scholarly journals Speaking about the War of 1812: Reinterpreting History in the Rhetoric Surrounding Canada’s Inter-War Diplomacy (1919–1939)

Author(s):  
Hector Mackenzie

A remarkable feature of Canada’s external relations in the years between the two world wars of the twentieth century is the extent to which Canada’s conduct and speeches by its representatives on international affairs were dominated by imagery of North American harmony. Past clashes, most notably the War of 1812, or simply differences of views were forgotten or overlooked in the construction of a myth that served to justify inaction and the denial of commitments in imperial and world affairs. An aloof, unhelpful stance internationally was depicted more positively as a worthy example of peaceful attitudes and conduct. Thus, the inter-war period was dominated by rhetoric about ‘the longest undefended border in the world,’ ‘[more than a] century of peace in North America,’ and the contrast between the ‘New World’ and the ‘Old World’ in world affairs. No Canadian speech in an international forum seemed complete without some variation on these themes and without an admonition to Europeans and other miscreants to settle disputes by conciliation, negotiation and arbitration – rather than resort to war – as was the tradition in relations between Canada and the United States. This paper deals with the development, application and effect in the inter-war period of the lessons supposedly drawn from the experience and especially the aftermath of the War of 1812.

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Lloyd E. Ambrosius

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Four days earlier, in his war message to Congress, he gave his rationale for declaring war against Imperial Germany and for creating a new world order. He now viewed German submarine attacks against neutral as well as belligerent shipping as a threat to the whole world, not just the United States. “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” he claimed. “It is a war against all nations.” He now believed that Germany had violated the moral standards that “citizens of civilized states” should uphold. The president explained: “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” He focused on protecting democracy against the German regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. “A steadfast concert for peace,” he said, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.” Wilson called on Congress to vote for war not just because Imperial Germany had sunk three American ships, but for the larger purpose of a new world order. He affirmed: “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-69
Author(s):  
Dmitrii N. Khristenko

The article examines the foreign policy concept of the «new world order» of George Herbert Walker Bush, which he put forward during the Gulf War (1990-1991). Despite its short duration, the Middle East conflict has become a symbol of the transformation of international relations initiated by the crisis of the bipolar system and arising of the United States as the main military and political world power. Consequently, Washington sought to rethink its role in the world arena. This task was intended to solve by the concept of a «new world order». The main sources for this article were the memoirs of the former American president and James Addison Baker III (U.S. Secretary of State), documents of White House’ administration, as well as publications of «Foreign Affairs» – the most influential journal on international relations in the United States. The research methodology includes the space-time analysis of Fernand Paul Achille Braudel, historical-descriptive and historical-genetic methods. It is noted that the foreign policy concept of a «new world order» was in the centre of public attention and caused a heated discussion in the United States, as a result of which was rejected its main element – reliance on allies and the rule of international law. The attempts of Russian diplomacy to propose a corrected interpretation of the concept of a «new world order» did not meet the understanding overseas. Washington took a course towards sole leadership in the world that triggered the deterioration of the state of affairs in the world arena in the long term.


Author(s):  
Jose Moya

More than 98 percent of the Brazilian population descend from people who arrived in the country, willingly or forced, during the last five centuries. French and Dutch Calvinists established colonies during the 1500s and 1600s. The Portuguese, including Jewish conversos, expelled these imperial rivals and, unlike in Portuguese India, managed to forge the Luso-Brazilian culture to which later arrivals would eventually assimilate. Close to four-tenths of the eleven million slaves trafficked across the Atlantic landed in Brazil, giving the country the largest Afro-descendant population in the world outside Nigeria. The large numbers, the traffic’s long temporal span, and the country’s close connection to Portuguese Africa infused Brazil with distinctively intense and varied African ethnic cultures that shaped both the slaves’ strategies of adaptation and resistance and the national ethos. Brazil also received over five million immigrants after its independence in 1822, most of them between the 1880s and the 1920s. Latin Europe accounted for four-fifths of the arrivals (1.8 million Portuguese, 1.5 million Italians, and 700,000 Spaniards). Others came from elsewhere in Europe and beyond, giving Brazil the largest population of Japanese descendants in the world outside Japan, the largest of Lebanese descendants outside Lebanon, and the second largest of German descendants outside Germany (after the United States). This engendered a strikingly multicultural society. Yet over a few generations, Brazil absorbed these new populations in a manner that resembles the experience of the rest of the New World. Economically, immigrants turned southern Brazil from a colonial backwater into the richest region of the country, but, in the process, they also brought racially embedded regional inequalities to the forefront.


1984 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Albro Martin

Transportation, especially inland transportation, has played a more important role in the economic development of the United States than that of any other nation. After a long, slow start in which it faced the necessity of dealing across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the young nation found itself expanding westward across an equally vast land mass, without much idea of how its people might conveniently get to the Promised Land or how they would send its fruits back to market. Until the problem of inland transportation began to be solved following the War of 1812, America remained just another of the important maritime nations of the world, tied to a coastline and the few miles of coastal plain that bordered it. Such areas of the world had been virtually synonymous with “civilization” for many centuries; but in a generation or two after about 1815, the ancient domination of the sea was emphatically erased.


1968 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmer Plischke

As Chief of State and head of government, the President is the epicenter of the management of American external relations and the formulation of foreign policy. Not only does he welcome the leaders of other countries who come on summit visits, receive personally the diplomatic emissaries of foreign governments accredited to the United States, and participate in many other formal diplomatic functions, but he also is responsible for executing those segments of the law that pertain to international affairs, for appointing United States diplomats and communicating with other governments, for making treaties, and for initiating and enunciating foreign policy. Addressing himself to the last of these, President Truman cryptically declared: “The President makes foreign policy.” Dean Rusk later commented that this “is not the whole story,” but “it serves very well if one wishes to deal with the matter in five words.”


1917 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 185-197
Author(s):  
Claude Jenkins

When Peter the Great was wearied with London and Londoners, and even receiving visits of ‘the thin gentleman’ in ‘a modest looking coach’ to his lodgings in Norfolk Street, Strand, and returning them through the back door of Kensington House had ceased to amuse, he was induced to make an expedition from Deptford to Lambeth where, we are told, ‘nothing in England astonished him so much as the Archiepiscopal library … he declared that he had never imagined that there were so many printed volumes in the world.’ One would like to know if they displayed to him among the MSS. that Elizabethan atlas (463) with its wonderful map of the New World and its mariner's compass in the wooden cover—an atlas made, as it shows, in days when Africa was better known than Scotland and Canada included what we now know as the United States; or Sir Henry Maynwaring's treatise on nautical terms (91, cf. 268), parent of many similar works. They form at any rate part of the original collection which the Archbishops hold in trust ‘to ye service of God and his Church, of the Kings and Commonwealth of this Realme, and particularly of the Archbishops of Canterbury,’ in the terms of Archbishop Abbott's will, ‘as they will answere unto me, and my predecessor [Richard Bancroft] in that fearefull day of God.’ Those treasures thus preserved have been added to, under sanctions less tremendous, not only by the munificence of Archbishops such as Sheldon and Tenison, Secker and Manners-Sutton, but also by the gifts of readers: or if Lambeth Library is the only one in London, public or private, of which it can be said that access has been given to students for over three hundred years, it may be allowed to the enthusiasm of one of the youngest as well as the latest of its Keepers to venture the opinion that it has gained thereby not less than it has given. It was a reader, John Selden, who saved it in the days of the Commonwealth: it was yet other readers, William Dugdale, and in the following century Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham, who recovered for it valuable MSS. which, owing to the change of the times, could no longer be regained, as had been done in earlier days, by the weapons of the major excommunication and that godly discipline as to which some of my brother librarians probably agree with the Prayer Book that its restoration is much to be wished. And while there are many other readers down to the present time to whom the Library is indebted not only for books but even for MSS., there have been few I believe, who share with King James I the ignominy of having abused their privilege.


Author(s):  
Taras Tkachuk

The article examines the problem of relations between the two leading states of the world in the interwar period: Germany, which withdrew from the First World War as a defeated country and after the establishment of the Nazi regime started preparing revenge, and the United States, proclaimed «isolationism» and, therefore, distanced themselves from European international political problems. The scientific novelty: the author points up primarily political «isolationism», while in the economic sphere the United States has played a leading role in the reconstruction and development of the afterwar Germany. Today, due to the difficult geopolitical situation in the world, caused by the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation, which are quite similar to the former Nazi regime, there is a chance to look at the events of the 1930s in the international arena in a somewhat new way. Regarding this, the author sets out an aim of the article to carry out a comprehensive analyze and give his own assessment of the position of American politicians on the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany. The methodological basis of the study. In the study the author used a descriptive method to identify the essence and features of American-German relations in the 1920s and early 1930s, a comparative-historical method in analyzing the positions of President Roosevelt’s enciclement on German Chancellor A. Hitler’s policy in 1933, the principles of objectivity and systematization using only verified facts and their comprehensive assessment. This made it possible for the first time to draw attention to the position of the American leadership on the establishment of the Nazi regime and its role in international diplomacy on the eve of World War II in order to the current geopolitical situation connected with Russia’s aggressive actions. The Conclusions. Finally, the author asserts that President Roosevelt’s encirclement perceived the threat of a new world war from the German Nazis, but did not change the United States’ overall foreign policy toward Europe. The reason was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose a wrong strategy to avert new world conflict in the relationship with Berlin. At the same time, the author underlines the differences in the attitudes of American «isolationists» towards Germany and Japan, as well as the differences between Washington’s position on the political and non-political aspects of relations with Hitler’s regime. Therefore, the author points out that not all the American politicians perceived the Nazi «Third Reich» totally negatively. As a result, the United States chose the wrong strategy to deter Nazi Germany, which did not testify its effectiveness. That’s why, the article asserts that the current United States and the Western European countries need to anticipate their past mistakes in building of the strategy of relations with Russian Federation.


Author(s):  
Jessica B. Harris

From time immemorial, the world’s peoples have been in movement. Groups have been scattered, resulting in communities in regions and parts of the world with which they have no historic connection. In the 21st century, with more access to travel and the relaxing of immigration laws, the movement continues. Increasingly, those leaving their traditional homelands for other destinations are said to be in diaspora. This is the reason that tikka masala is now considered the national dish of the United Kingdom; that chop suey is found throughout the United States, but not in the same style as in China; and that variants of West African fritters are found throughout the New World. While the word ‘diaspora’ is now ubiquitous, and is used in relation to the patterns of movement of almost any people on an enforced or voluntary basis, its origins are more focused. It is derived from the Greek dia, meaning ‘across’, and speirein, meaning ‘scattered’. As noted by Kenny (2013), its earliest use is commonly held to be in relation to the migration of Jews, as referred to in the books of Genesis and Exodus from the Hebrew Bible. The Jewish people were led ‘...from Babylonia (in present-day Iraq) to Canaan, which they named Eretz Israel. Famine soon drove Abraham’s descendents out of Canaan to Eqypt...’ (p. 3). Applied to ancient Jewish history, the term has come to mean imposed exile and suffering, and subsequent efforts to return.


1968 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Campbell

AbstractThe New World species of the staphylinid subfamily Micropeplinae are revised. Three genera are recognized: Kalissus Leconte with 1 species, Micropeplus Latreille with 11 species, and Peplomicrus Bernhauer with 3 species. Of the three previously recognized subgenera of Micropeplus, Arrhenopeplus Koch is placed in synonymy with Micropeplus, and Peplomicrus is elevated to generic status. New species are: M. durangoensis from Mexico, M. neotomae from California and Oregon, M. browni from eastern Canada and the United States, M. robustus from California and Oregon, M. lecontei from southern California, and P. dybasi from Costa Rica and Panama. Micropeplus obliquus Leconte is placed in synonymy with M. sculptus Leconte, and M. oregonensis Hatch is placed in synonymy with M. punctatus Leconte. The genus Micropeplus is divided into six species groups based on an examination of both Old and New World species. A checklist of the species of Micropeplinae places all the described species in the proposed classification. Two African species, M. africanus Cameron and M. carayoni Jarrige, and one Central American species, M. acumen Sharp, are transferred to the genus Peplomicrus.


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