The Search for American Liberal Education

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank F. Wong
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Core Curriculum ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Models ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Complete Reversal ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
American Society

When Charles William Eliot launched his radical reforms at Harvard in the late 1870s, he was convinced that the fixed curriculum, based on English liberal education models, was ill-suited to the democratic spirit, the cultural diversity, and the rapidly changing circumstances in America. By introducing the free elective system, he hoped to develop in students the habits of self-reliance that he regarded as essential to the American democratic system. Seventy years later, in a post-World War II climate of concern about the "unifying purpose and idea" for American education, Harvard issued a new version of liberal education in its famous Redbook. To address the new American circumstances, these reforms reduced rather than increased choices for students. These benchmarks of American higher education notwithstanding, the final chapter of a widely respected study by Bruce Kimball, published in 1986, opens with the observation that there is no "distinctively American view of liberal education. This observation contains an irony that raises interesting and significant questions. After such high-profile efforts as those made at Harvard, why is there no clear model of American liberal education? And if there is no such model, do we need to develop one, especially in the context of the dramatic changes affecting American society today—changes that in many ways are more radical than those faced by Charles William Eliot? Why, in this latest round of debates about the core curriculum in our colleges and universities, has the issue been posed in terms of the primacy and purity of Western civilization rather than in terms of the adequacy of our educational models to address the realities of America in the late twentieth century? These questions are even more striking when one considers the almost complete reversal of roles and the dramatic changes in orientation that have occurred in the relationship between the United States and its cultural ancestors in the Anglo-European world.

Dwight Eisenhower

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Nuclear Arsenal ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S

Assessments of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s performance as the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and the nation’s thirty-fourth president have evolved across the more than seventy-five years from the conclusion of World War II in 1945 to the dedication in 2020 of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC. Historians have sought to explain Eisenhower’s unlikely rise from his modest upbringing in Abilene, Kansas, to his ascendance to command of western allies in the European theater. Selected over several senior officers in 1942 to command the invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch), Eisenhower initially experienced a series of setbacks and controversies resulting from inexperienced troops, incompetent subordinate leaders, a formidable enemy, and political deals with leaders of Vichy France. Although historians continue to debate his decisions regarding command and strategy in the European theater, they generally praise Eisenhower’s ability to maintain the western alliance amid national rivalries, professional jealousies, strong personalities, and competing political ambitions. Assessments of Eisenhower’s performance as president have undergone a remarkable transformation. Initially ranked in 1961 near the bottom in assessments of presidential leadership, he currently appears within the top tier. Initial accounts in the 1960s portrayed Eisenhower as a bumbling, docile president who appeared to be out of touch with the basic policies and operations of his administration. He appeared unwilling to address the major issues confronting American society, and to defer to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, on matters of foreign policy and national security. For his critics, Eisenhower perilously, inflexibly, and imprudently relied upon the superiority of the nation’s nuclear arsenal to contain communist expansion, then allowed the Soviet Union to beat the United States into space and create a missile gap. Scholars collectively labeled “Eisenhower Revisionists” assessing declassified documents beginning in the mid-1970s forged a revised consensus that Eisenhower was clearly thoughtful, informed, and firmly in command of his administration. Moreover, the nation’s nuclear arsenal retained and even strengthened its predominance of power. “Postrevisionist” analysts generally concur that Eisenhower was clearly the dominant decision-maker and developed an effective policy development process, but they question the efficacy of some of his decisions and policies, including his management of crises in this dangerous period of the Cold War, his increased use of covert operations and propaganda, his approach to decolonization, and his efforts to ease tensions and slow the nuclear arms race.

Broadway Goes to War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin ◽  
Sally E. Parry
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
American Theater ◽  
History Of ◽  
Battle Fatigue ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society

The American theater was not ignorant of the developments brought on by World War II, and actively addressed and debated timely, controversial topics for the duration of the war, including neutrality and isolationism, racism and genocide, and heroism and battle fatigue. Productions such as Watch on the Rhine (1941), The Moon is Down (1942), Tomorrow the World (1943), and A Bell for Adano (1944) encouraged public discussion of the war's impact on daily life and raised critical questions about the conflict well before other forms of popular media. American drama of the 1940s is frequently overlooked, but the plays performed during this eventful decade provide a picture of the rich and complex experience of living in the United States during the war years. McLaughlin and Parry's work fills a significant gap in the history of theater and popular culture, showing that American society was more divided and less idealistic than the received histories of the WWII home front and the entertainment industry recognize.

Introduction

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Changing Roles ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 1249-1278
Author(s):  
Frederick Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World Order ◽  
Break Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Relationship

“Beyond Empire” asks what studying empires from ancient times to the twentieth century tells us about the world today. Crises in the Middle East and the configuration of Europe, China, Africa, the United States, and elsewhere bear the imprint of trajectories into, through, and out of empire. Instead of assuming the “empire-to-nation-state” narrative, it explores the articulations of empire and nation and makes clear that the relationship was uncertain and contested, even in the mid- and late twentieth century. New empires (USSR, Japan, Nazi Germany) arose even as others collapsed, but World War II constituted a break point for winning as well as defeated empires, creating openings to anti-colonial movements but also enabling Western European powers to imagine a future without needing imperial resources in their rivalry with each other. The independent territorial state was not the only objective of political movements in colonial empires, but in the end national independence was what they could get. The juridical equivalence of post-imperial states has not brought about a stable, equitable, or even predictable world order.

scholarly journals How Did America Inspire Indonesian Revolution?

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
I Basis Susilo ◽  
Annisa Pratamasari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
British Colonization ◽  
Democratic System

This paper examines the American Revolution as an inspiration for Indonesia’s founding fathers to fight for their nation’s independence in 1945. This paper was sparked by the existence of  the pamphlet ‘It's 1776 in Indonesia’ published in 1948 in the United States which presupposes the link between Indonesian Revolution and the American Revolution. The basic assumption of this paper is that Indonesian founding fathers were inspired by the experiences of other nations, including the Americans who abolished the British colonization of 13 colonies in North American continent in the eigthenth century. American inspiration on the struggle for Indonesian independence was examined from the spoken dan written words of three Indonesian founding fathers: Achmad Soekarno, Mohamad Hatta and Soetan Sjahrir. This examination produced two findings. First, the two Indonesian founding fathers were inspired by the United States in different capacities. Compared to Hatta and Sjahrir, Soekarno referred and mentioned the United States more frequent. Second, compared to the inspirations from other nations, American inspiration for the three figures was not so strong. This was because the liberal democratic system and the American-chosen capitalist system were not the best alternative for Soekarno, Hatta and Sjahrir. Therefore, the massive exposition of the 1776 Revolution in 1948 was more of a tactic on the Indonesian struggle to achieve its national objectives at that time, as it considered the United States as the most decisive international post-World War II political arena.

Strange Whims of Crest Fiends: Marketing Heraldry in the United States, 1880–1980

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-611
Author(s):  
FORREST D. PASS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Broad Cross Section ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

CONSIDERING CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
MARK PITTENGER
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century American intellectuals, broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms. If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America.

Latino Urbanism and the Geography of Opportunity

Latino City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Llana Barber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Latino Migration ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Mike Davis ◽  
The City

As any ten-year-old in East L.A., or Philly’s El Norte knows, borders tend to follow working-class Latinos wherever they live and regardless of how long they have been in the United States. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism As the twentieth century drew to a close, Lawrence barely resembled the city it had been at the end of World War II. While its landscape was still dominated by brick mills and triple-decker homes, its economy and population had been profoundly transformed by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and Latino immigration. As scholars develop a distinct historiography of postwar Latino urbanism, Lawrence may not prove to be typical—as no city could possibly be—but its history nonetheless provides a set of essential questions to address: What was the role of U.S. imperialism in the Latinization (and globalization) of U.S. cities in the late twentieth century? How did race and class segregation in the era of suburbanization and urban crisis impact Latino settlement patterns and experiences? How did Latinos fight against disinvestment and discrimination and strive to claim their right to the city? Where did Latinos fit in the larger stigmatization of the “inner city” and the broad turn to conservatism that this discourse helped enable? From the periphery of U.S. empire to the ghettos at its center, Latino migration in the crisis era was a protracted struggle against containment and marginalization. Imperial migrants fought to have in the United States what U.S. intervention had denied them at home, pushing back against barriers of race and class in a segregated metropolitan landscape....

THINKING AND NOT THINKING ABOUT RACE IN THE UNITED STATES

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-446
Author(s):  
DAVID FARBER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Society

John Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2004)Since June 1964, all three branches of the federal government have supported the goal of racial justice in the United States. John Skrentny, in The Minority Rights Revolution, explains how that goal and related ones have been implemented over the last sixty years. He argues that key policy developments since that time were driven less by mass movements and much more by elite “meaning entrepreneurs.” Well before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was made law, in the immediate post-World War II years, a bevy of transatlantic intellectuals responded to Nazi race policy by seeking a universalist vision that would unite humanity. Richard King, in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, explores how intellectuals pursued that anti-racist universalist vision and then how African and African-American intellectuals in the 1960s, in particular, rejected universalism and began, instead, to pursue racial justice through cultural particularism. King's traditional intellectual history, when combined with Skrentny's sociological analysis of how elites managed ideas to pursue specific policies, reveals how American society, in pursuit of racial justice, moved from the simple stated ideals of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—equal opportunity and access—to the complexities of affirmative action and an embrace of “diversity” in American life.

Democracy's Guardians: Hollywood's Portrait of Reporters, 1930–1945

1991 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-838 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Vaughn ◽  
Bruce Evensen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Front Page ◽  
World War ◽  
System A ◽  
Newspaper Editors ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
American Society ◽  
Striking Contrast

Reporters in films of the early 1930s were often portrayed as drunks or as less than glamorous, as evidenced by the 1930 film “The Front Page.” By the end of the decade, pressure from the American Newspaper Publishers Association, American Society of Newspaper Editors, and other professional organizations, plus film-makers' need for good press, caused a change in the way reporters appeared, as evidenced by “His Girl Friday,” the 1940 remake of “The Front Page.” World War II films often portrayed reporters as searchers for truth in a free democratic system, a striking contrast to fascist control of information abroad. This study is based on the recently opened files of the Production Code Administration plus the viewing of 35 key films of the period.

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