An Evidentiary and Epistemic Shift

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Oreskes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marine Microbiology ◽  
Global Science ◽  
Car Crash ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
International Geological Congress ◽  
Work Done ◽  
American Geophysical Union ◽  
The U.S

World War II dashed the hopes and dreams of many, among them Richard Field. As President of the American Geophysical Union, Field was to host the International Geological Congress when it met in Washington, D.C. at the end of the summer of 1939, an event Field was greatly anticipating. Scientists were expected from around the globe, and the permanence —or nonpermanence —of ocean basins was high on Field’s list of topics for discussion. But as the meeting was about to begin, Adolf Hitler’s armies invaded Poland; many delegates turned around mid-voyage, and others who had already arrived in Washington quickly returned home. The following year William Bowie died; two years later Charles Schuchert died at the age of eighty-four, and Field was involved in a near-fatal car crash which effectively ended his scientific career. Bowie’s and Field’s scientific goals would be realized, however, albeit not by them. Together, they had assembled an advisory committee for gravity studies that included five subsections —navigation, geophysics, tectonics, oceanology [sic], and marine microbiology—with prominent members from acaclemia, and industry in the United States and abroad and from the U.S. Navy. Their ambitions went beyond gravity: Bowie and Field hoped to foster a global science of geophysics and oceanography to explore the three-fifths of the earth that scientists had scarcely visited by enlisting the material and financial support of the U.S. Navy and other navies. The U.S. Navy, for its part, was making plans to enlist geophysicists, both figuratively and literally. When war broke out, Harry Hess joined the naval reserve, as did many other young and aspiring geophysicists and oceanographers. In 1941, Hess was called to active duty and became the captain of an assault transport, the USS Cape Johnson. Among the ship’s tasks was the echo sounding of the Pacific basin; Hess subsequently became famous for the discovery of flat-topped sea-mounts, which he named guyots after the first professor of geology at Princeton, Arnold Guyot. I less published this discovery, but much geophysical work done during the war, and after, was classified.

8. The Two-Ocean Navy

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-96
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Central Pacific ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The U.S

Europe went back to war in 1939 and on July 19 1940, the U.S. Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act, the largest naval appropriation in American history, which expanded the U.S. Navy by more than seventy per cent in preparation for the United States entry into the war. ‘The two-ocean navy: the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939–1945)’ outlines the key battles fought by the U.S. Navy: in the Pacific from 1941–43, in the Mediterranean from 1943–44, the Central Pacific drive from 1943–44, the D-Day landings in 1944, and the ferocious battles with the Japanese at Iwo Jima and Okinawa that ended the war.

Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Higgs
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Performance Measures ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Macroeconomic Performance ◽  
Command Economy ◽  
First Time ◽  
The U.S

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.

scholarly journals The ANZUS Treaty during the Cold War: A Reinterpretation of U.S. Diplomacy in the Southwest Pacific

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Robb ◽  
David James Gill
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Regional Cooperation ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This article explains the origins of the Australia–New Zealand–United States (ANZUS) Treaty by highlighting U.S. ambitions in the Pacific region after World War II. Three clarifications to the historiography merit attention. First, an alliance with Australia and New Zealand reflected the pursuit of U.S. interests rather than the skill of antipodean diplomacy. Despite initial reservations in Washington, geostrategic anxiety and economic ambition ultimately spurred cooperation. The U.S. government's eventual recourse to coercive diplomacy against the other ANZUS members, and the exclusion of Britain from the alliance, substantiate claims of self-interest. Second, the historiography neglects the economic rationale underlying the U.S. commitment to Pacific security. Regional cooperation ensured the revival of Japan, the avoidance of discriminatory trade policies, and the stability of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Third, scholars have unduly played down and misunderstood the concept of race. U.S. foreign policy elites invoked ideas about a “White Man's Club” in Asia to obscure the pursuit of U.S. interests in the region and to ensure British exclusion from the treaty.

U.S. Security Strategy and Southeast Asia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin C. Ott
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Manila Bay ◽  
The U.S

With the exception of the Philippines, America’s strategic interest in and engagement with Southeast Asia begins with World War II. Prior to that “Monsoon Asia” was remote and exotic—a place of fabled kingdoms, jungle headhunters, and tropical seas. By the end of the nineteenth century European powers had established colonial rule over the entire region except Thailand. Then, as the twentieth century dawned, the Spanish colonial holdings in the Philippines suddenly and unexpectedly became available to the United States as an outcome of the Spanish-American War and Admiral Dewey’s destruction of the decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. This chapter examines the strategic pivot in Southeast Asia and the role China plays in affecting the U.S. position in this region.

The Melting Pot of the Pacific

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Asian Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Racial Harmony

This chapter deals with the concept of Hawaiʻi as a racial paradise. In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals began to tout the islands' ethnically diverse composition—including the indigenous population, white settler colonists, and imported labor from Asia and other locales—as a Pacific melting pot free of the mainland's social taboos on intermingling. After World War II, the association of Hawaiʻi with racial harmony and tolerance received unprecedented national attention as Americans heatedly debated the question of whether or not the territory, annexed to the United States in 1898, should become a state. Statehood enthusiasts tagged the islands' majority Asian population, with its demonstrated capability of assimilation, as a forceful rationale for admission.

Legacies of War

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Military Training ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Foreign Wars ◽  
The U.S

Since 1900, United States troops have fought in more foreign conflicts than any other nation on Earth. Most Americans supported those actions, believing that they would keep the scourge of war far from our homes. But the strategy seems to have failed—it certainly did not prevent terror attacks against the U.S. mainland. The savage Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were not the first to inflict war damage in America’s 48 contiguous states, however—nor were they the first warlike actions to harm innocent citizens since the Civil War. Paradoxically, making war abroad has always required practicing warfare in our own back yards. Today’s large, mechanized military training exercises have degraded U.S. soils, water supplies, and wildlife habitats in the same ways that the real wars affected war-torn lands far away. The saddest fact of all is that the deadly components of some weapons in the U.S. arsenal never found use in foreign wars but have attacked U.S. citizens in their own homes and communities. The relatively egalitarian universal service of World War II left a whole generation of Americans with nostalgia and reverence for military service. Many of us, perhaps the majority, might argue that human and environmental sacrifices are the price we must be willing to pay to protect our interests and future security. A current political philosophy proposes that the United States must even start foreign wars to protect Americans and their homes. But Americans are not fully aware of all the past sacrifices—and what we don’t know can hurt us. Even decades-old impacts from military training still degrade land and contaminate air and water, particularly in the arid western states, and will continue to do so far into the future. Exploded and unexploded bombs, mines, and shells (“ordnance,” in military terms) and haphazard disposal sites still litter former training lands in western states. And large portions of the western United States remain playgrounds for war games, subject to large-scale, highly mechanized military operations for maintaining combat readiness and projecting American power abroad.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
David J Ulbrich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Pacific Basin ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.

An American Icon Crosses the Pacific

Dearest Lenny ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Mari Yoshihara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Career ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
War Effort

Leonard Bernstein’s early career was shaped by the global politics of World War II and its aftermath as well as his interest in the world beyond the United States, his understanding of war, and his dedication to peace. It was also propelled by the United States government’s investment in his background, qualities, and success in its war effort and postwar public relations. The initial encounter of Kazuko Amano (born Ueno) with Bernstein was enabled by the cultural policy of US occupation forces. After her initial fan letter to Bernstein in 1947, she followed his rising career through recordings, broadcasts, and performances and became Japan’s most loyal fan of the maestro, who quickly became an American icon with his appointment as the music director of the New York Philharmonic and the huge success of West Side Story.

Arabic Language Instruction

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter F. Abboud
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The U.S

The last fifteen years have witnessed rapid growth in the number of students studying Arabic and of programs concerned with the teaching of the language. This is directly attributable to the awakened interest in the United States in the Middle East in general, and the Arab world in particular, as a result of the entry of the U.S. in World War II and its emergence as a global power with strategic, economical, and political interests in the area. This is not to say that the teaching of Arabic is a new phenomenon in the U.S. As an indespensible tool of Orientalistic scholarship, Arabic was taught for many years in a few institutions which offered programs in Oriental and Semitic Studies.

Japanese Labor in World War II

1990 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 29-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rice
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Workers ◽  
The Pacific

Apart from the intrinsic value of understanding the fate of Japanese workers during the war, Japanese labor history in World War II also gives us a non-Western point of comparison for studies of wartime labor in the West. To facilitate that comparison, we should consider government policy, the response of the labor movement, and the conditions of workers during the war. In Japan, labor and economic history periodization of World War II does not conform to the European and American conceptions. For the Japanese, the war began with the outbreak of the “China incident” in 1937; Pearl Harbor, traumatic as it was for the United States, only marks the beginning of a new stage the Japanese call the “Pacific War.” It is not surprising, then, that Japanese labor history begins its wartime phase in 1937. In fact, to comprehend changes during the 1937–45 war, at least brief mention must be made of earlier developments.

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