British and German Business and Politics under the Pax Americana, 1941–1957

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Organization ◽  
Business Relationship ◽  
The Third ◽  
American Century ◽  
Henry Luce

This chapter examines the third round in the German–American–British business relationship from 1941 to 1957. It begins with an account of Hitler's activities in Eastern Europe, before turning to the magazine article published by American businessman Henry Luce, entitled, “The American Century.” This article postulated that, if the twentieth century had not been an American one in its first half, the United States should at least make every effort to realize this idea in its second half, and shape a peace for the rest of the twentieth century that was based on American principles of sociopolitical and economic organization. From here, the chapter discusses the role of American big business in postwar and Cold War periods, the question of cartels, economic reconstruction, and others.

Planning or Improvisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-120
Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Governance Strategies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Imperfect Knowledge

This chapter assesses the role of planning in the design of governance strategies. Enthusiasm for large-scale planning—also known as overall, comprehensive, long-term, economic, or social planning—boomed and collapsed in twentieth century. At the start of that century, progressive reformers seized on planning as the remedy for the United States' social and economic woes. By the end of the twentieth century, enthusiasm for large-scale planning had collapsed. Plans could be made, but they were unlikely to be obeyed, and even if they were obeyed, they were unlikely to work as predicted. The chapter then explains that leaders should make plans while being realistic about the limits of planning. It is necessary to exercise foresight, set priorities, and design policies that seem likely to accomplish those priorities. Simply by doing this, leaders encourage coordination among individuals and businesses, through conversation about goals and tactics. Neither is imperfect knowledge a total barrier to planning. There is no “law” of unintended consequences: it is not inevitable that government actions will produce entirely unexpected results. The more appropriate stance is modesty about what is known and what can be achieved. Plans that launch big schemes on brittle assumptions are more likely to fail. Plans that proceed more tentatively, that allow room for testing, learning, and adjustment, are less likely to collapse in the face of unexpected results.

Technology’s Retreat: The Decline of Rural Telephony in The United States, 1920-1940

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-327
Author(s):  
Claude S. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diffusion Of Innovation ◽  
Technology Diffusion ◽  
Social Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
The Social

One million fewer American farms had telephones in 1940 than in 1920; the instrument was disconnected in at least a third of the farm homes that once had it. Knowing how and why this “devolution” (Mattingly and Aspbury, 1985) occurred can expand our understanding of the social role of technology, diffusion of innovation, and more generally, twentieth-century modernization in America.

POLITICAL ATHEISM: THE SECULARIZATION AND LIBERALIZATION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

“The Hora Staccato in Swing!”: Jascha Heifetz's Musical Eclecticism and the Adaptation of Violin Miniatures

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-431
Author(s):  
JOSHUA S. WALDEN
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
History Of

AbstractJascha Heifetz (1901–87) promoted a modern brand of musical eclecticism, recording, performing, and editing adaptations of folk and popular songs while remaining dedicated to the standard violin repertoire and the compositions of his contemporaries. This essay examines the complex influences of his displacement from Eastern Europe and assimilation to the culture of the United States on both the hybridity of his repertoire and the critical reception he received in his new home. It takes as its case study Heifetz's composition of the virtuosic showpiece “Hora Staccato,” based on a Romany violin performance he heard in Bucharest, and his later adaptation of the music into an American swing hit he titled “Hora Swing-cato.” Finally, the essay turns to the field of popular song to consider how two of the works Heifetz performed most frequently were adapted for New York Yiddish radio as Tin Pan Alley–style songs whose lyrics narrate the early twentieth-century immigrant experience. The performance and arrangement history of many of Heifetz's miniatures reveals the multivalent ways in which works in his repertoire, and for some listeners Heifetz himself, were reinterpreted, adapted, and assimilated into American culture.

Brainstorming Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Claudia Mareis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
History Of

This article discusses a particular strand in the history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century shaped by an instrumental, production-oriented understanding of the term. When the field of creativity research emerged in the United States after World War II, debates around creativity were driven not only by humanist intents of self-actualization but also by the aim of rendering individual creative potentials productive for both society and economy. Creativity was thus defined in terms of not mere novelty and originality but utility and productivity. There was a strong interest, too, in methods and techniques that promised to systematically enhance human creativity. In this context, the article looks at the formation of brainstorming, a group-based creativity method that came into fashion in the United States around 1950. It discusses how this method had been influenced by concepts of human productivity developed and applied during World War II and prior to it. Using the brainstorming method as a case in point, this article aims not only to shed light on the quite uncharted history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century, but also to stress the conducive role of allegedly trivial creativity methods in the rise of what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has identified as the “creativity dispositif”: a seemingly playful, but indeed rigid, imperative in post-Fordist and neoliberal societies that demand the constant production of innovative outcomes under flexible, yet self-exploitative working conditions.

The Making of the "First Dog": President Warren G. Harding and Laddie Boy

2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Pycior
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
White House ◽  
Cultural Icon ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Press ◽  
American Press ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis paper traces the history of the cultural icon of the "First Dog" of the United States back to the administration of President Warren G. Harding (1921-1923). It briefly explores technological and socio-cultural factors—including the early-twentieth-century cult of human and nonhuman celebrities—that laid a basis for the acceptance of Laddie Boy, Harding's Airedale terrier, as the third member of the First Family and a celebrity in his own right. Following Laddie Boy, First Dogs would greet and entertain visitors to the White House, pose for the press, make public appearances, and "talk." While recognizing that Laddie Boy's personality was essential to his success at the White House, the paper also documents the steps taken by President Harding, his wife Florence Kling Harding, and the American press to establish Laddie Boy as the First Dog of the land. The paper argues that the construction of the cultural icon of the First Dog was not simply a political ploy to humanize the President but more a calculated attempt by President Harding to further animal welfare.

The Imprisonment Boom of the Late Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Lynch ◽  
Anjuli Verma
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Culturally Embedded

This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony drug filings, convictions and sentences in fueling both the scale and racial disparities of imprisonment; and regional and jurisdictional variations in trends across three planes: federal-state, interstate, and intrastate. Finally, the recent “stabilization” of incarceration rates in the United States is described and possible implications considered.

Africa and America

1961 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 25-30
Author(s):  
George Shepperson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free State ◽  
African Studies ◽  
London School ◽  
African History ◽  
The Third ◽  
Subsaharan Africa ◽  
Congo Free State

(These notes were offered as a contribution to discussion at the nineteenth and twentieth century sessions of the Third Conference on African History and Archaeology at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, 3 - 7 July, 1961. Two additions - references 3 and 12 - have been made to the original notes.)The historical position of the United States in Subsaharan Africa has until recently been one of detachment. There have been official moves, as when in 1833 an agreement was concluded with the Sultan of Zanzibar which, among other things, permitted American consuls to reside in his ports and judge disputes involving U. S. citizens; or the recognition of the Congo Free State in 1884. On the whole, however, the United States has left Africa to the European powers who took over the responsibility of governing her peoples.

The Project for a New Anglo Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Constituent Elements

This chapter sketches a synoptic intellectual history of the attempt to unify the constituent elements of the “Anglo-world” into a single globe-spanning community, and to harness its purported world-historical potential as an agent of order and justice. Since the late nineteenth century numerous commentators have preached the benefits of unity, though they have often disagreed on the institutional form it should assume. These are projects for the creation of a new Anglo century. The first two sections of the chapter explore overlapping elements of the fin de siècle Anglo-world discourse. The third section traces the echoes of debates over the future relationship between the empire and the United States through the twentieth century, discussing the interlacing articulation of imperial-commonwealth, Anglo-American, democratic unionist, and world federalist projects. The final section discusses contemporary accounts of Anglo-world supremacy.

Our Shadow Immigration System

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Adam B. Cox ◽  
Cristina M. Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Shadow System ◽  
Deferred Action ◽  
United States Today ◽  
System P

This chapter explains how legal and institutional developments in immigration enforcement coincided with the dramatic acceleration of illegal immigration during the final third of the twentieth century. Together, these legal and demographic phenomena gave rise to a massive shadow immigration system that today operates alongside the formal immigration regime. This shadow system has rendered Congress’s intricate, detailed code of immigration rules increasingly less central to defining the content and character of the immigrant population. Instead, the Executive’s enforcement judgments—decisions about whom to target from the pool of deportable immigrants—have taken center stage. Indeed, the rise of the shadow system has effectively delegated vast screening authority to the President and other executive branch officials—authority that has culminated in events as dramatic as President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The large number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States today amplifies the role of enforcement discretion and further entrenches the shadow immigration system.

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