Popular Culture and US Foreign Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Falk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Information Campaigns ◽  
The World ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Third World

Americans in and out of government have relied on media and popular culture to construct the national identity, frame debates on military interventions, communicate core values abroad, and motivate citizens around the world to act in prescribed ways. During the late 19th century, as the United States emerged as a world power and expanded overseas, Americans adopted an ethos of worldliness in their everyday lives, even as some expressed worry about the nation’s position on war and peace. During the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, though America failed to join the League of Nations and retreated from foreign engagements, the nation also increased cultural interactions with the rest of the world through the export of motion pictures, music, consumer products, food, fashion, and sports. The policies and character of the Second World War were in part shaped by propaganda that evolved from earlier information campaigns. As the United States confronted communism during the Cold War, the government sanitized its cultural weapons to win the hearts and minds of Americans, allies, enemies, and nonaligned nations. But some cultural producers dissented from America’s “containment policy,” refashioned popular media for global audiences, and sparked a change in Washington’s cultural-diplomacy programs. An examination of popular culture also shows how people in the “Third World” deftly used the media to encourage superpower action. In the 21st century, activists and revolutionaries can be considered the inheritors of this tradition because they use social media to promote their political agendas. In short, understanding the roles popular culture played as America engaged the world greatly expands our understanding of modern American foreign relations.

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.”

Conclusions

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
21St Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government

I have tried in this book to summarize where the world economy has come from in the past three centuries and to set out the core of the agenda that lies before us as we face the century ahead. This century, for the first time since the mid-18th century, will come to be dominated by stagnant or falling populations. The conclusions at which I have arrived can usefully be divided in two parts: one relates to what can be called the political economy of the 21st century; the other relates to the links between the problem of the United States playing steadily the role of critical margin on the world scene and moving at home toward a solution to the multiple facets of the urban problem. As for the political economy of the 21st century, the following points relate both to U.S. domestic policy and U.S. policy within the OECD, APEC, OAS, and other relevant international organizations. There is a good chance that the economic rise of China and Asia as well as Latin America, plus the convergence of economic stagnation and population increase in Africa, will raise for a time the relative prices of food and industrial materials, as well as lead to an increase in expen ditures in support of the environment. This should occur in the early part of the next century, If corrective action is taken in the private markets and the political process, these strains on the supply side should diminish with the passage of time, the advance of science and innovation, and the progressively reduced rate of population increase. The government, the universities, the private sector, and the professions might soon place on their common agenda the delicate balance of maintaining full employment with stagnant or falling populations. The existing literature, which largely stems from the 1930s, is quite illuminating but inadequate. And the experience with stagnant or falling population in the the world economy during post-Industrial Revolution times is extremely limited. This is a subject best approached in the United States on a bipartisan basis, abroad as an international problem. It is much too serious to be dealt with, as it is at present, as a domestic political football.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

Advisory Committee to the U.S. Department of State on Historical Documentation Annual Report, 1978

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (03) ◽  
pp. 330-333 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
Fiscal Constraint ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Government ◽  
The U.S

The 22nd annual meeting of the Advisory Committee on Historical Documentation met in Washington on November 3, 1978, with the officers and staff of the Historical Office of the U.S. Department of State, and with other officials in the Bureau of Public Affairs, the Department and the government who are concerned with the release and publication of historical documentation on American foreign relations. The Committee, formerly called the Advisory Committee onForeign Relations of the United States, continues to be concerned chiefly with theForeign Relationsseries as the major form of the Department's historical documentation.The leitmotiv of the meeting—continuing from last year—was the problem of the appropriate adaptation of the series to fiscal constraint. The problem is the more acute because theForeign Relationsseries is now dealing with the 1950s, where it confronts a veritable explosion of documentation involving other agencies of government as well as the Department of State. This expansion of the relevant historical record comes at a time when increases in the budget have barely been able to keep up with the pace of inflation, thus holding practically constant the real resources available for publication.

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