"The Privilege of Acting upon Others: The Middle Eastern Exception to Anti-Exceptionalist Histories of the US and the World." In Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 3d ed. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, eds., 203-216

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations

This introduction outlines some of the main topics in the history of American foreign relations. It explains the importance of seven key themes—moral values; a belief in expansion and progress; racial and religious norms; the centrality of war; the influence of geography; the myth of “isolationism”; and domestic politics—in how Americans have interacted with the rest of the world. These themes are useful signposts to understanding an otherwise complicated history. The Introduction aims to explain these themes in as even-handed a manner as possible. In this way, readers will be able to address some of the most important topics and lay to rest some of the most common myths about America in the world.

POWER AND PLURALISM: AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 903-915
Author(s):  
DANIEL G. HUMMEL
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
American Century ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Us Foreign Relations ◽  
American Foreign Relations

The study of US foreign relations (what is now often called “America and the World”) has been in a protracted “religious turn” for at least a decade. One of the most prominent statements of the turn was Andrew Preston's article in Diplomatic History from 2006, “Bridging the Gap between the Sacred and the Secular in the History of American Foreign Relations.” Preston, a trained diplomatic historian who made an indelible contribution to the turn with his later Sword of Spirit, Shield of Strength: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012), called for “paying more attention” to religion in the field of American foreign relations. More precisely he urged historians to make of religion “a systematic rubric under which various moments in the history of American foreign relations, or the whole history itself, can be analyzed and explained.”

The Great Influenza

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
East Coast ◽  
World History ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Surgeon General ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of Disease ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines evidence principally from the US that the Great Influenza provoked profiteering by landlords, undertakers, vendors of fruit, pharmacists, and doctors, but shows that such complaints were rare and confined mostly to large cities on the East Coast. It then investigates anti-social advice and repressive decrees on the part of municipalities, backed by advice from the US Surgeon General and prominent physicians attacking ‘spitters, coughers, and sneezers’, which included state and municipal ordinances against kissing and even ‘big talkers’. It then surveys legislation on compulsory and recommended mask wearing. Yet this chapter finds no protest or collective violence against the diseased victims or any other ‘others’ suspected of disseminating the virus. Despite physicians’ and lawmakers’ encouragement of anti-social behaviour, mass volunteerism and abnegation instead unfolded to an extent never before witnessed in the world history of disease.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

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