The American Era
The American Era

Author: Robert J. Lieber

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-09-12

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9781139460231

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American Era makes a provocative argument about America's world role. It sets out the case for a grand strategy that recognizes American preponderance as necessary and desirable for coping with the perils of the post-9/11 world. The book argues firstly that, Militant Islamic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction pose a threat which requires us to alter the way we think about the pre-emptive and preventive use of force. Secondly, the UN and other international bodies are incapable of acting on these urgent problems. Thirdly, in an international system with no true central authority other countries will inevitably look for leadership to the US. The book argues that if America does not respond actively to terrorist threats, no one else will take the initiative.

The End of the American Era
The End of the American Era

Author: Charles Kupchan

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0307428516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Refuting the conventional wisdom that the end of the Cold War cleared the way for an era of peace and prosperity led solely by the United States, Charles A. Kupchan contends that the next challenge to America’s might is fast emerging. It comes not from the Islamic world or an ascendant China, but from an integrating Europe that is rising as a counterweight to the United States. Decades of strategic partnership across the Atlantic are giving way to renewed geopolitical competition. The waning of U.S. primacy will be expedited by America’s own ambivalence about remaining the globe’s guardian and by the impact of the digital age on the country’s politics and its role in the world. By deftly mining the lessons of history to cast light on the present and future, Kupchan explains how America and the world should prepare for the more complex, more unstable road ahead.

Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era
Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era

Author: Joseph S. Nye Jr.

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-08-31

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 069116360X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How presidents forged the American century This book examines the foreign policy decisions of the presidents who presided over the most critical phases of America's rise to world primacy in the twentieth century, and assesses the effectiveness and ethics of their choices. Joseph Nye, who was ranked as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Top Global Thinkers, reveals how some presidents tried with varying success to forge a new international order while others sought to manage America’s existing position. The book shows how transformational presidents like Wilson and Reagan changed how America sees the world, but argues that transactional presidents like Eisenhower and the elder Bush were sometimes more effective and ethical. It also draws important lessons for today’s uncertain world, in which presidential decision making is more critical than ever.

The American Yawp
The American Yawp

Author: Joseph L. Locke

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 670

ISBN-13: 1503608131

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.

At America's Gates
At America's Gates

Author: Erika Lee

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004-01-21

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0807863130

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Liberal
Liberal

Author: Jordan A. Schwarz

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In a decade of growing conservatism, the intellectual and moral assumptions of liberalism from the New Deal to the Great Society have been frequently questioned, criticized, and, at times, distorted. In this, the first full-length biography of Adolf A. Berle, Jr. - braintruster to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Fiorello H. LaGuardia - Jordan A. Schwarz provides a sharply etched portrait of a man who personified the ideas, the vision, and the aspirations that shaped American liberalism in modern times. Drawn from Berle's own writings, including his private papers and diaries, extensive historical research, and in-depth interviews with Berle's colleagues, family, and friends, this monumental study touches upon some f the most important events and figures of the century. Beginning with Berle's intellectually gifted family, and his unusual, accelerated education that created a daunting combination of brilliance and arrogance, an examination of his early years reveals the origins of his lifelong passion for Latin America, his equally long-standing animosity toward Felix Frankfurter, and the serendipity that made him a twenty-three year old advisor on Russia at the Paris Peace Talks after World War I and a colleague of Joseph C. Grew, Walter Lippmann, William Bullitt, John Foster Dulles and brother Allen, and the historian Samuel Eliot Morison ... A truly comprehensive work that looks in to political back rooms, "braintrusting," and informal networks among the most powerful men of the century, Liberal clarifies and revises our understanding of the vision that stoked a half-century of American idealism and well being. -- publisher description.

Disunion!
Disunion!

Author: Elizabeth R. Varon

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0807887188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.

American Honor
American Honor

Author: Craig Bruce Smith

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1469638843

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as "honor" and "virtue." As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans' ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.

The Second American Revolution
The Second American Revolution

Author: Gregory P. Downs

Publisher: Steven and Janice Brose Lectur

Published: 2019-11-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781469652733

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Much of the confusion about a central event in United States history begins with the name: the Civil War. In reality, the Civil War was not merely civil--meaning national--and not merely a war, but instead an international conflict of ideas as well as armies. Its implications transformed the U.S. Constitution and reshaped a world order, as political and economic systems grounded in slavery and empire clashed with the democratic process of republican forms of government. And it spilled over national boundaries, tying the United States together with Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Britain, and France in a struggle over the future of slavery and of republics. Here Gregory P. Downs argues that we can see the Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centered in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain. Downs introduces a range of actors not often considered as central to the conflict but clearly engaged in broader questions and acts they regarded as revolutionary. This expansive canvas allows Downs to describe a broad and world-shaking war with implications far greater than often recognized.