America and Walter Bagehot

1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Brogan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Secession Crisis ◽  
Safe Model

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.

Text of Resolution Which Entered the United States into World War

1917 ◽  
Vol 85 (17) ◽  
pp. 455-456
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
German Government ◽  
The People ◽  
Successful Termination ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government

The following is the text of the resolutions which officially entered the United States into the world war:— “Whereas the imperial German government has committed repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States of America; therefore be it “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in congress assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the imperial German government, which has thus been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared; and that the President be and he is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the government to carry on war against the imperial German government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.”

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....

Paving the Way for Reagan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Third World

The book analyzes the influence of National Review, Human Events, and Commentary on the foreign policy ideas of the Republican Party from 1964–1980. During that eighteen-year period, the publications of conservative opinion provided ideological clarification on important national issues that played a fundamental role in reviving the political fortunes of the American Right, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan. Those who wrote for these publications used their positions to offer suggestions to conservative policy makers that called for a more confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union and the nations that sought to compromise the United States’ interests around the world. In recommending a shift in foreign policy, Human Events, National Review, and Commentary assisted right-wing decision makers by contributing arguments to revive what these publications believed was a weak and indecisive United States that had become uncertain about its role in the world following the defeat in Vietnam. By criticizing policies, such as détente, or the aggressiveness of the Third World within the United Nations, opinion makers on the Right offered conservative political leaders information and analysis that called for the return of American power in the face of an ever more confident Soviet Union.

scholarly journals Erosion and Renewal in Democratic Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
The World ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Democratic Life

Most of us feel that our democratic lives have eroded. We are less civil to one another than at any other time in our history, perhaps short of the Civil War—certainly any period in my lifetime. At the 2020 Democratic National Convention, former President Barack Obama described the nation’s current situation in this way: “Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.” Speakers at both parties’ conventions claimed that the 2020 election is a struggle for the soul of the United States.

US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-893
Author(s):  
Stephen Tankel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Cooperation ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World

Abstract The massive expansion and evolution of United States security cooperation under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’ remains overlooked in the counterterrorism and interventions literature. The Sahel provides a useful region in which to explore the constitutive effects of such cooperation and its evolution because the US has always pursued an ‘economy of force’ mission there. In this article, I focus mainly on the constitutive effects of US indirect military intervention in the Sahel after 9/11, and subsequent more direct military intervention following the outbreak of civil war in Mali. The indirect intervention by the United States to build the capacity of local forces in Mali, where jihadists were based, failed because of the dissonant relationship between the two countries. This led the United States to intervene more directly in the region, including through its cooperation with and support for French and Nigerien forces. The nature of this more direct military intervention was also informed by evolving US experiences working by, with and through partner forces in other parts of the world.

The Civil War and U.S. World Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Sexton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
World Power ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.

‘To the benefit of Africa, the world, and ourselves’: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) Mission to Nigeria, 1966–1968

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
James Austin Farquharson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Military Government ◽  
The World ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Conflicting Discourses

Abstract Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which Black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Stève Sainlaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
Legal Responses ◽  
The World ◽  
Diplomatic Recognition ◽  
Napoleon Iii

During the American Civil War, European powers understood that the weakening of the United States was likely to affect the geopolitical balance of the world at large. Napoleon III saw the American war as an opportunity for France to regain international influence in the world. The United States featured prominently in Napoleon’s concerns but low in his affections, for after America’s war with Mexico, Napoleon sought to stem U.S. expansion to protect imperial regimes and preserve Catholicism and the Latin world from the Anglo-Saxons. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the French government’s first concern was to find legal responses to various situations. Diplomatic recognition, which the Confederacy sought, was the central question for France’s policy toward America. France had to consider the intrinsic nature of the new republic, its viability, its compatibility with the French agenda in Mexico, its trade arrangements, the disappearance of the Union, and French relations with Washington.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
James P. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Religious War

This epilogue examines the central themes of the Bible in the Civil War, including confidence in clear analogies between biblical texts and the war; faith in the war’s redemptive outcome, which, for many in the North, charged the United States with a divine mission in the world; and above all, reverence for the sacred sacrifice of the dead, whose blood had “consecrated” the nation. Through all the death and injury, endless debates over slavery, defenses of secession, and patriotism, the Bible was a constant reference. The American Civil War may not have been “a war of religion,” James McPherson wrote, but we should not forget “the degree to which it was a religious war.” In a similar way, the American Civil War was not primarily a war over the Bible, but it was a biblical war for many Americans.

scholarly journals Art and Freedom

1970 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Rose Ghurayyib
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
South Asian ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
Women And Children

History tells us that slavery existed from early times in ancient Mesopotamia, Pharaonic Egypt, ancient Greece and other cradles of civilization. It continued throughout the Middle Ages and the modem period, during which it diminished, beginning in the United States of America with the Civil War (1861-1865) that abolished black slavery. Although the efforts of the United Nations has somewhat succeeded in eradicating this evil in other parts of the world, slavery continues to exist in a variety of forms such as the trafficking of women and children in Thailand, India, south Asian and other countries in the world.

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