‘America’ and Europe, 1914–1945

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Ellwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mass Communications ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Democratic Stability ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
Second World

The First World War cost Europe the leadership of the world. But the United States of Woodrow Wilson was not ready to take its place. The 1920s brought Europe to a crossroads where mass democracy, mass production, and mass communications—the latter two dominated by American innovations— transformed ideas of sovereignty, modernity, and identity everywhere. The financial crash of 1929 destroyed illusions about the United States as the land of the future, and helped legitimize the totalitarians. European democrats looked to the 1930s New Deal as their last best hope. During the Second World War Roosevelt rebuilt the global order, with the United Nations and other new institutions. But the United States was now looking to ‘retire’ Europe from the world scene, and build a new universe based on America’s experience of the link between mass prosperity and democratic stability.

America Abroad

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kal Raustiala
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Second World

The single most important feature of American history after 1945 was the United States’s assumption of hegemonic leadership. Europeans had noted America’s enormous potential since at least the nineteenth century. After the Civil War the United States had one of the largest economies in the world, but, as noted earlier in this book, in geopolitical terms it remained a surprisingly minor player. By 1900 the United States was playing a more significant political role. But it was only after 1945 that the nation’s potential on the world stage was fully realized. Victory in the Second World War left the United States in an enviable position. Unlike the Soviet Union, which endured devastating fighting on its territory and lost tens of millions of citizens, the United States had experienced only one major attack on its soil. Thanks to its actions in the war America had great influence in Europe. And the national economy emerged surprisingly vibrant from the years of conflagration, easily dominant over any conceivable rival or set of rivals. When the First World War ended the United States ultimately chose to return to its hemispheric perch. It declined to join the new League of Nations, and rather than maintaining engagement with the great powers of the day, America generally turned inward. The years following the Second World War were quite different. In addition to championing—and hosting—the new United Nations, the United States quickly established a panoply of important institutions aimed at maintaining and organizing international cooperation in both economic and security affairs. Rising tensions with the Soviet Union, apparent to many shortly after the war’s end, led the United States to remain militarily active in both Europe and Asia. The intensifying Cold War cemented this unprecedented approach to world politics. The prolonged occupations of Germany and Japan were straightforward examples of this newly active global role. In both cases the United States refashioned a conquered enemy into a democratic, free-market ally—a significant feat. The United States did not, however, seek a formal empire in the wake of its victory.

Orpheus in Tennis Sneakers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hicks ◽  
Christian Asplund
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Informal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Unrest ◽  
Second World

This chapter describes Wolff's childhood and formative years in the world of music. Born to cellist Kurt Wolff and his wife Helen in 1934, Christian Wolff grew up during an era of political unrest, which later culminated in the Second World War. Though born in France to German parents, Wolff would spend a significant part of his life in the United States, where he had begun an informal education in music, and where he would eventually study under his mentor John Cage, from whom Wolff would draw the fundamental ideas, habits, and relationships that would guide the rest of his compositional career. Here, the chapter shows how Wolff's early opus—which set the pattern for all his subsequent compositional periods—were formed and influenced through Cage's instruction. Yet the chapter shows that this influence proved reciprocal, with Wolff likewise leaving his own lasting impacts upon Cage's compositional career.

How It Began: Bletchley Park Goes to War

Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Radio Communications ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
The Many ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The breaking of the German teleprinter cipher that led to the construction of the Colossus computer was the culmination of a series of triumphs for British codebreakers. British interception of other countries’ radio communications had begun in earnest during the First World War. The War Office ‘censored’ diplomatic communications passing through the hands of the international telegraph companies, setting up a codebreaking operation to decipher the secret messages. The British Army intercepted German military wireless communications with a great deal of success. E. W. B. Gill, one of the army officers involved in decoding the messages, recalled that ‘the orderly Teutonic mind was especially suited for devising schemes which any child could unravel’. One of the most notable successes for the British cryptanalysts came in December 1916 when the commander of the German Middle-East signals operation sent a drunken message to all his operators wishing them a Merry Christmas. With little other activity taking place over the Christmas period, the same isolated and clearly identical message was sent out in six different codes, only one of which, until this point, the British had managed to break. The army codebreaking operation became known as MI1b and was commanded by Major Malcolm Hay, a noted historian and eminent academic. It enjoyed a somewhat fractious relationship with its junior counterpart in the Admiralty, formally the Naval Intelligence Department 25 (NID25) but much better known as Room 40, after the office in the Old Admiralty Buildings in Whitehall that it occupied. The navy codebreaking organisation had an even more successful war than MI1b, recruiting a number of the future employees of Britain’s Second World War codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, including Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, Frank Birch, Nigel de Grey, and Alastair Denniston, who by the end of the war was head of Room 40. Among the many successes of the Royal Navy codebreakers was the breaking of the Zimmermann telegram, which showed that Germany had asked Mexico to join an alliance against the United States, offering Mexico’s ‘lost territory’ in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in return, and brought the United States into the war.

4. The American century?

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
American Power ◽  
American Century ◽  
The World

Despite rejecting the internationalist marriage Woodrow Wilson had arranged for it with the world, America was still the strongest state in the international system. ‘The American century?’ explains how the myth of isolationism emerged in this period, and why it was so powerful. The Depression did more damage to America’s role in the world than anything in the decades before it, yet in the late 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt began rebuilding the structures of American power. Thanks to Roosevelt, during World War II the United States transitioned from a major, but often peripheral actor on the world scene, to one of the most powerful states the world has ever seen.

Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Reappraisal

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
American President ◽  
The First World War

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”

The Constitution and the Tasks Ahead

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 961-979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles McKinley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
First World ◽  
Changing Society

A resurgent conservatism rules the day in the United States not only in public affairs but also in political speculation. Frightened by the uneasy ghost of the barbarism that was embodied in German Nazism and Italian Fascism and by the spread of Russian-spawned totalitarianism, political speculation in this and other democratic countries now shrinks from the hazard inherent in a rationalistic effort to remold the world of public affairs. Inquiry turns to the adoration of our inheritance, to the discovery of neglected or undervalued virtues in the institutions as molded by our forebears, and to the wise prevision which they, in simpler crisis times, expressed in their statesmanship.My own fundamental orientation toward government developed in the “progressive” decade before mankind's applecart was sharply tilted, if not completely upset, by the First World War. It rested upon an act of preference for a democratic, freely thinking, and freely associating society. It therefore shared something of the “divine discontent” felt by all political innovators, to whom the wisdom of the ancestors always has seemed incomplete and often inadequate to meet the demands of a constantly changing society.

scholarly journals Who is Right, Who is Wrong? Interpreting 14 Points of Wilson – A Case Study of Deontic Modals and their Meanings

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Matulewska ◽  
Marek Mikołajczyk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
United States Congress ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Deontic Modals ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Abstract The document titled “14 points of Wilson” was announced by the President of the United States Woodrow Wilson in his speech addressed to the United States Congress on 8th January 1918. The speech is one of the most well known documents of the First World War as it touched upon several world issues. The text has been interpreted ever since in respect to the importance and real meaning of points formulated by Wilson. One of the points referred to Poland. The aim of the paper is to focus on the exponents of deontic modality used in that text of historical value and to find the answer to the question concerning the deontic value of each point. The analysis will encompass the principles of deontic logic as well as the meaning of deontic modals in legal discourse at the time of speech delivery as those 14 points should be classified as a text belonging to legal genres. The aim of the paper is to present the historical background and the linguistic analysis in order to find out whether historical facts, interpretations and language used correspond with one another.

Peaceful Change in US Foreign Policy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The chapter discusses the US advocacy of liberal principles and pursuit of hegemony as its contribution to peaceful change. In the nineteenth century, the United States forcefully asserted its leadership over the Western Hemisphere, although it did not have the military capabilities to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Under Woodrow Wilson, the United States promoted the ideals of collective security, self-determination, and international institutions. These ideas were implemented in the World War II settlement, when the United States helped to establish new institutions: Bretton Woods and the United Nations. The United States helped to integrate the USSR and China into the international community through the détente strategy, including linkage and triangular diplomacy. After the Cold War ended, Bill Clinton sought to engage China through increased trade and membership in the World Trade Organization and decided to expand NATO to include members of the former Soviet alliance.

scholarly journals Avstro-ogrska diplomacija in vstop ZDA v vojno

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2018) (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrej Rahten
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Scientific Paper ◽  
The United States ◽  
English Summary ◽  
World War ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Biographical Research ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Category: 1.01 Original scientific paper Language: Original in Slovenian (Abstract in Slovenian and English, Summary in English) Key words: Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Habsburg Monarchy, United States, Ivan Švegel, Josip Goričar Abstract: The article presents the work of Austro-Hungarian diplomacy in the United States during the First World War. The reasons for the cooling of relations between the superpowers are evaluated, and on the basis of biographical research, the author also draws attention to the important role of two Slovenians in the Austro-Hungarian consular service: Ivan Švegel and Josip Goričar.

scholarly journals Rogers Act 1924: establishment of a professional USA Foreign Service

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
Tetiana Klynina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
World War ◽  
Foreign Service ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
First World ◽  
Selection Of

The article is devoted to the analysis of the formation of the legal framework that made possible the existence and functioning of the US foreign service. The purpose of the article is to clarify the preface and the course of formation of the professional foreign service of the United States, which was reflected in the adoption of the Rogers Act. The methodological basis of the study. The study was based on the principle of historicism, which contributed to the consideration of the phenomenon under study in its development and made it possible to identify periods in the formation of a professional diplomatic service. The use of the problem-chronological method contributed to the preservation of the historical heredity and integrity of the picture; the application of the comparative method made it possible to identify significant changes that occurred after the adoption of Rogers’ Law, which was considered through the use of the method of analysis. A historiographical description of the main scientific works devoted to the research topic is given. Analyzed works A. Evans, T. Lay, I. Stewart etc., which became the basis for the study. The scientific novelty lies in the systematization of ideas about qualitative and quantitative changes in the diplomatic service after the adoption of the relevant law. The author concludes that before the adoption of the Rogers Act there was no control over the selection of diplomatic and consular staff and the negative consequences of such a decision were especially evident during the First World War. Therefore, the historical conditions in which America found itself at that time became a challenge for the continued existence of the consular and diplomatic services, and therefore the issue of restructuring and modernization of these services in the United States and its transfer to another, qualitatively new level. In general, the author emphasizes the change in the status of foreign service, which was introduced by relevant legislation, namely the Rogers Act, the need for which was caused by certain historical conditions of the American state and its place on the world stage. Prior to the enactment of the Diplomatic Service Act, there was virtually no control over the selection of diplomatic and consular personnel representing the United States on the world stage. After the First World War, it became clear that the diplomatic service needed to be restructured. That is why Rogers’ law was passed, which, in fact, was the first legislative attempt to resolve this issue.

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