Militarizing Rubber

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-279
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Rubber Plantations ◽  
Northern Latitudes ◽  
War Machine ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Behavior

The extreme violence brought to bear on the Vietnamese society and environment by the American war machine during the 1960s meant that measures taken by South Vietnamese leaders ended up sustaining plantation production. Ironically, the communist insurgency also benefited from rubber plantations, which continued to serve as a valuable source of material and recruits. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese rubber experts worked to extend the range of hevea into more northern latitudes so that latex could flow in the socialist world. Chapter 7 extends the history of rubber to 1975 to show the ways that memories of colonialism continued to structure thoughts and behavior regarding rubber, and suggests why human-environment interactions on the plantations of post-1975 socialist Vietnam often resembled those of their colonial predecessors. This chapter focuses on the degree to which colonial discourse as materialized on plantations was subverted by various actors and revisits the historiography of the Vietnam War by adopting the lens of environmental history to show the unexpected consequences of plantation agriculture. Finally, it considers how the post–World War II development of “synthetic” rubber affected the actions of those associated with “natural” rubber plantations.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

Follow the Flag

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Roger Grant
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Small Firms ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Railroad Company

This book offers a history of the Wabash Railroad Company, a once-vital interregional carrier. Like most major American carriers, the Wabash grew out of an assortment of small firms. Thanks in part to the genius of financier Jay Gould, by the early 1880s what was then known as the Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway reached the principal gateways of Chicago, Des Moines, Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis. In the 1890s, the Wabash gained access to Buffalo and direct connections to Boston and New York City. One extension fizzled, and in 1904 entry into Pittsburgh caused financial turmoil, ultimately throwing the Wabash into receivership. A subsequent reorganization allowed the Wabash to become an important carrier during the go-go years of the 1920s and permitted the company to take control of a strategic “bridge” property, the Ann Arbor Railroad. The Great Depression forced the company into another receivership, but an effective reorganization during the early days of World War II gave rise to a generally robust road. In the 1960s, the Wabash, along with the Nickel Plate Road, joined the prosperous Norfolk & Western Railway, a merger that worked well for all three carriers. Immortalized in the popular folk song “Wabash Cannonball,” the midwestern railroad has left important legacies. Today, forty years after becoming a “fallen flag” carrier, key components of the former Wabash remain busy rail arteries and terminals, attesting to its historic value to American transportation.

“The Most Important Human Salvage Operation in the History of Our Country”

Rough Draft ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 128-156
Author(s):  
Amy J. Rutenberg
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Military Service ◽  
National Guard ◽  
Conscientious Objector ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Minority Men

Chapter six argues that in working to avoid the draft, men during the Vietnam War did not behave terribly differently from men during World War II or the Korean War. Rather, it was the context of their actions that changed. This chapter affirms that the historical conditions of the Vietnam War, particularly the advent of draft counseling, made it easier for men to engage in draft avoidance behavior. But it also argues that the military manpower policies of the previous decades influenced their choices. Because policies and practices privileged men with the resources to attend college, gain admittance to the National Guard or Reserves, find sympathetic doctors, or write reasoned belief statements in conscientious objector applications, white, middle-class men were the most successful at avoiding the draft. For them, military service was a decision more than a fait accompli. Working-class and minority men had fewer tools for draft avoidance.

African American and Latino Workers in the Age of Industrial Agriculture

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-190
Author(s):  
Erin L. Conlin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Pesticide Exposure ◽  
Farm Labor ◽  
Farm Work ◽  
Latino Farmworkers ◽  
Economic Marginality ◽  
History Of

Extensive chemical and pesticide exposure in the post–World War II period highlights African American and Latino farmworkers’ shared encounters with coercive labor structures, state hostility, economic marginality, racial discrimination, and bleak working conditions. Drawing heavily on oral histories and traditional archival sources, this case study of Florida farm labor draws directly on workers’ lived experiences and sheds light on the modern labor and environmental history of southern farm work. Examining this deep history of exploitation and negligence illuminates the challenges facing the South’s new working class.

Americans in An Giang: Nation Building and the Particularities of Place in the Mekong Delta, 1966––1973

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Mekong Delta ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Nation

In recent years, American diplomatic and military historians have begun to reexamine Cold War-era nation-building efforts in Vietnam and elsewhere. This essay explores the contested and contingent meanings of some US-sponsored nation-building programs established in the Republic of Vietnam during the 1960s. By focusing on nation-building activities in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang during the peak years of the Vietnam War, this essay suggests how historians may begin to assess these indirect effects of the war within a more nuanced, local Vietnamese historical framework. Such a history necessarily focuses on particular places and on the specific social and environmental conditions that shaped the course and outcome of nation-building projects undertaken there. Despite the universalist aspirations inherent in nation building, its effects varied widely from one place to another. In assessing the course and fate of these nation-building initiatives, this essay draws from the varied archival documents produced and collected by American provincial advisors during their stays in An Giang. A close reading of these reports reveals why the history of American nation-building programs in the Republic of Vietnam cannot be explained solely by reference to ideologies of modernization and counterinsurgency.

Family and Childhood

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret L. King
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Annales School

Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, cofounder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.

The Political History of American Food Aid

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Riley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Agriculture Sector ◽  
History Of

This book discusses the 220-year history of the political and humanitarian uses of American food as a tool of both foreign and domestic policy. During these years, food aid has been used as a weapon against the expansion of bolshevism after World War I and communism after World War II, a cudgel to force policy changes by recalcitrant recipient governments, a method for balancing disputes between Israel and Egypt, a backdoor means of increasing military aid to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, a signal of support to friendly governments, and a resource to help achieve economic development in food-insecure countries. At home, international food aid has, at times, been used to dump troublesome food surpluses abroad and has served politicians as a tool to secure the votes of farming constituents and the political support of agriculture-sector lobbyists, commodity traders, transporters, and shippers. Most important in the minds of many, it has been the most visible—and most popular—means of providing humanitarian aid to tens of millions of hungry men, women, and children confronted, on distant shores, by war, terrorism, and natural cataclysms and the resulting threat—if not the reality—of famine and death. The book investigates the little-known, not well-understood, and often highly contentious political processes that have converted fields of grains, crops of pulses, and herds of livestock into the tools of U.S. government policy.

The Post-War Period: 1946–1972

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Ragsdale ◽  
Jerrold G. Rusk
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Growth Rate ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Abstract: The chapter considers nonvoting after World War II, a unique electoral period in American history with the lowest nonvoting rates of any period from 1920–2012. The post-war period also boasts the highest economic growth rate of any of the four periods, coupled with the early days of television which transformed politics in the 1950s. In general, economic growth and the introduction of television move nonvoting rates downward. The chapter also considers in detail the struggles leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the law’s impact on nonvoting rates among African Americans. It also uncovers that in the 1960s the Vietnam War increased nonvoting. The chapter begins an analysis of nonvoting at the individual level. The less individuals know about the campaign context and the less they form comparisons between the candidates, the more likely they will say home on Election Day.

International Relations and the Study of History

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantinos Koliopoulos
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
System Analysis ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
History Plays ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

International relations and history are inextricably linked, and with good reason. This link is centuries old: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, one of the very earliest and one of the very greatest historical works of all time, is widely regarded as the founding textbook of international relations. Still, those two disciplines are legitimately separate. A somewhat clear boundary between them can probably be drawn around three lines of demarcation: (1) past versus present, (2) idiographic versus nomothetic, and (3) description versus analysis. The utility of history for the analysis of international affairs has been taken for granted since time immemorial. History is said to offer three things to international relations scholars: (1) a ready source of examples, (2) an opportunity to sharpen their theoretical insights, and (3) historical consciousness, that is, an understanding of the historical context of human existence and a corresponding ability to form intelligent judgment about human affairs. This tradition continued well after international relations firmly established itself as a recognized separate discipline some time after World War II, and would remain virtually unchallenged until the 1960s. Since the 1960s, attitudes toward history have diverged within the international relations community. Some approaches, most notably the English school and the world system analysis, have almost by definition thriven on history. History plays a fundamental role in the critical-constructivist approach, while realist scholars continue to draw regularly on history. History is far less popular, though not absent from works belonging to the liberal-idealist approach. Postmodernism is the one approach that is almost completely antithetical to the analytical use of history. Postmodernists have characterized history as merely another form of fiction and question the existence of objective truth and transhistorical knowledge. One cannot exclude the possibility that postmodernism is correct in this respect; however, it is highly unlikely that uncountable generations of people have been victims of mass deception or mass psychosis regarding the utility of history, not least in the analysis of international relations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document