Freedom of speech: A recent history of political t-shirts in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Marie Akou

Since their invention in the 1930s, t-shirts have become one of the most common styles of casual clothing in the United States ‐ worn by all ages, genders and social classes. Although ‘graphic’ t-shirts have existed for decades, twenty-first-century technologies have made them much faster and easier to produce. Students protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s wore black armbands and grew their hair long; today, students (and activists of all ages) are more likely to wear political t-shirts. In a time when anyone with modest computer skills can design a graphic and get t-shirts professionally printed and shipped in just two or three days, this medium for self- and group-expression is well-suited to the turbulence of politics. This article explores the recent history of political t-shirts in the United States in two parts. The first focuses on legislation and legal rulings, including a case heard by the US Supreme Court in 2018 regarding whether activists can wear political t-shirts in polling places (a space where any kind of campaign activity is generally forbidden). The second part explores the definition of a ‘political’ t-shirt. This section is grounded in a study of t-shirts that are currently turning up in thrift shops in Bloomington, IN ‐ a small, politically active community in a conservative state that voted for Obama in 2008 and then Trump in 2016.

Author(s):  
Chia Youyee Vang

The Vietnam War is the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies, policy reports, memoirs, and literary titles. As America’s longest and most controversial war, it coincided with domestic turmoil in the United States and in Southeast Asia, led to the displacement of large numbers of people, and strained the social fabric of Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese societies. The complex nature of the war means that despite the many books that have been written about it, much remains to unfold, in particular the experiences of ethnic minorities in Laos who became entangled in Cold War politics during the 1960s and 1970s. This book fills the gap by exploring the dramatic forces of history that drew several dozen young Hmong men to become fighter pilots in the United States’ Secret War in Laos, which was in direct support of the larger war in Vietnam. They transformed from ethnic minorities who mostly lived on the margins of Lao society to daring airmen working alongside American pilots. After four decades in exile, surviving pilots, families of those killed in action, and American veterans who worked with them collectively narrated their version of the historical events that resulted in the forced migration of nearly 150,000 Hmong to the United States. By privileging Hmong knowledge, this book begs us to reconsider the war from overlooked perspectives and to engage in the ongoing construction of meanings of war and postwar memories in shaping ethnic and national identities.


Author(s):  
Dafydd Townley

The Watergate affair has become synonymous with political corruption and conspiracy. The crisis has, through fact, fiction, and debate, become considerably more than the arrest of five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Instead, the term “Watergate” has since come to represent the burglary, its failed cover-up, the press investigation, the Senate enquiry, and the eventual resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Arguably, Watergate has come to encompass all the illegalities of the Nixon administration. The crisis broke when the Vietnam War had already sunk public confidence in the executive to a low ebb, and in the context of a society already fractured by the turbulence of the 1960s. As such, Watergate is seen as the nadir of American democracy in the 20th century. Perversely, despite contemporaries’ genuine fears for the future of the US democratic system, the scandal highlighted the efficiency of the US governmental machine. The investigations that constituted the Watergate enquiry, which were conducted by the legislative and judicial branches and the fourth estate, exposed corruption in the executive of the United States that stretched to the holder of the highest office. The post-war decades had allowed an imperial presidency to develop, which had threatened the country’s political equilibrium. Watergate disclosed that the presidency had overreached its constitutional powers and responsibilities and had conspired to keep those moves hidden from the electorate. More significantly, however, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon revealed that the checks-and-balances system of government, which was conceived almost 200 years before the Watergate affair, worked as those who devised it had planned. Watergate should illustrate to Americans not just the dangers of consolidating great power in the office of the president, but also the means to counteract such growth.


1997 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughan Lowe

The history of clashes over extraterritorial jurisdiction between the United States of America and other States in the Americas, Europe and elsewhere is a long one. That history is commonly traced back to the antitrust claims arising from the Alcoa case in 1945, in which the “effects” doctrine was advanced in the peculiar and objectionable form in which it is applied, not simply to acts which constitute elements of a single offence but which occur in different jurisdictions but, rather, to the economic repercussions of acts in one State which are felt in another. The conflict persisted into the 1950s, with the clashes over US regulation of the international shipping and paper industries. In the 1960s and 1970s there were further clashes in relation to the extraterritorial application of US competition laws, notably in disputes over shipping regulation and the notorious Uranium Antitrust litigation, in which US laws were applied to penalise the extraterritorial conduct of non-US companies, conducted with the approval of their national governments, at a time when those companies were barred by US law from trading in the United States. It was that litigation which was in large measure responsible for the adoption in the United Kingdom of the Protection of Trading Interests Act 1980, which significantly extended the powers which the British government had asserted in the 1952 Shipping Contracts and Commercial Documents Act to defend British interests against US extraterritorial claims.


Author(s):  
JOÃO DE PINA-CABRAL

Charles Boxer's Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825, which came out nearly half a century ago, has found a readership beyond the circle of those interested in the history of Portuguese overseas expansion. Boxer was perfectly conscious, as he produced it, of the impact his essay would have. He found in the discourse of race an instrument of mediation that allowed him to continue to develop his favoured topics of research in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The response to Boxer's book points to the highly charged atmosphere that continues to surround all debates concerning ‘race’ and, in particular, those that compare North American notions of race with those that can be observed elsewhere in the world. This chapter attempts to shed new light on what caused such a longstanding cross-cultural misinterpretation.


Author(s):  
Christopher S. Browning ◽  
Pertti Joenniemi ◽  
Brent J. Steele

The chapter explores the United States’ vicarious identification with Israel, arguing that since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel has served as a positive identity proxy. Two features of Israeli military might have proven attractive for the United States’ vicarious identification with it: its preemptive military actions and its resounding military successes. Using generational analysis the chapter surmises that the increased connections made to Israel in the 1990s and 2000s by the United States are a result of the US Baby Boomer generation’s admiration of Israel as heroic, right, and assertive and where this image served as a formative experience for that generation at the same time as the United States was at its military, moral, and cultural nadir in Vietnam amid the broader tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. This generational take may also explain the increased tensions between the two countries and even the unraveling of the United States’ vicarious identification with Israel hereafter.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Agnes Yudita Larasatiningrum

History has shown us that the most successful progressive movements have been intergenerational. Thus, this article will deeply examine about youth movements in the U.S specifically on youth movement against the U.S invasion in Vietnam War around 1960s. Vietnam War was the first modern American conflict that seriously affected the United States not only politically, but also socio-culturally. It will be explored how youth generation has become a breakthrough in American history since it was the most significant movement of its kind in the nation’s history. According to Karl Mannheim one generation is not fully continuity of the elder generation, but they could be different and challenging the established form. Youth tend to reject the US involvement in the Vietnam War because there is a gap between the ideals they have learned from older generations and the realities they have experienced.Keywords: U.S. Youth Movement, Vietnam War, and Generational Cohorts.


Author(s):  
David R. Maciel ◽  

In the decade of the 1960s and 1970s, a trascendental social movement –which was known as the Chicano Movement for Civil Rights– took place in the United States. One of its major achievements was a cultural flowering that encompassed all the art forms and practices. Among them, one of single importance is the documentary film. This article presents an overview of the origins, first steps and current developments of the Chicana/o documentary cinema. Such films address a multitude of topics and combine highly artistic value with a definite political message. In addition, the Chicana/o documentary is an outstanding and highly informative mirror into Chicano experience. Since its inception to the present, over 100 documentaries have been produced and exhibited in the US, yet they have not been well-distributed in the Spanish-speaking world.


Author(s):  
M. B. Konashev

This study presents a small part of the epistolary heritage of an outstanding biologist, geneticist, and evolutionist, F.G. Dobrzhansky, which is of interest for not only geneticists but also anyone interested in the history of our country. In the correspondence of Feodosiy Grigorievich with B.L. Astaurov, D.K. Belyaev, R.L. Berg, N.N. Vorontsov, G.F. Gauze, B.M. Zavadovsky, N.P. Dubinin, G.D. Karpechenko, Yu.Ya. Kerkis, G.A. Levitsky, Zh.A. Medvedev, N.N. Medvedev, N.I. Vavilov, S.Ya. Paramonov, M.N. Rimsky-Korsakov, A.S Serebrovsky, V.N. Soifer, Yu. A. Filipchenko, I.I. Shmalgauzen, A.V. Yablokov, and other scientists, significant events have been discussed, which took place in Russian and foreign academic and university science of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the fate of Russian immigrants in the United States.


Author(s):  
Kateryna Kasatkina

The article is an attempt to analyze the peculiarities of the US Policy towards Cuba under conditions of break off diplomatic relations in the 1960s. The article focuses on factors which influenced on the formation of the US policy towards Cuba and determined the nature of its qualitative changes in the given period. The author analyzed definite political and economic steps made by President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson against Fidel Castro’s regime. There is also described the work of the Special Group Augmented that prepared for the new phase of the «Cuban project» – Operation «Mongoose». As a result of the research the author comes to the conclusion, that peculiarities of the US Policy towards Cuba under conditions of break off diplomatic relations in the 1960’s had changed. President Kennedy’s policies were characterized by different methods and approaches. It included both covert operations and sabotage against F. Castro’s regime, as well as political and economic pressure on Cuba. However, such US policy had the opposite effect. Cuba had established relations with the Soviet Union. The confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba led to The Cuban missile crisis. After the crisis was resolved the USA was forced to suspend operation «Mongoose». In addition, John F. Kennedy had attempted to establish a secret back channel of communication with F. Castro. After his death, preliminary for negotiations between Washington and Havana were discontinued. The new President Lyndon Johnson did not allow the normalization of relations with Cuba on Castro’s terms and while he was in power. He made an effort to destabilize the Castro’s regime by making an engaging immigration policy for Cubans who lived in the United States or desired come to the country and got a permanent residence. At the end of Johnson’s presidency, the United States took part in the Vietnam war, but the problem of U.S.-Cuban relations remained unresolved.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

By identifying two general issues in recent history textbook controversies worldwide (oblivion and inclusion), this article examines understandings of the United States in Mexico's history textbooks (especially those of 1992) as a means to test the limits of historical imagining between U. S. and Mexican historiographies. Drawing lessons from recent European and Indian historiographical debates, the article argues that many of the historical clashes between the nationalist historiographies of Mexico and the United States could be taught as series of unsolved enigmas, ironies, and contradictions in the midst of a central enigma: the persistence of two nationalist historiographies incapable of contemplating their common ground. The article maintains that lo mexicano has been a constant part of the past and present of the US, and lo gringo an intrinsic component of Mexico's history. The di erences in their historical tracks have been made into monumental ontological oppositions, which are in fact two tracks—often overlapping—of the same and shared con ictual and complex experience.


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