Legitimation crisis, memory, and United States exceptionalism: Lessons from post-communist Eastern Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1285-1300
Author(s):  
Monica Ciobanu ◽  
Mihaela Şerban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Past

The article examines how the experiences of post-communist transitional justice policies could inform current controversies in the United States regarding its reckoning with the past. To lay the ground for this analysis, three facets of American exceptionalism—the dual state reality, the triumphalist myth, and the denialist myth—are identified as principal obstacles that have preempted any substantive reparations for the crimes against humanity perpetrated against enslaved Africans and their descendants. This is followed by a presentation of how the 1989 revolutions in East and Central Europe failed to promote an inclusive and pluralistic model of the past. Instead, current representations of the past rooted in essentialist and ethnocentric historical narratives are weaponized by non-democratic political actors. Finally, the authors caution against misguided representations of historical trauma and memory wars in the United States that could potentially reproduce White supremacist ideologies and escalate existent political and cultural divisions.

scholarly journals Making narrative connections? Exploring how late teens relate their own lives to the historically significant past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dawes. Duraisingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Study Participants

This paper reports on a study that invited 187 16–18-year-old students in the United States to draw diagrams showing connections between their own lives and the past. Interviews were subsequently held with 26 study participants. The degree to which students made connections between their own lives and the past, and the various ways in which they integrated personal and historical narratives, are discussed, with three examples explored in detail. The ways in which interviewed students talked about their diagrams point to the significance of individuals' understandings of the nature of historical knowledge for how they use the past to orient their own lives.

THE GLOBAL VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAY SEXTON
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American History ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global View ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations

In the past decade, ‘internationalizing’ or ‘globalizing’ American history has become the mantra of the historical profession. This essay reviews this new body of literature that situates American history within a global framework, searches for connections between the United States and the rest of the world, and explores how American practices and culture have been exported. The ‘globalizing’ project, it shall be argued, has helped historians move beyond the limiting concept of American exceptionalism, whilst providing new explanations for the distinct and, at times, unique, history of the United States. It has also shed new light on the history of American foreign relations. Though historians need to balance the international with the national and better apply transnational methods to the study of the nineteenth century, the global perspective has already added a new texture to our understanding of American history.

From Combahee resistance to the Confederate: Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-535
Author(s):  
Tanya Ann Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Combahee River Collective

In the weeks preceding the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017, HBO responded to criticism of Game of Thrones’ whiteness by announcing a new series from its producers called Confederate that imagined an alternative history in which the Confederacy became its own nation and slavery still existed. A few weeks later, Representative Maxine Waters’ refusal to listen to white male practices of diversion and condescension under the guise of flattery made national news when she interrupted Treasury Secretary Mnuchin's stalling to “reclaim my time.” In this paper, I examine these events as representative of the prevalent contention in the United States that the post-2016 election era is an era of crisis, but look outside the ruling temporality of crisis as it is framed through white supremacy. Reinterpreting this crisis through the lens of black feminist insurgencies against white supremacy demonstrates how the ruling temporalities of mainstream feminism are implicated in the election of 2016 and the events following. In returning to the year 1977 and aligning two feminist moments from that year, the Combahee River Collective Statement and the National Women’s Conference, I argue for a recalibration of feminist temporalities that will allow us, as Lisa Lowe argues, to recuperate the future in the tense of the past conditional, to see “what could have been” as that which may yet be.

Ancient History, American Time: Chesnutt's Outsider Classicism and the Present Past

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sectional Conflict

This essay advances a theory of black classicism as a mode of resistance to the dominant narrative of American history, according to which the United States was to be a new Rome, rooted in the best traditions of classical antiquity yet destined to surpass its antecedent through the redeeming power of American exceptionalism. In the late nineteenth century this narrative reemerged as a means of getting beyond sectional conflict and refocusing on imperial expansion and economic growth. For Charles Chesnutt, a post-Reconstruction African American writer, the progress of American civilization was a dubious notion, a fiction suited to the nation's imperial purposes. In opposition, Chesnutt developed an outsider classicism, challenging the figuration of the United States as inheritor of the mantle of Western civilization by linking the nation to the ancient world through the institution of slavery—a very present relic of the past.

US Feminisms and Their Global Connections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Movements

This chapter reinterprets the history of twentieth-century US feminism by foregrounding the importance of the global. Both international events and transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods have shaped the development of feminism in the United States. Recognizing the importance of the global foregrounds the diversity of political goals and political actors within movements for gender equality. Also, acknowledging US feminists’ engagement with the global reinforces the need for new narratives and periodizations for the multiple histories of US feminisms. To explore these ideas, this chapter first analyzes definitions of feminism and existing historical narratives of US feminism. The second half examines the significance of the global for feminist movements seeking political equality, economic justice, and sexual liberation.

scholarly journals Freedom, Salvation, Redemption

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-123
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Process ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law And Politics

The politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this field presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. This article makes the case for a different approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, affirming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. This hails a particular kind of subject of freed om and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.

scholarly journals Lives, Not Metadata: Recovery Methods for Digital Histories of Racial Violence

2021 ◽  
Vol 694 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Monica Muñoz Martinez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Public Understanding ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Time

This article discusses new digital research projects by historians, sociologists, and legal scholars that recover previously unrecorded cases of racist violence in the twentieth century and bring them into public view for the first time. New cases are expanding current understandings of the past by documenting lynchings, racially motivated homicides, police killings, church bombings, and nonlethal types of violence that have targeted multiple racial and ethnic groups. Early findings from these projects show that we only have a glimpse into widespread practices of racial terror in the United States. I argue for collecting broader sets of data about victims, surviving relatives, aggressors, and events in the aftermath of violence, because doing so will create new possibilities for studying widespread historical trauma, institutional traces of racist violence, and public understanding of increasingly urgent historical lessons. To keep the humanity of victims central to recovery efforts, I suggest that researchers can learn from community preservation and memorialization practices.

International Research and Variation in Views of Ethnicity

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-72
Author(s):  
Ella Inglebret ◽  
Amy Skinder-Meredith ◽  
Shana Bailey ◽  
Carla Jones ◽  
Ashley France
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Classification System ◽  
International Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Publication Patterns

The authors in this article first identify the extent to which research articles published in three American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) journals included participants, age birth to 18 years, from international backgrounds (i.e., residence outside of the United States), and go on to describe associated publication patterns over the past 12 years. These patterns then provide a context for examining variation in the conceptualization of ethnicity on an international scale. Further, the authors examine terminology and categories used by 11 countries where research participants resided. Each country uses a unique classification system. Thus, it can be expected that descriptions of the ethnic characteristics of international participants involved in research published in ASHA journal articles will widely vary.

Proportion of Individuals With Past-Year Suicidal Ideation Who Attempted Suicide Over the Past 10 Years in the United States, and the Influence of Age and Sex

Crisis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shannon Lange ◽  
Courtney Bagge ◽  
Charlotte Probst ◽  
Jürgen Rehm
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Suicidal Ideation ◽  
Random Effects ◽  
Attempted Suicide ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
Age Category

Abstract. Background: In recent years, the rate of death by suicide has been increasing disproportionately among females and young adults in the United States. Presumably this trend has been mirrored by the proportion of individuals with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether the proportion of individuals in the United States with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide differed by age and/or sex, and whether this proportion has increased over time. Method: Individual-level data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 2008–2017, were used to estimate the year-, age category-, and sex-specific proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. We then determined whether this proportion differed by age category, sex, and across years using random-effects meta-regression. Overall, age category- and sex-specific proportions across survey years were estimated using random-effects meta-analyses. Results: Although the proportion was found to be significantly higher among females and those aged 18–25 years, it had not significantly increased over the past 10 years. Limitations: Data were self-reported and restricted to past-year suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Conclusion: The increase in the death by suicide rate in the United States over the past 10 years was not mirrored by the proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide during this period.

EDITORIAL: Migration and competitiveness: Japan and the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Variable Cost ◽  
Fixed Cost ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
The Past ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Key Sectors ◽  
Past Half

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.

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