Planetary Power? The United States and the History of Around-the-World Travel

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOYCE E. CHAPLIN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Whole Earth

It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social – it implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators’ accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Technology and US Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Krysko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us History ◽  
Patterns Of Use ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Us Foreign Relations

Technology is ubiquitous in the history of US foreign relations. Throughout US history, technology has played an essential role in how a wide array of Americans have traveled to and from, learned about, understood, recorded and conveyed information about, and attempted to influence, benefit from, and exert power over other lands and peoples. The challenge for the historian is not to find where technology intersects with the history of US foreign relations, but how to place a focus on technology without falling prey to deterministic assumptions about the inevitability of the global power and influence—or lack thereof—the United States has exerted through the technology it has wielded. “Foreign relations” and “technology” are, in fact, two terms with extraordinarily broad connotations. “Foreign relations” is not synonymous with “diplomacy,” but encompasses all aspects and arenas of American engagement with the world. “Technology” is itself “an unusually slippery term,” notes prominent technology historian David Nye, and can refer to simple tools, more complex machines, and even more complicated and expansive systems on which the functionality of many other innovations depends. Furthermore, processes of technological innovation, proliferation, and patterns of use are shaped by a dizzying array of influences embedded within the larger surrounding context, including but by no means limited to politics, economics, laws, culture, international exchanges, and environment. While some of the variables that have shaped how the United States has deployed its technological capacities were indeed distinctly American, others arose outside the United States and lay beyond any American ability to control. A technology-focused rendering of US foreign relations and global ascendancy is not, therefore, a narrative of uninterrupted progress and achievement, but an accounting of both successes and failures that illuminate how surrounding contexts and decisions have variably shaped, encouraged, and limited the technology and power Americans have wielded.

The Cambridge History of America and the World

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Benjamin Banneker, Pioneer Negro Mathematician

1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-160
Author(s):  
T. F. Mulcrone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Life

In almost every history of the Negro in the United States one can find an account of the incidental contributions of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) to the social history of Ms race. But no chronicle is readily available of the scientific life of Banneker as a student of mathematics, almanac compiler, surveyor, and astronomer. The object of this article is to provide such an account of the scientific activity of Benjamin Banneker, whom W. Douglas Brown called “the first American Negro to challenge the world by the independent power of his intellect,” and to indicate how close Banneker comes to approximating the composite picture of the mathematician in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.

Histoire du mot «démocratie» au Canada et au Québec. Analyse politique des stratégies rhétoriques

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Le Canada

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.

History, Theory, and Education

2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Rury
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Attention To Detail

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”

The Wright Brothers

1948 ◽  
Vol 52 (447) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Wilbur ◽  
Orville
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wilbur Wright

On 6th January 1916 Lord Northcliffe, seconding a vote of thanks to Mr. Griffith Brewer for his lecture on the Life and Work of Wilbur Wright, said among other things : “The fact remains, however, that after more than one hundred years of experiment with aeroplanes, these two brothers were the first people in the world who made a machine to fly, and flew it. I make that remark emphatically, because there is one point to which Mr. Griffith Brewer did not call attention, and that is the attempt that has been made to rob the Wright brothers of the credit of their invention. We have not heard much of that in England, but ‘a prophet is not without honour save in his own country,’ and in the United States there have been long and persistent attempts to belittle the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright. I have closely read and followed the history of the hundred years of aeroplane experiments, and I am convinced that the credit of the first flying aeroplane is due to the Wright Brothers, and from the point of practical flying to nobody else. As an Englishman I am in an independent position, and I know that these words of mine will go across the Atlantic, and I believe they will assist in stopping the spread of the insidious suggestion that the Wrights did not invent the aeroplane.”

scholarly journals The colonial matrix of power: Image ontology and the question of blackness

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Itumeleng D. Mothoagae
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Black People ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global South ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.

On Fat Clothes: Unraveling Plus-Size Design Discourse

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Lauren Downing Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article considers the possibilities and limitations of plus-size clothing— a subcategory of ready-to-wear that is deeply embedded in the history of dieting, exercise, standardized sizing, and the industrialization of clothing manufacturing in the United States. In doing so, it draws on fashion theory and disability theory in exposing how plus-size clothing functions as a normalizing mechanism, thereby inhibiting innovation in this sector. The article concludes with a counterexploration of the possibilities of “fat clothes” and the novel w ays of seeing and existing in the world that they might enable.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Peter Hart-Brinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Generational Change ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Generational Theory ◽  
Cultural Schemas ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces the concepts of generational change, generational theory, and the social imagination, and it describes how they can help us understand the evolution of public opinion about gay marriage in the United States and the role that public opinion played in the legalization of gay marriage. It introduces the thesis that the changing social imagination was the key cultural and cognitive development that led young cohorts to develop more supportive attitudes about gay marriage while also causing older cohorts to rethink their prior opinions. It explains how the imagination both produces and draws from the cultural schemas that we use to make sense of the world and why different groups can develop different cultural schemas. It concludes by describing the overall plan of the book and the author’s standpoint.

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