How will state medical boards handle cases involving disclosure and apology for medical errors?

Surveys were sent to 68 American state medical boards, including territories of the United States, inquiring how they handle—or will handle—cases involving disclosure and apology after medical errors. Surveys were not sent to specialty boards. Thirty-eight state medical boards ( n = 38, 56%) responded to the survey, with 31 completing the survey (46% completion rate) and seven boards ( n = 7) providing explanations for nonparticipation and other thoughts; 30 boards did not respond in any manner. Boards that completed the survey indicated that disclosure and apology and other positive post-event behavior by physicians are likely to be viewed favorably and disclosing physicians will not be easy targets for disciplinary measures, though boards also stressed they view each case on the merits and patient safety is their top priority. Recommendations are made for policy makers and other stakeholders.

“I always place my bet on Red”: Comrade Detective and the Spectre of Communism

The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concerns—the dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism—through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s.

The Nicaraguan Question: Contadora and the Latin American Response to US Intervention Against the Sandinistas, 1982–86

While much has been written about the United States’ efforts to undermine Nicaragua's Sandinista government (1979–90), historians have paid little attention to Latin American state perspectives on the only successful armed revolution in the region since Cuba. In fact, the war that subsequently emerged between Sandinista armed forces and US-backed contras was a thoroughly regionalized affair: at least 12 Latin American countries—including the five largest—became directly involved in efforts to broker peace by the mid 1980s. How and why did they become involved? What can Latin American diplomacy vis-à-vis the Sandinista Revolution tell us about the shape of inter-American relations in the twilight years of the Cold War?To answer these questions, this article uses diplomatic archival sources and oral history interviews from Nicaragua, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Panama to trace Latin American state responses to US intervention against the Sandinista government between 1982 and 1986. While the Reagan administration viewed Nicaragua as the place where it would begin to roll back Soviet-sponsored communism in the Third World, a bloc of Latin American governments—especially those associated with the Contadora peace process—saw Central America as the site where they would push back against US unilateralism and the threat it posed to their real interests and shared hopes for regional sovereignty. In stark contrast with the earlier reaction to the Cuban Revolution, most Latin American states rejected US intervention and sought to legitimize Managua's left-wing government. The regional dimensions of Nicaragua's civil war therefore show how the political fault lines of Latin America's Cold War shifted over time.

Violence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes

What does the superhero—an icon of the American imaginary—communicate about the politics of violence? Responding to nationwide protests of police brutality in 2020, law enforcement officers adopted the skull logo of The Punisher, an exceptionally violent fictional vigilante. That adoption signals what I call the privilege of violence: the force individuals may deploy based on normative expectations concerning gender and race. Comparing Marvel-Netflix productions including The Punisher series, I identify three modes of violence in operation: the unrestricted rage of a white male vigilante, the vulnerability of a feminist heroine, and the sacrificial control of a Black male hero. The article demonstrates the gendered and racialized conditions under which heroic violence is rendered legitimate to American audiences. As I conclude, Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance, and this is precisely what appeals to armed agents of the American state.

The United States Navy, Slave-Trade Suppression, and State Development

The mission of the United States Navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil. Most important, both proslavery and antislavery forces favored, for very different reasons, a substantial naval buildup in the late 1850s. The navy had, however, long been engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling, an activity that also seemed to have broad support at the time. Finally, somewhat more controversially, the navy had been associated with the American Colonization Society’s Liberian enterprise from its very inception, deciding to deploy vessels to Africa in an otherwise unimaginable time frame. The relationship between the presence of slavery and the pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.