United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 346-353
Author(s):  
David Sorkin

This chapter looks at how the Great Migration from eastern Europe made the United States a center of world Jewry. The Nazis' murder of most of European Jewry magnified that status. While the migrants and their children were citizens, their rights were restricted. Thus, in the period after World War II, American Jewry's civil defense organizations engaged in a concerted emancipation campaign. Jews collaborated with African Americans, Catholics, and other minorities to end inequality. That campaign succeeded: from the 1940s to the 1960s, state and federal civil rights laws, and court rulings prohibiting discrimination, dismantled the structure of inequality. Those events constituted American Jews' second emancipation: it positioned the immigrant's children and grandchildren to realize the promise of American equality.

Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...


Author(s):  
Keith L. Camacho

This chapter examines the creation and contestation of Japanese commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands. As an archipelago colonized by Japan and the United States, the Mariana Islands have become a site through which war memories have developed in distinct and shared ways. With respect to Japanese commemorations, the analysis demonstrates why and how they inform and are informed by Chamorro and American remembrances of the war in the Mariana Islands. By analyzing government, media, and tourist accounts of the war from the 1960s to the present, I thus show how we can gain an understanding and appreciation for the complex ways by which Japanese of various generations reckon with a violent past.


2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.


ASKETIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anjar Sri Wahyuni

The American state that it became the object of the first Islamic da'wah in about 1875, from what was then known as Greater Syria (Great Syria [now includes Syria itself, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine]) until the end of World War I. Followed by a second wave, in the 1920s to then be stopped because of World War II. Immigration laws in this period are rather limiting. Only black or Caucasian people can enter the United States. Arabs are considered not to fall into the two categories. While the third wave, between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s took place along with the occurrence of important changes outside the United States. Muslims who enter the US in this category are more educated. Most of them migrated because of political oppression. At the same time, especially in the 1960s various changes took place in US immigration policy. The job market is expanding and the country needs potential immigrants to fill the posts. Here ethnic or racial boundaries are loosened. Then the fourth wave, lasting about 1967 and still going on until now. They are generally very fluid and fluent in English. Their immigration is in place for various reasons such as for the improvement of professional ability and avoiding Government oppression. They also have the intention to settle or preach Islam in this Country. And the fifth wave started from 1967 until now. Those who came to America in this wave, in addition to economic reasons, political factors are also the main reasons that encourage them to migrate. There are some proofs that Islam came to America long before Columbus and the West.


2021 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
R. Keith Schoppa

In the aftermath of World War II, global realities seemed to have been grouped into binary formats: the United States and the USSR in a policy the United States called “containment” and included the establishment of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Korean War. Violent decolonization rose for Great Britain in Malaysia and Kenya and for France in Vietnam and Algeria. Another chapter dichotomy was the general success of the civil rights movement in the United States and the concomitant strengthening of apartheid in South Africa.


Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
Paul H. Nitze

George Kennan, in an interview published by the New York Times Magazine, affirmed the proposition that it is better to be “Red than dead.” Since the end of World War II the United States has been engaged in a successful effort to demonstrate that the choice thus implied is wrong. We have demonstrated, at least to date, that it is not necessary to be either “Red or dead“; it has been possible both to remain free and to avoid a nuclear war. The essential task is to continue so to do.In the last half of the 1950's, at the time of Sputnik, serious doubts arose as to whether a time would shortly arise when that issue—“Red or dead“—could become serious. It had not been a serious choice during the period when we had a nuclear monopoly, or even when we had an overwhelming and stable nuclear deterrent. But with the Soviet development of ICBMs, the technological practicality of which was first demonstrated by Sputnik, it became possible, perhaps probable, that the “better Red than dead” issue would arise in all seriousness in a few years.


Author(s):  
Paul R. Mullins

In the 1960s Edward J. Zebrowski turned the razing of Indianapolis, Indiana into a compelling show of forward-looking community optimism illuminating the power of displacement. When Zebrowski’s company toppled the Knights of Pythias Hall in 1967, for instance, he installed bleachers and hired an organist to play from the back of a truck as the twelve-storey Romanesque Revival structure was reduced to rubble. Two years later, the ‘Big Z’ hosted a party in the Claypool Hotel and ushered guests outside at midnight to watch as the floodlit building met its end at the wrecking ball (Figure 12.1). Zebrowski’s theatricality perhaps distinguished him from the scores of wrecking balls dismantling American cities, but his celebration of the city’s material transformation mirrored the sentiments of many urbanites in the wake of World War II. The post-war period was punctuated by a flurry of destruction and idealistic redevelopment in American cities like Indianapolis just as the international landscape was being rebuilt from the ruins of the war. In 1959 the New York Times’ Austin Wehrwein (1959: 61) assessed the University of Chicago’s massive displacement in Hyde Park and drew a prescient parallel to post-war Europe when he indicated that ‘wrecking crews have cleared large tracts, so that areas near the university resemble German cities just after World War II’. Indeed, much of Europe was distinguished less by ruins and redevelopment than demolition and emptied landscapes removing the traces of warfare that states wished to reclaim or efface; in the United States, urban renewal likewise took aim on impractical, unappealing, or otherwise unpleasant urban fabric and the people who called such places home (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10, for this process associated with the policies of apartheid in Cape Town). These global projects removed wartime debris and razed deteriorating prewar landscapes, extending interwar urban renewal projects that embraced the fantasy of a ‘blank slate’ as they built various unevenly executed imaginations of modernity. However, many optimistic development plans in Europe and the United States alike were abandoned or disintegrated into ruins themselves, simply leaving blank spaces on the landscape. Consequently, the legacy of urban renewal and post-war reconstruction is not simply modernist architecture; instead, post-war landscape transformation is signalled by distinctive absences dispersed amidst post-war architectural space and traces of earlier built environments.


Author(s):  
Cheryl Greenberg

This chapter examines the contrasting efforts of organizations representing two marginalized groups, blacks and Jews, to counter defamation. In the end, civil rights advocates from both groups came to the conclusion, on a mixture of principled and pragmatic grounds, that it was wiser not to push for adoption of laws against “group libel,” such as those that characterize post-Holocaust Europe and Canada. Yet both groups were forced to wrestle with how to organize and justify protest campaigns against bigoted media representations, including threats of economic reprisals, while refuting charges of censorship. The chapter shows that the absolute embrace of free speech in the United States after World War II was far from inevitable.


Author(s):  
Gregory F. Domber

American policy makers have rarely elevated Eastern Europe to the pinnacle of American grand strategy. The United States’ and Eastern Europe’s histories, however, are intertwined through the exchange of people and shared experiences. In the Age of Revolution, Eastern Europeans traveled to the United States to fight for the same causes they championed at home: to break from imperial control and expand the rights of man. At the end of the 19th century, “New Immigrants” from Eastern Europe streamed into America’s expanding cities. When countries in the region have moved to the forefront of American concerns during specific crises, Eastern European interests were regularly deemed secondary to larger American geopolitical interests. This holds true for the settlement of World War I, the conclusion of World War II, and the entirety of the Cold War. Overall, including Eastern Europeans and Eastern Europe in the history of the United States provides essential nuance and texture to broader patterns in American relations and more often than not provides evidence of the limitations of American power as it is altered by competing powers and local conditions.


Author(s):  
Melissa A. McEuen

The Second World War changed the United States for women, and women in turn transformed their nation. Over three hundred fifty thousand women volunteered for military service, while twenty times as many stepped into civilian jobs, including positions previously closed to them. More than seven million women who had not been wage earners before the war joined eleven million women already in the American work force. Between 1941 and 1945, an untold number moved away from their hometowns to take advantage of wartime opportunities, but many more remained in place, organizing home front initiatives to conserve resources, to build morale, to raise funds, and to fill jobs left by men who entered military service. The U.S. government, together with the nation’s private sector, instructed women on many fronts and carefully scrutinized their responses to the wartime emergency. The foremost message to women—that their activities and sacrifices would be needed only “for the duration” of the war—was both a promise and an order, suggesting that the war and the opportunities it created would end simultaneously. Social mores were tested by the demands of war, allowing women to benefit from the shifts and make alterations of their own. Yet dominant gender norms provided ways to maintain social order amidst fast-paced change, and when some women challenged these norms, they faced harsh criticism. Race, class, sexuality, age, religion, education, and region of birth, among other factors, combined to limit opportunities for some women while expanding them for others. However temporary and unprecedented the wartime crisis, American women would find that their individual and collective experiences from 1941 to 1945 prevented them from stepping back into a prewar social and economic structure. By stretching and reshaping gender norms and roles, World War II and the women who lived it laid solid foundations for the various civil rights movements that would sweep the United States and grip the American imagination in the second half of the 20th century.


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