2. Diplomacy of the American Revolution

Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa

‘Diplomacy of the American Revolution’ considers the United States' battle for independence and the diplomatic efforts required to reach agreement with Great Britain. In order to win independence, the United States had found it necessary to involve itself in the international rivalries and politics of Europe. The negotiations between the US peace commissioners — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay — and the Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, the Earl of Shelburne, Richard Oswald, and the Spanish are worth examining at this point. A number of key treaties were signed during the negotiations, including the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce and Treaty of Alliance between America and France.

Author(s):  
Natalia B. Pomozova ◽  

The complex development of China and its transformation into a superpower arouses the US fears, what results in the trade and economic wars between the two countries, as well as in a discursive confrontation. As the conflict between the United States and China escalates, the struggle will intensify not only for markets, but also for the hearts and minds of Europeans (in this article, in particular, Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy are considered). Reflection on Beijing’s behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic will become one of the important sociological factors that will affect the attitude of European citizens towards China, what, in turn, will have a significant impact on the implementation of the PRC’s foreign policy strategy.


English Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Carmen Ebner

Having studied attitudes towards usage problems such as the notorious split infinitive or the ubiquitous literally in British English as part of my doctoral thesis, I was intrigued by the sheer lack of scientific studies investigating such attitudes. What was even more intriguing was to discover that the same field and the same usage problems seem to have received a different treatment in the United States of America. While my search for previously conducted usage attitude studies in Great Britain has largely remained fruitless, besides two notable exceptions which I will discuss in detail below (see Section 3), a similar search for American usage attitude studies resulted in a different picture. Considerably more such studies seem to have been conducted in the US than in Great Britain. On top of cultural and linguistic differences between these two nations, it seems as if they also hold different attitudes towards studying attitudes towards usage problems. Now the following question arises: why do we find such contradictory scientific traditions in these two countries? In this paper, I will provide an overview of a selection of American and British usage attitude studies. Taking into account differences between the American and British studies with regard to the number of usage problems studied, the populations surveyed and the methods applied, I will attempt to capture manifestations of two seemingly diverging attitudes towards the study of usage problems. By doing so, I will provide a possible explanation for the lack of attention being paid to usage attitudes in Great Britain.


Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard

‘You will be amused to hear that I am at work upon a Sherlock Holmes story. So the old dog returns to his vomit.’1 Arthur Conan Doyle to Herbert Greenhough Smith Sherlock Holmes, who died in Switzerland in May 1891, returned to the world on 23 October 1899. The location for his rebirth was, somewhat surprisingly, the Star Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Early the following month, Holmes moved to New York where he could be found in Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre on 236 separate occasions, before making his way across the United States. In September 1901, Holmes went back to Great Britain, arriving (like so many travellers from the US) at Liverpool, before reaching London on 9 September 1901. He was so much in demand that on 1 February 1902 he received an audience with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. In 1902 he was again in New York, was seen travelling across northern England in 1903, and for the next thirty years popped up repeatedly in various American towns and cities....


Author(s):  
R. B. Bernstein

The phrase “founding fathers” is central to how Americans talk about politics, and “Words, images, meanings” describes when the phrase was first coined, what it really means, and how artists have depicted the “founding fathers”—those who helped to found the United States as a nation and a political experiment. This group has two subsets. First are the Signers, delegates to the Second Continental Congress, who in July 1776 declared American independence and signed the Declaration of Independence. Second are the Framers, the delegates to the Federal Convention who in 1787 framed the United States Constitution. They include Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Chloe Romanis ◽  
Jordan A Parsons ◽  
Nathan Hodson

Abstract In this paper we consider the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic is having on access to abortion care in Great Britain (GB) (England, Wales, and Scotland) and the United States (US). The pandemic has exacerbated problems in access to abortion services because social distancing or lockdown measures, increasing caring responsibilities, and the need to self-isolate are making clinics much more difficult to access, and this is when clinics are able to stay open which many are not. In response we argue there is a need to facilitate telemedical early medical abortion in order to ensure access to essential healthcare for people in need of terminations. There are substantial legal barriers to the establishment of telemedical abortion services in parts of GB and parts of the US. We argue that during a pandemic any restriction on telemedicine for basic healthcare is an unjustifiable human rights violation and, in the US, is unconstitutional.


1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-307
Author(s):  
H. Howard Frisinger

On july 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence. This paper will discuss the contributions to mathematics or the interest in mathematics of four of these men. Two of these four, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, made significant contributions to the early development of mathematics in the United States. In addition to the mathematical contributions of Franklin and Jefferson, we shall briefly consider the mathematical interests of George Washington and John Adams.


Author(s):  
Philippe R. Girard

Haiti (known as Saint-Domingue until it gained its independence from France in 1804) had a noted economic and political impact on the United States during the era of the American Revolution, when it forced U.S. statesmen to confront issues they had generally avoided, most prominently racism and slavery. But the impact of the Haitian Revolution was most tangible in areas like commerce, territorial expansion, and diplomacy. Saint-Domingue served as a staging ground for the French military and navy during the American Revolution and provided troops to the siege of Savannah in 1779. It became the United States’ second-largest commercial partner during the 1780s and 1790s. After Saint-Domingue’s slaves revolted in 1791, many of its inhabitants found refuge in the United States, most notably in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans. Fears (or hopes) that the slave revolt would spread to the United States were prevalent in public opinion. As Saint-Domingue achieved quasi-autonomous status under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, it occupied a central place in the diplomacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The Louisiana Purchase was made possible in part by the failure of a French expedition to Saint-Domingue in 1802–1803. Bilateral trade declined after Saint-Domingue acquired its independence from France in 1804 (after which Saint-Domingue became known as Haiti), but Haiti continued to loom large in the African-American imagination, and there were several attempts to use Haiti as a haven for U.S. freedmen. The U.S. diplomatic recognition of Haiti also served as a reference point for antebellum debates on slavery, the slave trade, and the status of free people of color in the United States.


1988 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Eric Beerman

History generally records Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 as the last battle of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, six months after that epic campaign, warships of the South Carolina Navy commanded by Commodore Alexander Gillon, transported Spanish General Juan Manuel de Cagigal's infantrymen from Havana to Nassau in the Bahamas, where the British capitulated on May 8, 1782. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles signed the following year made this little-known Spanish and American expedition the last battle of the American Revolution.The Bahamas, or Lucayos, an archipelago off the southeastern coast of the United States, take on increasing historical interest with the approach of the 500th Anniversary of Columbus's first landing in the New World 200 miles southeast of Nassau at Guanahani. The Bahamas, however, played only a minor role in the Spanish colonization of the Americas whereas, Great Britain gave priority to these strategic islands, making an initial settlement on the island of Eleuthera. The British later found a better harbor to the west and named the island New Providence which became their Bahama stronghold. King Charles II granted the Duke of Albemarle the Bahamas in 1670 and appointed John Wentworth as governor. Harrassed by plundering pirates, the British governor constructed a fort on New Providence in 1695 and named it Nassau in honor of King William III. The island's preoccupation changed in 1703 from marauding corsairs to a Spanish and French invasion during the War of the Spanish Succession. Great Britain regained control and maintained it until the outbreak of the American Revolution when John Paul Jones participated in the brief American seizure of Nassau in March 1776 in one of the first offensive operations in the history of the United States Navy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 1109-1137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Long ◽  
Joseph Ferrie

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000 nationally-representative British and US fathers and sons. The US was more mobile than Britain through 1900, so in the experience of those who created the US welfare state in the 1930s, the US had indeed been “exceptional.” The US mobility lead over Britain was erased by the 1950s, as US mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)


Author(s):  
Atul Kohli

WHEN THE UNITED States invaded Iraq in 2003, American decision-makers expected to depose Saddam Hussein quickly, install a friendly regime, and leave. The Iraq War did not follow that script. Instead, the United States confronted Iraqi nationalism. A prolonged occupation followed. Although most of the US troops left in 2011, American efforts to shape Iraq continue. During the occupation, American critics of US intervention in Iraq compared it to Vietnam. Senator Edward Kennedy suggested that Iraq was another “quagmire,” a term often used during the American war in Vietnam. While these were serious comparisons, they ignored deeper historical parallels. Great Britain created Iraq after World War I by piecing together the outlying provinces of the former Ottoman Empire. British efforts to turn Iraq into an India-style colony then met swift resistance from Arab nationalists, nearly a century ago. London had to order the bombing of Iraq in 1920 to defeat this indigenous opposition. Instead of turning Iraq into a formal colony, Britain installed a pliable Arab monarch, who allowed British troops and advisers to stay and who pursued pro-British policies. Britain’s informal empire in Iraq lasted well into the 1950s. The parallels between the US and British experiences in Iraq run even deeper: both expected to be welcomed as liberators to Iraq, but were not; both denied that they had any interest in Iraqi oil, but that was a lie; and, while promising to bring progress, both wreaked havoc on Iraq....


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