Accepting Regional Zero: Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, U.S. Nonproliferation Policy and Global Security, 1957–1968

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stocker

Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) were an important development in the history of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. From 1957 through 1968, when the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed, the United States struggled to develop a policy toward NWFZs in response to efforts around the world to create these zones, including in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Many within the U.S. government initially rejected the idea of NWFZs, viewing them as a threat to U.S. nuclear strategy. However, over time, a preponderance of officials came to see the zones as advantageous, at least in certain areas of the world, particularly Latin America. Still, U.S. policy pertaining to this issue remained conservative and reactive, reflecting the generally higher priority given to security policy than to nuclear nonproliferation.

Author(s):  
Noel Maurer

This introductory chapter discusses the shift from politicized confrontations like the imbroglio of 1900 to legalized disputes like the more orderly affair of 2007. It advances four basic findings. First, American government intervention on behalf of U.S. foreign investors was astoundingly successful at extracting compensation through the 1980s. Second, American domestic interests trumped strategic concerns again and again, for small economic gains relative to the U.S. economy and the potential strategic losses. Third, the United States proved unable to impose institutional reform in Latin America and West Africa even while American agents were in place. Finally, the technology that the U.S. government used to protect American property rights overseas changed radically over time.


Author(s):  
David N. Dickter ◽  
Daniel C. Robinson

This chapter traces the early history and progress of a pioneering interprofessional practice and education (IPE) program at Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU), whose growth and development can be viewed in the context of the broader IPE field, that of a nascent movement within the United States to recognize and facilitate collaborative, patient-centered healthcare. This chapter provides some of the background and details from the early design years at WesternU. The IPE movement in the U.S. worked with general principles and broad conceptual outcomes such as safety and quality but it took time to delineate more specific guidelines and practices. Over the years, frameworks and standards for education, practice, and outcomes assessment have developed that have helped to guide the program. Similarly, WesternU has developed and refined its education and assessment methods over time.


Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 169-176
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson

We begin the book’s conclusion with the juxtaposition of two different stories of peyotism: the creation of an ecotourism business featuring Wixárika peyotism in Potrero de la Palmita, Nayarit, in 2010 and the short history of an African American peyotist church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1920s. The former is licit, enjoying support by a state committed to economic development, while the latter faced constant threats from the police before collapsing, in part due to its members’ fear of arrest. These two stories remind us of the central roles that place and time play in the history of peyotism across the U.S.-Mexican border, but they also force us to consider the ways that ideas about race have informed the battles over peyote in Mexico and the United States. Particularly striking is the fact that the racial prohibitions enacted by the Spanish Inquisition resonate with current law. Also notable is the fact that Mexicans and Americans have deployed similar ideas about race over time in their battles over peyote. This speaks to the underlying anxieties that indigeneity evokes in both societies, as well as the role that indigenous subjects have played in the creation of whiteness in both the United States and Mexico.


2019 ◽  
pp. 157-164
Author(s):  
Gamonal C. Sergio ◽  
César F. Rosado Marzán

This chapter, the book’s conclusion, summarizes the book’s main points and generally describes how the U.S. case illuminates the utility of Latin America and principled labor law for the rest of the world. It argues that, despite globalization, neoliberalism, labor law crises, and whatnot, many countries have deep traditions, legal and otherwise, that support protecting the weak and, as such, the protective principle and its correlative principles, primacy of reality, nonwaiver, and continuity. If the United States, one of the least labor-protective jurisdictions in the developed world, has the potential of having a labor-protective jurisprudence, other countries might do even better than the United States if they ascribe to principled labor law. In fact, the chapter briefly shows how the United Kingdom’s courts acknowledge primacy of reality (fact) and the protective principle in recent cases dealing with “gig” work. The conclusion also acknowledges that the book has been partial to state-enforced labor law, discussing little the importance of freedom of association. However, it asserts that freedom of association remains a necessary aspect for workers’ rights. As such, the book has provided a necessary but still incomplete toolbox for robust labor law. It concludes by underscoring the need for labor-protective jurisprudence in developed and developing countries alike, and the relevance of Latin America for at least part of that task.


Author(s):  
Peter Dauvergne

Chapters 7–11 explore why environmentalism is failing to make more headway against the global forces of unsustainability analyzed in chapters 1–6. Chapter 7 sets up the analysis by reviewing the global history of the environmental movement, highlighting the diversity of thought across cultures and time. Diversity characterizes contemporary environmentalism, from environmental justice movements in Africa to environmentalism of the poor in Asia to anti-capitalism in Latin America to conservation in North America. This diversity remains a source of strength and environmentalism is best thought of as a “movement of movements.” Around the world protests continue to rage; communities continue to rise up; radical organizations continue to fight capitalism; and, as the Goldman Prize reminds the world, individual environmentalists continue to win local battles. Still, over time the mainstream of environmentalism has increasingly come to reflect the values of those with money and privilege, supporting policies and prescriptions that arise primarily out of moderate Western environmentalism: conserving wildlife and natural settings; sustaining productive yields; improving eco-efficiency; and reducing pollution for prosperous citizens.


Author(s):  
Lisa Blee ◽  
Jean M. O’Brien

This chapter explains the connection between monuments and the stories about the past they convey to viewers over time. While monuments are considered static and place-bound, this statue of the Massasoit became mobile in numerous ways: in stories that travel with the viewer; as small replicas carried away as souvenirs or purchased as art across the country and the world; and in full-sized casts installed in diverse public settings in the Midwest and West. This chapter argues that the fact that the statue represents a Native leader with a connection to the story of the first Thanksgiving makes its mobility uniquely revealing of the fraught historical memory of colonialism in the U.S. This chapter introduces the argument that Wampanoag and other Native peoples have long resisted, challenged, and refigured the popular celebratory story of peaceful colonization often attached to the figure of the Massasoit. This chapter also introduces the history of the Thanksgiving myth, recounts Wampanoag and English settler relations, explains the popular interest in Indian statuary, and provides background on the public art movement that lead to the commission of the Massasoit statue.


2005 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Trish Flaster

Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Her statement sums up the philosophy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Medicinal Plant Working Group. This is the story of that group. It is the story of the evolution of an idea and the determination required to make it real. It is a story of community involvement and of people who care enough about plants to develop strategies to help ensure their future survival. This is the history of the Medicinal Plant Working Group (MPWG) under the guidance and leadership of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). It includes how it evolved, the projects to date, field data collected, and the community of people who have made it successful.


Author(s):  
Jane H. Hong

Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration. The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.


2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Priest

This paper analyzes the major debates over future petroleum supply in the United States, in particular the long-running feud between the world-famous geologist, M. King Hubbert, and the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Vincent E. McKelvey. The intellectual history of resource evaluation reveals that, by the mid-twentieth century, economists had come to control the discourse of defining a “natural resource.” Their assurances of abundance overturned earlier conceptions of petroleum supplies as fixed and finite in favor of a more flexible understanding of resource potential in a capitalist society and acceptance of the price elasticity of natural resources. In 1956, King Hubbert questioned these assurances by predicting that U.S. domestic oil production would peak around 1970, which drew him into a long-running debate with McKelvey and the so-called “Cornucopians.” When Hubbert’s Peak was validated in the mid-1970s, he became a prophet. The acceptance of Hubbert’s theory ensured the centrality of oil in almost all discourses about the future, and it even created a cultural movement of prophecy believers fixated on preparing for the oil end times. Although notions of resource cornucopia seem to be once again in ascendance in the United States, Hubbert’s Peak still haunts any consideration of humanity’s environmental future.


Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina

This chapter summarizes new trends in scholarship on the U.S. Southwest by expanding and refining the three-era schema of Southwest history illustrated in the book of Francis Baylies, who accompanied the victorious U.S. forces on their march through Mexico following the Mexican–American war. The book reflected U.S. views on the history of the region and the U.S. takeover of the former Mexican territories. The chapter divides Latino Catholicism in the Southwest into a thematic schema: colonial foundations, enduring communities of faith in the wake of the war between Mexico and the United States, the rejuvenation and diversification of Latino Catholic communities with the arrival of numerous immigrants from Mexico and throughout Latin America, and the struggle for rights in church and society that accelerated during the second half of the twentieth century.


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