Capital Projects

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-109
Author(s):  
Jean H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Mutual Respect ◽  
Public Buildings ◽  
Capital Projects ◽  
The Us

Chapter 3 covers Latrobe in early Washington, DC, his appointment as surveyor of public buildings, his relationship with Thomas Jefferson, and most importantly, his work on the US Capitol. Latrobe agreed to take over the poorly designed and unfinished Capitol building. During this time, President Jefferson’s practical requirements and artistic preferences collided with Latrobe’s sometimes excessive, expensive perfectionism and his commitment to Greek, not Roman, precedents. These differences in outlook tested but never destroyed their mutual respect because both men agreed on the larger enterprise of creating a heroic structure that would be a focal point of the nation. Throughout, there were constant battles with the budget and Congress. Later, Latrobe’s plans for a Washington Canal and better roads to connect the nation were admired—but never funded—by a fiscally reluctant Congress.

scholarly journals Ethnic Fundraising in America and the Irish and Lithuanian Wars of Independence, 1918–1923

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
R. J. C. Adams ◽  
Vaida Nikšaitė
Keyword(s):  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Recognition ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Bonds ◽  
First World

Abstract The close of the First World War signalled a proliferation of newly established nation-states across Europe. However, the unilateral proclamations of these states’ independence did not guarantee their international recognition, nor did it guarantee their financial viability. This article examines the funding of two such states: the unrecognized Lithuanian (1919–23) and Irish (1919–21) republics. Both funded their wars of independence by selling ‘war bonds’ to their respective diasporas in the United States; the Lithuanians raising almost $1.9m from c. 28,000 subscribers and the Irish raising $5.8m from c. 300,000 subscribers. Communication between the organizers of these bond drives was virtually non-existent, but following the example of the US Liberty Loans they employed remarkably similar tactics. Yet, issued by self-proclaimed nation-states with neither territorial integrity nor a credible history of borrowing, the Lithuanian and Irish war bonds promised a return only when the states had received international recognition. In this sense, they were examples of what the authors term Pre-Sovereign Debt. Practically, they were a focal point for agitation for governmental recognition and rousing of American public opinion. Symbolically, they were tangible representations of the Lithuanian and Irish pretensions to statehood.

John Philip Sousa’s Historic Resistance to Technology in Music Learning

2021 ◽  
pp. 153660062110339
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Thibeault
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Digital Music ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us

In this article, I explore John Philip Sousa’s historic resistance to music technology and his belief that sound recordings would negatively impact music education and musical amateurism. I review Sousa’s primary arguments from two 1906 essays and his testimony to the US Congress from the same year, based on the fundamental premise that machines themselves sing or perform, severing the connection between live listener and performer and thus rendering recordings a poor substitute for real music. Sousa coined the phrase “canned music,” and I track engagement with this phrase among the hundreds of newspapers and magazines focused on Sousa’s resistance. To better understand the construction of Sousa’s beliefs, I then review how his rich musical upbringing around the US Marine Band and the theaters of Washington DC lead to his conception of music as a dramatic ritual. And I examine the curious coda of Sousa’s life, during which he recanted his beliefs and conducted his band for radio, finding that in fact these experiences reinforced Sousa’s worries. The discussion considers how Sousa’s ideas can help us better to examine the contemporary shift to digital music by combining Sousa’s ideas with those of Sherry Turkle.

Disappointments and Legacies of Social Indicators

1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Eleanor Innes
Keyword(s):  
Research Council ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Indicators Movement ◽  
Science Research Council

The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term ‘social indicators’ dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.

scholarly journals Radiation Research and Policy Coordination: A Successful Model

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. p183
Author(s):  
Alvin L. Young
Keyword(s):  
Technology Policy ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Policy Coordination ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
Successful Model ◽  
Radiation Research ◽  
Research And Policy

The Committee on Interagency Radiation Research and Policy Coordination (CIRRPC) was charted in April 1984 by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President, Washington, DC because there was a need to ensure that Federal policies and research applicable to the use and control of radiation sources were well coordinated and integrated. The creation and maintenance of a convenient neutral forum provided opportunities for examining various agency and public interests in radiation research and policy formulation. During its 11 years of existence, the success of CIRRPC’s policy and research initiatives were supported by a professional and administrative staff whose operations were housed in a central and neutral facility that served as a focal point for the radiation coordination activities of the 18 member agencies and departments that were brought together to discuss radiation and scientific issues of mutual interest. For over a decade CIRRPC was recognized nationally and internationally for its activities, and its preparation and publication of more than 20 major reports. CIRRPC was a model of how the Federal government should coordinate radiation issues for the United States.

Postal Maps, 1860–83

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
American West ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
The Us ◽  
Postal Network

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.

3. The US rise to world power, 1776–1945

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter LaFeber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines how the United States evolved as a world power during the period 1776–1945. It first considers how Americans set out after the War of Independence to establish a continental empire. Thomas Jefferson called this an ‘empire for liberty’, but by the early nineteenth century the United States had become part of an empire containing human slavery. Abraham Lincoln determined to stop the territorial expansion of this slavery and thus helped bring about the Civil War. The reunification of the country after the Civil War, and the industrial revolution which followed, turned the United States into the world’s leading economic power by the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses Woodrow Wilson’s empire of ideology and concludes with an analysis of U.S. economic depression and the onset of the Cold War.

A Century of US Diplomatic Security

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Patrick Cullen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Military Units

The United States' diplomatic security apparatus that operates today from Washington DC to Iraq and Afghanistan is uniquely massive. It is incomparable in its size, budget, degree of institutionalization, and level of sophistication when set against both other nations as well as its own humble origins in WWI. To understand why this is so, the first half of this chapter historically maps and causally explains how, and why, US diplomatic security has been transformed over the course of its modern hundred-year history. The second half provides an empirically rich study of the various roles and functions of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the US military units that protect the US diplomatic mission.

“When I came to the US”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping-Hsuan Wang
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Positioning Theory ◽  
Social Constructionist ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Before And After

Abstract From a social constructionist perspective, this study examines three gay Indian immigrants’ coming-out narratives as the locus of the discursive construction of both one’s physical and social location within the changing context. It advocates reconceptualizing “coming out” as dynamic and situated in interaction. Also, it investigates the intersection and construction of identities by analyzing coming-out narratives in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Washington, DC. Drawing on Bamberg’s three levels of positioning (1997), the analysis highlights how narrators bring about their identities as they contrast the social constructs in India, i.e., the absence of such concept, and in the US, e.g., the acceptance of homosexuality, by reenacting dialogue before and after migration. This study adds to positioning theory and contributes to the cross-cultural dimension of research on coming-out narratives. The qualitative analysis also provides a linguistic perspective that views narrating coming out as an interactive process for constructing intersected identities.

The Watergate Crisis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dafydd Townley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
The Us ◽  
National Headquarters ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

The Watergate affair has become synonymous with political corruption and conspiracy. The crisis has, through fact, fiction, and debate, become considerably more than the arrest of five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Instead, the term “Watergate” has since come to represent the burglary, its failed cover-up, the press investigation, the Senate enquiry, and the eventual resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Arguably, Watergate has come to encompass all the illegalities of the Nixon administration. The crisis broke when the Vietnam War had already sunk public confidence in the executive to a low ebb, and in the context of a society already fractured by the turbulence of the 1960s. As such, Watergate is seen as the nadir of American democracy in the 20th century. Perversely, despite contemporaries’ genuine fears for the future of the US democratic system, the scandal highlighted the efficiency of the US governmental machine. The investigations that constituted the Watergate enquiry, which were conducted by the legislative and judicial branches and the fourth estate, exposed corruption in the executive of the United States that stretched to the holder of the highest office. The post-war decades had allowed an imperial presidency to develop, which had threatened the country’s political equilibrium. Watergate disclosed that the presidency had overreached its constitutional powers and responsibilities and had conspired to keep those moves hidden from the electorate. More significantly, however, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon revealed that the checks-and-balances system of government, which was conceived almost 200 years before the Watergate affair, worked as those who devised it had planned. Watergate should illustrate to Americans not just the dangers of consolidating great power in the office of the president, but also the means to counteract such growth.

Joy Kreeft Peyton, Donald A. Ranard, & Scott McGinnis (eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems, 2001. Pp. vi, 327. Pb $20.95.

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 438-441
Author(s):  
Lida Dutkova-Cope
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Long Beach ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Subject ◽  
National Resource

This volume, a product of the First National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, held in Long Beach, California, in 1999, opens with the editors' introduction, followed by fourteen chapters within five thematic sections: “Defining the field,” “Shaping the field,” “Educational issues,” “Research and practice,” and “A call to action.” Together, they make a compelling case for the need to preserve and exploit heritage languages in the US as a national resource. The book provides a comprehensive overview of pressing issues and challenges within the growing field of heritage language (henceforth HL) education, and it successfully demonstrates “why those who are involved in the heritage language movement believe that it is important for the United States to preserve its non-English languages” (5). The volume is intended primarily for “educators, community leaders, researchers, grant makers and policymakers” (5), though its clear, nontechnical language makes it accessible to any reader interested in the subject. Its effective thematic organization, likely to appeal to both novice and expert readers, and its overall coherence, accentuated by ample cross-referencing, testify to careful editorial preparation and suggest the desire of all involved to speak with one voice as they build their case and issue a call for action on behalf of heritage languages in the US.

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