American Democratic Ideals Research Articles

The “friends” of the United States: the transformation of U.S. cultural diplomacy in Spain (1865–1900)

ABSTRACT This study goes beyond the debate on anti- and philo-American discourses to focus on the role U.S. cultural diplomacy played in shaping Spanish views on the United States in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from a wide variety of contemporary sources, it argues that the outbreak of the American Civil War led to the active promotion of American democratic ideals in Spain by a host of official and unofficial cultural diplomats alike. But support for Spanish republicans was gradually replaced by a focus on educational reform as a more effective tool to spread American liberty abroad after the collapse of the Spanish Republic.

Base nation: how U.S. military bases abroad harm America and the world

As David Vine demonstrates, the overseas bases raise geopolitical tensions and provoke widespread antipathy towards the United States. They also undermine American democratic ideals, pushing the U.S. into partnerships with dictators and perpetuating a system of second-class citizenship in territories like Guam. They breed sexual violence, destroy the environment, and damage local economies. And their financial cost is staggering: though the Pentagon underplays the numbers, Vine's accounting proves that the bill approaches $100 billion per year. For many decades, the need for overseas bases has been a quasi-religious dictum of U.S. foreign policy. But in recent years, a bipartisan coalition has finally started to question this conventional wisdom. With the U.S. withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending thirteen years of war, there is no better time to re-examine the tenets of our military strategy. Base Nation is an essential contribution to that debate.

<i>Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense</i>. Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter J. Vogt, directors. John W. Comerford and Theo N. Ianuly, producers. Lars Larson, director of photography. Paradigm Studio. 2009. DVD B002RNO1BW

Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense. Michael Rivoira, Lars Larson and Peter J. Vogt, directors. John W. Comerford and Theo N. Ianuly, producers. Lars Larson, director of photography. Paradigm Studio. 2009. DVD B002RNO1BW.The documentary Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense makes a case for jazz as a living culture and growing art form in North America and Europe. Jazz artists, including Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard, Ravi Coltrane, Bill Frisell, Donald Harrison, Wynton Marsalis and Esperanza Spalding, provide the film's primary voices; these musicians, along with others, address how they reconcile the demands of tradition with the realities of changing audiences and markets. This is no small task because, as the documentary demonstrates, jazz is comprised of a fractured and contested set of overlapping and often conflicting values and practices. Because of this approach, Icons provides an alternative narrative to Ken Burns's Jazz (2000), which has drawn criticism for portraying jazz as a uniform expression of American democratic ideals rather than a multiplicity of stories struggling to be told.1This 93-minute documentary is presented in a traditional style with talking heads interspersed with performances and other B-roll material. This format allows the viewer to connect the featured musicians' personalities to their live performances while not getting mired in extended concert footage or thirdparty pontifications. We see the jazz musician as a working artist, struggling with their craft while negotiating shifting economic and social worlds. We are also taken into the contemporary contexts of jazz, from grimy college bars, to concert halls; from outdoor festivals to street corners and intimate clubs. Few viewers will miss the stark contrast of saxophonist Skerik's (Eric Walton) punk-laced mosh-inducing performance in a cramped and sweaty bar with clarinetist Anat Cohen's delicately crafted interpretations of American songbook standards for reserved Manhattan listeners.The central theme of the documentary emerges from a survey of musicians' attitudes towards the idea of change, a long-contested concept in jazz. The viewer quickly realizes that while the various musicians interviewed in Icons draw from a common tradition of music-making, they interpret that tradition in widely varied ways. The documentary opens with trumpeter Nicholas Payton's enigmatic statement, 'The truth never remains the same and to me a lie is anything that has nothing to do with now'. While setting a revisionist tone, this statement does little to clarify what the boundaries of change are or should be in jazz. For guitarist Bill Frisell, the boundaries of change are theoretically limitless:I just don't like it when the name of something has the effect of exclud - ing. If you say it's one thing then it can't be something else. That doesn't work for me because the words are always smaller than whatever it is you're trying to describe. For me jazz is infinite.Jazz, in Frisell's world, is a means to joyfully deconstruct the world and test cultural boundaries. His brooding interpretation of Bob Dylan's 'Masters of War' in Icons is a case in point.Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and scholar Paul de Barros counter Frisell's utopian art-scape realization of jazz with essentialist readings of the music's history. Marsalis states, 'In jazz, it's interesting in America, that we are one of the only people in the world that created an art form then tried to figure out how to make it not have a definition.' Fundamental to this statement is the idea that jazz's identity hinges on one definition rather than many overlapping and contested definitions. While Marsalis focuses on the aesthetic choices of musicians, de Barros points to contemporary musicians' lack of social engagement as the source of jazz's current disenfranchisement from audiences and markets. As he states,If you ask Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins what their music was saying they would say, 'I'm a black person in a white society where I have something to say and I need it to be heard. …

William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the King James Version of the Bible

During 1911 three of the United States’ leading statesmen (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan) delivered lengthy speeches to commemorate the tercentenary of the King James Bible. While all three emphasized this Bible’s important contribution to American democratic ideals, Bryan also stressed the Bible’s role in revealing Jesus Christ as ‘Son of God and Saviour of Mankind’. Shades of difference in how these leaders spoke of the Bible and in how their careers promoted progressive politics suggests the range of meanings to which the King James Version has been put in American history.

The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness

The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness

GI Jews: how World War II changed a generation

Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Uprooted from their working- and middle-class neighborhoods, they joined every branch of the military and saw action on all fronts. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles these faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers. Through memoirs, oral histories, and letters, Moore charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands. From confronting pork chops to enduring front-line combat, from the temporary solace of Jewish worship to harrowing encounters with death camp survivors, we come to understand how these soldiers wrestled with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. Moore shows how military service in World War II transformed this generation of Jews, reshaping Jewish life in America and abroad. These men challenged perceptions of as simply victims of the war, and encouraged throughout the diaspora to fight for what was right. At the same time, service strengthened Jews' identification with American democratic ideals, even as it confirmed the importance of their Jewish identity. GI Jews is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual, as well as its profound consequences for these hitherto overlooked members of the greatest generation.

Placing Work, Home, and Empire in Filipino America: A Review Essay

Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. By Catherine Ceniza Choy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. By Yen Le Espiritu (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003) American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919–1941. By Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) In 2003, America's global endeavors have demonstrated that empire in its various guises is far from a closed chapter in human history. The year 2003 also brought us three noteworthy texts in Filipino American studies by, respectively, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Yen Le Espiritu, and Dorothy Fujita-Rony. While I am not suggesting that recent American war activities explicitly relate to the publication of Filipino American texts in 2003, these books help us see why it is important to understand the relationship between the history of U.S. imperialism and Filipino American history. America's empire building in Asia and the Pacific forms a fundamental chapter in Filipino American history. As many scholars (for example, E. San Juan, Jr., Amy Kaplan, and Lisa Lowe) working in various iterations of American studies have argued, the contradiction between the promises of American democratic ideals and their practice closely relates to the invisibility of U.S. imperialism. Choy, Espiritu, and Fujita-Rony work in, and extend, this tradition. Along these lines, I use the occasion of this review essay to remind us that just as we should not [End Page 93] mistake our current historical period as an aberration from an otherwise successfully operating developmentalist narrative toward the universal global equality and security promised by Modernity, neither should we forget the relevance of America's imperialist history in the Philippines to contemporary Filipino America and America in general. Critically and insistently remembering U.S. imperialism highlights the deeply transnational, if not global, perspective that animates Filipino American studies' field imaginary. The history of U.S. imperialism and continued neocolonial relations between the Philippines and the United States form one of three critical parts of what I take to constitute that field imaginary. Nationalism and, in particular, Americanization – the wide-ranging social process that structures both the potential and actual conditions of Filipino American lives – is the second part. The third aspect is transnational capitalism and its pervasive logic of exchange, which underlies our social relations from the individual to the multinational. Together, these three aspects describe the politics of globalization that define the specificity of the situation of Filipinos in the United States. While not mutually exclusive, identifying these distinguishable aspects of Filipino American studies' field imaginary allows us to better understand Filipino American studies' underlying concerns and theoretical directions. Choy, Espiritu, and Fujita-Rony's texts demonstrate the ways that Filipino American studies' ostensible central focus – "Filipino America" and Filipino American subjectivity – relates to what I have been calling the politics of globalization. The simplicity of this claim belies the diversity of perspectives in Filipino American studies and the complexity underlying the development of Filipino American communities and Filipino American experiences. Indeed, intellectual, community and cultural workers have debated on an ongoing basis and in explicit and indirect forms, what it means to be Filipino in the United States precisely because of the inadequacy of any single study or approach to address that complexity. The texts anchoring this review essay engage this debate by presenting us with historically grounded studies that foreground U.S. imperialism, document the struggles and successes of Filipinos in the United States with Americanization, and highlight the ways that transnational capitalism both enables and limits the possibilities of Filipino American subjectivity. In other words, these texts individually and collectively provide us with focused studies on Filipino American agency in the face of systemic power. Catherine Ceniza Choy's study examines the development of nursing in the Philippines and...

Democratic ideals and the urban experience

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities. Ralph Waldo Emerson What is the role of the urban experience in the construction of American democratic ideals? By looking at the disparate visions of a just society advanced by Jefferson and Hamilton, this paper will attempt to provide an account of the historical role of the urban experience in the construction of the American vision of democracy. Then, through the works of John Dewey and Lewis Mumford (and Robert Westbrook's account of their continuing disagreements), the essay will address some of the issues stemming from the role of urban experience in the processes of moral development. Then, through the work of Whitman, it will be argued that the urban experience is a necessary condition for the adequate development of democratic ideals. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of some of the important elements of the urban experience, and their respective contributions to the construction of democratic values.

The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War

On May 26, 1863, Walt Whitman wrote to his mother: the sad, sad things I see-the noble young men with legs and arms taken off-the deaths-the sick weakness, sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations...just flickering alive, and O so deathly weak and sick. For nearly three years, Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experience with an immediacy and compassion unequaled in wartime literature anywhere in the world. In The Better Angel, acclaimed biographer Roy Morris, Jr. gives us the fullest accounting of Whitman's profoundly transformative Civil War Years and an historically invaluable examination of the Union's treatment of its sick and wounded. Whitman was mired in depression as the war began, subsisting on journalistic hackwork, wasting his nights in New York's seedy bohemian underground, his great career as a poet apparently stalled. But when news came that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed south to find him. Though his brother's injury was slight, Whitman was deeply affected by his first view of the war's casualties. He began visiting the camp's wounded and, almost by accident, found his calling for the duration of the war. Three years later, he emerged as the war's unlikely hero, a living symbol of American democratic ideals of sharing and brotherhood. Instead of returning to Brooklyn as planned, Whitman continued to visit the wounded soldiers in the hospitals in and around the capital. He brought them ice cream, tobacco, brandy, books, magazines, pens and paper, wrote letters for those who were not able and offered to all the enormous healing influence of his sympathy and affection. Indeed, several soldiers claimed that Whitman had saved their lives. One noted that Whitman seemed to have what everybody wanted and added When this old heathen came and gave me a pipe and tobacco, it was about the most joyful moment of my life. Another wrote that There is many a soldier that never thinks of you but with emotions of the greatest gratitude. But if Whitman gave much to the soldiers, they in turn gave much to him. In witnessing their stoic suffering, in listening to their understated speech, and in being always in the presence of death, Whitman evolved the new and more direct poetic style that was to culminate in his masterpiece, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, The Better Angel explores a side of Whitman not fully examined before, one that greatly enriches our understanding of his later poetry. More than that, it gives us a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the other army-the legions of sick and wounded soldiers who are usually left in the shadowy background of Civil War history-seen here through the unflinching eyes of America's greatest poet.

Wissenschaft als säkularer Kreuzzug: Thomas V. Smith und die Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in den USA (1944–1946)

One of the earliest American reeducation programs designed for the transformation of political attitudes and the inculcation of American democratic ideals among Germans came into being shortly before the end of the Second World War. Initiated by the Special Projects Division of the War Department in 1944, this top secret experiment in reeducation brought together a group of university professors, including philosopher Thomas Vernon Smith from the University of Chicago, at selected prisoner‐of‐war camps in Rhode Island and Virginia. Consistent with his faculty colleagues. Smith drew heavily from the liberal arts tradition and classical humanism to teach his German charges about the plausibility of the “democratic way of life. “ The relatively brief initial foray by Smith into the reeducation of Germans under captivity revealed American aspirations and democratic ideals for the new German citizen of the post war era, elements of which subsequently reappeared in the activities of American Military Government on German soil. Not the least significant in this endeavor was the formation of a German citizenry supportive of American interests, a foundational goal of the Special Projects combining reform idealism with “Realpolitik”.

To Remember the Faces of the Dead: The Plentitude of Memory in Southwestern New Britain

David Obey has in his nearly forty years in the U.S. House of Representatives worked to bring economic and social justice to America s working families. In 2007 he assumed the chair of the Appropriations Committee and is positioned to pursue his priority concerns for affordable health care, education, environmental protection, and a foreign policy consistent with American democratic ideals. Here, in his autobiography, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress and ethics reforms and his view of the recent Bush presidency crucial chapters in our democracy, of interest to all who observe politics and modern U.S. history.Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Religion's Very Public Presence

The 1984 election emphasized the public role of religion in both parties; much uneasiness about the proper place of religion in politics was revealed. The United States was originally envisioned by some religious groups as a voluntary Christian commonwealth. Although that dream is less persuasive today, religion supplies a continuing definition and critique of the public good. Growing religious diversity produces conflicting views, necessitating rethinking by mainline Protestants. A major difference is between those who nourish nationalism and an individualistic religion and those with a world-encompassing vision and a communal faith. Religion provides sustaining hope and a commitment to wholeness, and it contributes politically, often through coalitions. The role of the religious convictions of politicians was heatedly debated with modest resolution in the 1984 campaign. American democratic ideals are being tested, and religion, in dialogue with science, is challenged to help shape the nation's future.

Community College General Education Enrichment Through Community Action

Community College General Education Enrichment Through Community Action

The Relation of Municipal Government to American Democratic Ideals

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Relation of Municipal Government to American Democratic IdealsL. S. RoweL. S. Rowe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 11, Number 1Jul., 1905 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/211377 Views: 22Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.