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This book tells the story of how internationalist Americans worked between 1938 and 1941 to convince the American government and the American public of the need to stem the rising global tide of fascist aggression. As war approached, the internationalist movement attempted to arouse the nation in order to defeat noninterventionism at home and fascism overseas. This book's examination of this movement undermines the common belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrenched an isolationist United States into global armed conflict and the struggle for international power. The book focuses on three organizations—the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Fight For Freedom—that actively promoted a more global role for the United States based on a conception of the “four freedoms” later made famous by FDR. The desire to be free from fear was seen in concerns regarding America's immediate national security. The desire to be free from want was expressed in anxieties over the nation's future economic prosperity. The need for freedom of speech was represented in concerns over the potential loss of political freedoms. Finally, the need for freedom of worship was seen in the emphasis on religious freedoms and broader fears about the future of Western civilization. These groups and their supporters among the public and within the government characterized the growing global conflict as one between two distinct worlds and in doing so, set the tone of American foreign policy for decades to come.

Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was largely antagonistic. Yet, in and through the period from World War I to Vatican II, the Church did engage with, react to, and even accommodate various aspects of modernity. This book shows how the Church's official position on literary culture developed over this crucial period. The Catholic Church in the United States maintained an Index of Forbidden Books and the Legion of Decency (founded in 1933) lobbied Hollywood to edit or ban movies, pulp magazines, and comic books that were morally suspect. These regulations posed an obstacle for the self-understanding of Catholic American readers, writers, and scholars. But Catholics developed a rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton are important to the book's argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture.

This book provides a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and the book scrutinizes the various political purposes that the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word “fundamentalists.” The book examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter, which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had no legitimate place in the modern world. For almost fifty years, the concept of fundamentalism was linked almost exclusively to Protestant Christians. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the establishment of an Islamic republic led to a more elastic understanding of the nature of fundamentalism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans became accustomed to using fundamentalism as a way of talking about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well as Christians. Many Americans came to see Protestant fundamentalism as an expression of a larger phenomenon that was wreaking havoc all over the world. This book provides an overview of the way that the fear of fundamentalism has shaped American culture, and it will lead readers to rethink their understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it does.

The Allied occupation of Japan is remembered as the “good occupation.” An American-led coalition successfully turned a militaristic enemy into a stable and democratic ally. Of course, the story was more complicated, but the occupation did forge one of the most enduring relationships in the postwar world. Recent events, from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to protests over American bases in Japan to increasingly aggressive territorial disputes between Asian nations over islands in the Pacific, have brought attention back to the subject of the occupation of Japan. This book exposes the wartime origins of occupation policy and broader plans for postwar Japan. It considers the role of presidents, bureaucrats, think tanks, the media, and Congress in policymaking. Members of these elite groups came together in an informal policy network that shaped planning. Rather than relying solely on government reports and records to understand policymaking, the book also uses letters, memoirs, diaries, and manuscripts written by policymakers to trace the rise and spread of ideas across the policy network. The book contributes a new facet to the substantial literature on the occupation, serves as a case study in foreign policy analysis, and tells a surprising new story about World War II.

During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched a counterinsurgency program called the Human Terrain System. The program embedded social scientists within military units to provide commanders with information about the cultures and grievances of local populations. The controversy it inspired was not new. Decades earlier, similar national security concerns brought the Department of Defense and American social scientists together in the search for intellectual weapons that could combat the spread of communism during the Cold War. This book traces the rise, fall, and rebirth of Cold War-era military-sponsored social research. Seeking expert knowledge that would enable the United States to contain communism, the Pentagon turned to social scientists. Beginning in the 1950s, political scientists, social psychologists, and anthropologists applied their expertise to military problems, convinced that this would enhance democracy around the world. By the late 1960s, a growing number of scholars and activists condemned Pentagon-funded social scientists as handmaidens of a technocratic warfare state and sought to eliminate military-sponsored research from American intellectual life. Instead of severing their ties to the military, the Pentagon's experts relocated to a burgeoning network of private consulting agencies and for-profit research offices. Shielded from public scrutiny, they continued to influence national security affairs, and diversified to include the study of domestic problems, including urban violence and racial conflict. The book reveals the persistent militarization of American political and intellectual life, a phenomenon that continues to raise grave questions about the relationship between expert knowledge and American democracy.

BorderlineCitizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. It examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups—employers, colonial officials, courts and labor leaders—policing the borders of the U.S. polity. At a time when U.S. colonial officials sought to reduce citizenship through the definition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans tested the limits of colonial law when they migrated to California, Arizona, New York, and other states in the mainland. The incidents and legal cases created when Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland serve as essential, if largely overlooked, evidence in understanding the nature of U.S. empire and citizenship.

This book is a diverse set of twelve cutting-edge chapters that highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. The chapters consider the history of Buffalo's built environment in light of contemporary developments and in relationship to the evolving interplay between nature, industry, and architecture. The chapters examine Buffalo's architectural heritage in rich context: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful movement; world's fairs; grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and so-called white flight; and the larger networks of labor and production that set the city's economic fate. The book pays attention to currents that connect contemporary architectural work in Buffalo to the legacies established by its esteemed architectural founders: Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others. The book is a compelling introduction to Buffalo's architecture and developed landscape that frames discussion about the city.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Catholics, who make up a quarter of the population of the United States, made significant contributions to American culture, politics, and society. They built powerful political machines in Chicago, Boston, and New York; led influential labor unions; created the largest private school system in the nation; and established a vast network of hospitals, orphanages, and charitable organizations. Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history, the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent. This book brings together American historians of race, politics, social theory, labor, and gender to address this lacuna, detailing in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations, raised children, thought about war and peace, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, the book restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.

In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem organized an election to depose chief-of-state Bao Dai, after which he proclaimed himself the first president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam. The United States sanctioned the results of this election, which was widely condemned as fraudulent, and provided substantial economic aid and advice to the RVN. Because of this, Diem is often viewed as a mere puppet of the United States, in service of its Cold War geopolitical strategy. That narrative, the book contends, grossly oversimplifies the complexity of South Vietnam's domestic politics and, indeed, Diem's own political savvy. The book offers a detailed account of three crucial years, 1953–1956, during which a new Vietnamese political order was established in the south. It is, in large part, a history of Diem's political ascent as he managed to subdue the former Emperor Bao Dai, the armed Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious organizations, and the Binh Xuyen crime organization. The book shows Diem to be an engaged leader whose personalist ideology influenced his vision for the new South Vietnamese state, but also shaped the policies that would spell his demise. Washington's support for Diem because of his staunch anticommunism encouraged him to employ oppressive measures to suppress dissent, thereby contributing to the alienation of his constituency, and helped inspire the organized opposition to his government that would emerge by the late 1950s and eventually lead to the Vietnam War.

States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. This book shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. The book argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. It provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways. The book assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. The dataset allows the book to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

During the Cold War, both Chinese and American officials employed migration policy to pursue legitimacy, security, and prestige. They focused on allowing or restricting immigration, assigning refugee status, facilitating student exchanges, and enforcing deportations. This book focuses on the role these practices played in the relationship between the United States and the Republic of China both before and after the move to Taiwan. It identifies three patterns of migration diplomacy: migration legislation as a tool to achieve foreign policy goals, migrants as subjects of diplomacy and propaganda, and migration controls that shaped the Chinese American community. Using sources from diplomatic and governmental archives in the United States, the Republic of China on Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and the United Kingdom, the book applies a truly transnational perspective. It combines important innovations in the field of diplomatic history with new international trends in migration history to show that even though migration issues were often considered “low stakes” or “low risk” by foreign policy professionals concerned with Cold War politics and the nuclear age, they were neither “no risk” nor unimportant to larger goals. Instead, migration diplomacy became a means of facilitating other foreign policy priorities, even when doing so came at great cost for migrants themselves.

In a critical Cold War moment, Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency suddenly changed when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite. What Ike called “a small ball” became a source of Russian pride and propaganda, and it wounded him politically, as critics charged that he responded sluggishly to the challenge of space exploration. Yet Eisenhower refused to panic after Sputnik. He helped to guide the United States into the Space Age, even though Americans have given greater credit to John F. Kennedy for that achievement. This book examines the early history of America's space program. It details how Eisenhower approved breakthrough satellites, supported a new civilian space agency, signed a landmark science education law, and fostered improved relations with scientists. These feats made Eisenhower's post-Sputnik a time of remarkable progress, even as he endured the setbacks of recession, medical illness, and a humiliating first U.S. attempt to launch a satellite. Eisenhower's principled stands enabled him to resist pressure to boost federal spending, and he instead pursued his priorities—a balanced budget, prosperous economy, and sturdy national defense. Yet Sputnik also altered the world's power dynamics, sweeping Eisenhower in directions that were new to him, and he misjudged the importance of space in the Cold War's “prestige race.” By contrast, Kennedy capitalized on the issue in the 1960 election, and after taking office he urged a manned mission to the moon. This book demonstrates that Eisenhower built an impressive record in space and on earth, all the while offering warnings about America's stature and strengths that still hold true today.

This book tells the story of three American visionaries — Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff — whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. The book weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak. The book is a tale of pioneers on the frontier of a new technology, of American entrepreneurial spirit, and of the tragic collision between inventor and corporation.

This book studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. The book charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. The book demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War. In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revolution incited radical changes that challenged the frankly ideological and economic motivations of modernization. In response to threats to its ideological dominance regionally and globally, the United States began to promote new paradigms of development built around human rights, entrepreneurial internationalism, indigenous rights, and sustainable development. The book traces the ways Nicaraguans made their country central to the contest over development ideals beginning in the 1960s, transforming how political and economic development were imagined worldwide. By illustrating how ideas about ecology and sustainable development became linked to geopolitical conflict during and after the Cold War, the book provides a history of the late Cold War that connects the contest between the two then-prevailing superpowers to trends that shape our present, globalized, multipolar world.

This book traces the efforts of a dedicated community of experts to create a policy bureaucracy that reigned until Richard Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan in 1969. Although they toiled in relative obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war on the American political establishment, creating policies that challenged the unscientific prejudices that ruled DC politics. The Experts’ War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social data that these social scientists employed in their day-to-day work. Huret argues that this internal “war” at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War undermined and fractured the institutional system officially intended ending poverty. What developed instead, he writes, was a group that was determined to fight poverty in ways that the federal government was unable to pursue by promoting radical policies and a more progressive government role and sweeping reforms. The Expert’s War on Poverty closely examines the intellectual, social, and political dimensions of this community of experts and social scientists and how they shaped American policy in the Cold War era.

Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? This book recounts the author's triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor. When the author decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. The author wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As the book describes, the author battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats to bring her “crazy” scheme to fruition. The book retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers. Throughout, the book raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. The story functions as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.

In recent years, American shoppers have become more conscious of their food choices and have increasingly turned to CSAs, farmers' markets, organic foods in supermarkets, and to joining and forming new food co-ops. In fact, food co-ops have been a viable food source, as well as a means of collective and democratic ownership, for nearly 180 years. This book examines the economic and democratic ideals of food cooperatives. It shows readers what the histories of food co-ops can tell us about our rights as consumers, how we can practice democracy and community, and how we might do business differently. What possibilities for change—be they economic, political, environmental, or social—might food co-ops offer to their members, communities, and the globalized world? Food co-ops have long advocated for consumer legislation, accurate product labeling, and environmental protection. Food co-ops have many constituents—members, workers, board members, local and even global producers—making the process of collective decision-making complex and often difficult. Even so, food co-ops offer us a viable alternative to corporate capitalism. In recent years, committed co-ops have expanded their social vision to improve access to healthy food for all by helping to establish food co-ops in poorer communities.

During the Great Depression and into the war years, the Roosevelt administration sought to transform the political, institutional, and social contours of the United States. One result of the New Deal was the emergence and deployment of a novel set of narratives—reflected in social scientific case studies, government documents, and popular media—meant to reorient relationships among gender, race, sexuality, and national political power. This book focuses on the interplay of popular and official narratives of forgotten manhood, fallen womanhood, and other social and moral archetypes. It explores how federal officials used stories of collective civic identity to enlist popular support for the expansive New Deal state and, later, for the war effort. These stories, the book argues, had practical consequences for federal relief politics. The forgotten man, identified by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a fireside chat in 1932, for instance, was a compelling figure of collective civic identity and the counterpart to the white, male breadwinner who was the prime beneficiary of New Deal relief programs. During World War II, federal policies and programs continued to be shaped by specific gendered stories—most centrally, the story of the heroic white civilian defender, which animated the Office of Civilian Defense, and the story of the sacrificial Nisei (Japanese-American) soldier, which was used by the War Relocation Authority. The Roosevelt administration's engagement with such widely circulating narratives, the book concludes, highlights the affective dimensions of U.S. citizenship and state formation.

This book chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world. The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal. With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winnable and survivable nuclear warfare like never before, the Freeze movement forcefully translated decades of private fears into public action. Drawing upon extensive archival research in recently declassified materials, the book illuminates how the Freeze campaign demonstrated the power and importance of grassroots peace activism in all levels of society. The Freeze movement played an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and American politics, helping establish the conditions that would bring the Cold War to an end.

Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? This book would claim: all of the above. Camping is one of the United States' most popular pastimes. Campers have been enjoying themselves for well over a century, during which time camping's appeal has shifted and evolved. This book takes readers into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States. The book shows how camping progressed from an impulse among city-dwellers to seek temporary retreat from their exhausting everyday surroundings to a form of recreation so popular that an industry grew up around it to provide an endless supply of ever-lighter and more convenient gear. It humanizes camping's history by spotlighting key figures in its development and a sampling of the campers and the variety of their excursions.