins in a major international issue, and then unfolds the consequences of that issue for some region or city. Thus the starting points for the various contributions are great unifying questions regarding postwar occupation, militarization, industrialization, and decolonization. But the ending points are small and dispersed, such as movies in Japan, race relations in the American South, forests in East Germany, and industry in Novosibirsk. Collectively, these stories show how the cold war affected every facet of life--East and West, urban and rural, in developed and developing nations, in the superpowers and on the periphery of the international system.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight
Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight

Author: Jeanette Keith

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0807875899

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During World War I, thousands of rural southern men, black and white, refused to serve in the military. Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states. Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas. Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America.

Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations
Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations

Author: Daniel S. Margolies

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 0820338710

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In the late nineteenth century the United States oversaw a great increase in extraterritorial claims, boundary disputes, extradition controversies, and transborder abduction and interdiction. In this sweeping history of the underpinnings of American empire, Daniel S. Margolies offers a new frame of analysis for historians to understand how novel assertions of legal spatiality and extraterritoriality were deployed in U.S. foreign relations during an era of increased national ambitions and global connectedness. Whether it was in the Mexican borderlands or in other hot spots around the globe, Margolies shows that American policy responded to disputes over jurisdiction by defining the space of law on the basis of a strident unilateralism. Especially significant and contested were extradition regimes and the exceptions carved within them. Extradition of fugitives reflected critical questions of sovereignty and the role of the state in foreign affair during the run-up to overseas empire in 1898. Using extradition as a critical lens, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations examines the rich embeddedness of questions of sovereignty, territoriality, legal spatiality, and citizenship and shows that U.S. hegemonic power was constructed in significant part in the spaces of law, not simply through war or trade.