Reflections on Regionalism and U.S. Religious History

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bret E. Carroll

The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.

Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt

In the years around the Second World War, policymakers in the United States and Western Europe faced unique security challenges occasioned by the development of new technologies and the emergence of transnational ideological conflict. In coming to terms with these challenges, they developed the historically novel practice in which a state might maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another sovereign state without the subjugation of the latter. Such basing arrangements between substantive equals were previously unthinkable: under the inherited understanding of sovereignty, in which there was a tight linkage between military presence and territorial authority, such military presences could be understood only in terms of occupation or annexation. These “sovereign basing” practices, as I call them, are now central to many aspects of contemporary security politics. This book applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain the origin of this phenomenon. A pragmatist lens draws attention to how the actors involved creatively recombined inherited practices in response to changes in the material and social context of action and thereby transformed the practice of sovereignty. The tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. The practice of sovereign basing, bound up as it is now with the constitution of interests and understanding of how states exercise power, is likely a durable feature of international politics.


1987 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 317-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Orren

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.


2019 ◽  
pp. c2-64
Author(s):  
The Editors

buy this issue The situation in Venezuela has become extremely dire due to Washington's heightened economic warfare, its continuing attempts to engineer a political coup, and its growing threats of massive military intervention—all aimed at bringing down the Bolivarian Republic. The recent seizure of Venezuelan oil assets in the United States and its gold reserves in British banks, as well as the sanctioning of Venezuelan oil sales, have come on top of a long series of economic sanctions—beginning with the Obama administration and now intensified under Trump's—that constitute nothing less than a modern form of siege warfare, extended to food supplies and medicine. But the Venezuelan Revolution has managed to resist in the face of the economic and political warfare of the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, and the reasons why are to be found in the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution and the Venezuelan people themselves.


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