American Elites Research Articles

Trump sympathy in the Balkans: cross-border populist appeal

ABSTRACT Do populist leaders tend to win support from the same kinds of people abroad as they do at home? Since we know public opinion can shape foreign policy, the answer is important for understanding populists’ potential to carry out their typically anti-establishment international agendas. We address this question through original surveys in three Southeast European EU-aspiring countries on one populist leader (US President Donald Trump), establishing that the answer is a qualified yes: It depends on geopolitical orientation. In Albania, where local elites are perceived to be aligned with American elites, Trump supporters stand out for the same dispositions linked to him in the US, including intolerance and Euroscepticism. But in Serbia, where the American elites opposed by Trump’s own populism are seen as opposed to Serbia’s own establishment, patterns are remarkably different: Trump sympathizers generally stand out for tolerance, support for the EU, and a general trust in politicians. In Kosovo, these differences collapse into its deep ethnic divide between Albanians and Serbs.

The Charity Hall Mission: An 1820s Boarding School for Native American Children in the Chickasaw Nation

This study focuses primarily on the historical and archaeological investigations of Charity Hall, a Christian mission school that operated within the Chickasaw Nation in northeastern Mississippi between 1820 and 1830. This school and others during this time were funded by the United States government through the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, so I argue that these stations served as outposts for American colonialism before the federal government shifted its Indian policy to one of removal. Additionally, I argue that it is impossible to adequately understand the operation of individual mission schools apart from their networks, which I theorize here as “missionscapes.” The historic component also, therefore, focuses on a broader missionscape that encompassed both the Chickasaw Nation and the neighboring Choctaw Nation during the 1820s and 1830s. More precisely, the historical and archaeological data marshalled here are presented to answer my primary research question: what material tools and practices did missionaries use to “civilize” Native American children and their families prior to Indian removal?
 One of the chief ways that Chickasaw and Choctaw children were being “civilized” by the missionaries at Charity Hall was through the use of material culture. Their lives were regimented around an alien work schedule, they were clothed in materials procured by charitable societies, and they sat around a dinner table with ceramic and metal implements produced in faraway places, some coming all the way from east Asia. The pastors used practical mastery of both educational and mechanical “arts” to civilize the children in accordance with the wishes of the United States government. Here processes of practice and materiality took on a colonial character due to their being encouraged and enforced in a context where the balance of power was shifting from the Indians to the Americans. The American elites found the Christian missionaries to be ready-made agents to “civilize” Indians and spread political influence internally within both the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation. The mission experience, however, ultimately proved to be too costly and slow and therefore paved the way for the removal policies of the 1830s and the abandonment of the “civilization” project altogether.

Reassembling colonial infrastructure in Cold War Korea: the Han River Basin Joint Survey Project (1966-71)

ABSTRACT This article explores how the Han River Basin Joint Survey Team (HJST), consisting of American and Korean engineers, planned the Han River Basin development project in South Korea during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While much of the existing literature adopts the lens of Cold War geopolitics, arguing that American political and technical elites drove worldwide river basin development to promote an anti-communist alternative, this article reveals a nuanced picture of localized tensions between the authoritarian regime’s political aspirations and longstanding Cold War and colonial legacies. It shows that development of the Han River Basin was planned based on hydrological data and technical infrastructure produced during Korea’s Japanese colonial era. Moreover, it is impossible to understand HJST’s work without taking into account the political aspirations of the South Korean authoritarian regime.

The In/Visibility of Mourning

After the death of their young daughter in 1841, the Griffith family of northern Maryland commissioned artist Sarah Miriam Peale to paint her portrait. Peale, academically trained and a member of a famous artistic family, was renowned for her paintings of the American elite. Peale’s portrait of Mary “Molly” Griffith—along with a diary kept by the girl’s mother, mourning jewelry, family papers, and a gravesite—makes the Griffith’s grief tangible and highly visible, even today. However, these materials also reveal the experiences of people enslaved by the Griffiths that have been overlooked, including a bondswoman named Caroline whose own story is inextricably intertwined with that of Molly’s. By examining these artifacts collectively and alongside the context of slavery, this article illustrates the complex relationship between labor, loss, and the material culture of mourning.

The logic of knowledge production: Power structures and symbolic divisions in the elite field of American sociology

With its highly visible “academic elite”, the US is regarded as a worldwide center of knowledge production. In this context, we reveal the structure of US American elite sociology to find the social conditions of intellectual production and its external influences. Using specific Multiple Correspondence Analysis along with combinatorial inference, we aim to identify the fundamental power structures and the distribution of sociological capital. Crucially, we present the complex relationships between these structures and the topic choices, methodological orientations and research practices of the 250 most visible US sociologists. The reconstructed space is multidimensional: firstly, it is divided along a “dominant” and “dominated” pole, secondly, along a “pure” scientific versus an institutional power pole. The first division goes hand in hand with the hierarchy of sociological topics, and the second accounts for capital accumulation practices and the choice of methodology. While institutional and economic power is deeply nationally embedded and associated with quantitative methodology, “pure” scientific power goes with an international orientation and a qualitative, more “humanistic” approach. Simultaneously, these oppositions reflect degrees of autonomy. Whereas the “pure” scientific pole is more autonomous, as it is defined by internal field criteria to a larger extent, the institutional power pole is more heteronomous by receiving grants from State institutions. This partially determines the field's heteronomy towards the bureaucratic field, paradoxically protecting, to some extent, against the logic of the economic market.

ВАЖНЫЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ВОСПРИЯТИЯ РОССИИ В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ ЭЛИТЕ

The article examines some of the key issues that most directly affect the prevailing attitude towards Russia in the United States. In particular, it is argued that the sharpness of contradictions in relations with Russia is largely due to the fact that the American elite has proved largely unable to recognize its own assertions about the “final collapse” and weakening of Russia and perceive it not as a “departing nature”, but as a global player who has regained his strength on the political arena. In this, the Americans were far from China, which even in the “darkest” period of the Russian turmoil was convinced that Russia will return and influence the development of international relations in the most decisive way.

Tracks of US-China Relations’ Development in the Context of the discourse of the American elites

Tracks of US-China Relations’ Development in the Context of the discourse of the American elites

The Accumulated Knowledge of a Thousand Generations: U.S. Mining Engineers as Public Intellectuals, 1885–1920

American mining engineers operated around the world at the turn of the twentieth century when the United States poised itself as a global power. The article examines three prominent engineers-Hennen Jennings, John Hays Hammond, and Herbert Hoover, later the thirty-first president of the United States-and how they leveraged their expertise and wealth into international renown. Through the writings, speeches, and associations of these three engineers, they became public intellectuals whose discourse addressed the history of their profession; efficiency and conservation practices; professional standards and ethics; and racialist hierarchy. As Americans, they amplified a teleological discourse of Western industrial civilization as dominant and proper: they positioned mining as a fundamental aspect of Western civilization. Epitomizing American elites' ideals in the prewar period, they envisioned racialized technological and social progress through efficiency, management, and empire. This article contributes to U.S. history, transnational history, and the intellectual history of engineering and technology.

Henry Bradley Plant: Gilded Age Dreams for Florida and a New South by Canter Brown Jr

Reviewed by: Henry Bradley Plant: Gilded Age Dreams for Florida and a New South by Canter Brown Jr James Sanders Day Henry Bradley Plant: Gilded Age Dreams for Florida and a New South. By Canter Brown Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 360. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-5966-9; cloth, $79.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2037-9.) The first biography of Henry Bradley Plant, penned by his pastor George Hutchinson Smyth and published in 1898, constitutes a laudatory promotion [End Page 737] for the Plant System of railroads and steamship lines. Kelly Reynolds’s Henry Plant: Pioneer Empire Builder (Cocoa, Fla., 2003) marked the first modern biography of Plant. Canter Brown Jr. builds on Reynolds’s research by consulting private papers, government documents, contemporary newspapers, and abundant secondary sources. The use of linked quotations grows tedious at times, while the inclusion of maps, particularly when describing railroad routes and mergers, would have proved helpful. Nevertheless, Brown’s degree of detail and his extensive use of primary sources set this study apart. Undoubtedly, this exhaustive work represents the definitive Plant biography. Historians typically attribute the development of the Florida peninsula to Gilded Age magnates Henry B. Plant and Henry M. Flagler. Perhaps better known, Flagler extended rail lines south along the Atlantic coast from St. Augustine to Miami and ultimately to Key West. In contrast, the Plant System combined railroads and steamships to link Tampa and Florida’s Gulf coast with Havana, Cuba. As the Sunshine State became a winter resort for American elites, both entrepreneurs benefited from the integration of transportation, hospitality, and recreation. Plant hailed from Branford, Connecticut, but he made his fortune in the South. Early on, Plant worked with express companies that used ships, stagecoaches, and railroads to transport mail, cash, and other goods along various routes. Gaining a reputation as a reliable courier and capable administrator, Plant rose through the ranks to become president of the Southern Express Company. The Civil War marked a turning point in his fortune as he negotiated contracts with the Confederate government. Labeled by many northern associates as disloyal and by southern critics as an opportunist, Plant continued operations until 1863 when he departed for a hiatus in Europe. In leadership roles, Plant applied the values of his conservative Presbyterian upbringing, having been introduced at an early age to the antislavery and temperance movements. His paternalistic approach seemed progressive at times as he implemented health care and profit-sharing programs. In the wake of the Panic of 1873, he founded the Expressmen’s Aid Society, keeping employees working while providing death benefits when necessary. Although forward-thinking in race relations, Plant drew criticism for his use of convict labor and his anti-union stance. Nevertheless, he built an empire on par with other captains of industry. Plant first noted Florida’s potential for development in 1853, but opportunities for investment did not emerge until after Reconstruction. In 1881, a robust tourist season combined with changes in national and state leadership to foster statewide enthusiasm for land sales and railroad construction. While Flagler focused on his Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Plant concentrated on building a rail network that connected Tampa with Charleston and Savannah. With eyes fixed on Havana as the key destination, Plant also invested in steamships to link Tampa with the Cuban capital. However, two critical events altered his vision. A fire in Key West in 1886 forced tobacco makers to relocate to Tampa, and the city became a national port of entry the following year. As a result, Plant redirected his focus to the hospitality industry, beginning construction of the luxurious Tampa Bay Hotel in 1888. Plant died unexpectedly in 1899, a few months before his eightieth birthday. One newspaper editor commented that Plant “converted his ‘half’ [of Florida] [End Page 738] from a howling wilderness... into... one of the most important commercial sections in the United States” (p. 250). Although his empire dissolved within three years of his death, Henry Bradley Plant left an indelible mark on Tampa and West Florida. James Sanders Day University of Montevallo Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

‘Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from?’: Englishness and the Search for an American National Style, 1850–1900

ABSTRACTThe identification of the American elite with the Renaissance in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as seen in the extended Capitol Building and National Mall in Washington DC, can be traced back to architectural, historiographical and cultural trends taking place in Britain. The writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds framed the debate in the United States. At first Ruskin’s antipathy towards the Renaissance was exacerbated by the Nativist Party’s opposition to Catholic immigration, but then the writings of Pater and, particularly, Symonds achieved what Wallace K. Ferguson described as ‘the thorough naturalization of Renaissancism in the English-speaking world’. Symonds’s Hegelian interpretation of the historical era as a ‘spirit of self-conscious freedom’ enabled Americans from the 1870s onwards to post-rationalise the Renaissance as a national style. Symonds dethroned the Ruskinian cult of the Gothic and celebrated Renaissance classicism and secular individualism. His image of Italian despots as ‘self-made men of commerce’ and an ‘aristocracy of genius and character’ appealed to US capitalists, while his admiration for the sumptuous palaces built by these Renaissance ‘men of power’ reinforced the evolutionary theories of the British sociologist Herbert Spencer, whose principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’ became the creed of American plutocrats as they built their own palatial houses. Finally, his frequent references to the discovery of America by Columbus came to legitimise the image of the US as the heir of Renaissance culture, as proclaimed at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña

Reviewed by: ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border by Elaine A. Peña Elliott Young ¡Viva George! Celebrating Washington's Birthday at the US–Mexico Border. By Elaine A. Peña. ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 199. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Elaine Peña's ¡Viva George! is a much-needed academic analysis of the history and meaning of the binational celebration of George Washington's birthday sponsored by Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, the most significant fete of the first U.S. president's birthday. Peña employs a performance studies lens, using the frameworks of border enactments and border scaffolding to examine the celebration. In addition to using archival research to examine the origins of the event and its ensuing development, Peña conducted ethnographic work on both sides of the border with a variety of celebration actors, including politicians, participants, and observers. The birthday celebration began in 1898 as an effort to Americanize the "dos Laredos" area, which was and still is inhabited overwhelmingly by people of Mexican descent. Peña notes that Mexican American elite (the so-called gente decente) participated in the early years of the celebration and were not antagonistic to its Americanizing goals. The celebration was started by a local branch of a national fraternal organization, the International Order of Red Men, and Peña explains that "playing Indian" was central to the celebration. Elite Laredoans, dressed as Indians, enacted an attack on city hall, engaging in a ritual of inversion in which the actors playing Indians vanquished the building's Anglo and Mexican defenders. The book does not address the role of "playing Black," which was also central to the celebration in the early years, including minstrel performances and the song Dixie. The first two chapters focus on this ethnic cross-dressing, showing how the celebration offered Laredoans a chance to play Indian, colonial, and Mexican. A Mexican-inspired Noche Mexicana event began in 1925 to foster cross-border trade, shopping, and goodwill, but ambivalence about celebrating [End Page 116] Mexican heritage in the Washington celebration led to a behindthe-scenes backlash that suspended Noche Mexicana for another decade. In 1954, Hurricane Alice destroyed the international bridge that served as a vital link between the two cities. Rebuilding efforts led to a dispute when the Laredo construction group announced a new, higher bridge toll. The Nuevo Laredo group simply stopped construction, halting progress for several months. Peña shows how negotiations over the toll ultimately allowed Mexicans to cross into Texas during the Washington Birthday festivities without special visas. This so-called paso libre, beginning in 1957, was all the more surprising because it happened in the wake of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service's Operation Wetback (1954), in which more than a million undocumented Mexicans were rounded up and sent back to Mexico. The final chapter addresses the increasing securitization of the border following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and especially after drug cartel violence spiked in 2006. Even so, one of the birthday celebration's prime rituals of binational friendship, the abrazo (embrace) of figures representing George Washington and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, along with children representing each country, continued throughout this period. By 2015, following the traditional embrace on the bridge, U.S. law enforcement formed a human chain to prevent Mexicans from slipping across the border. Peña ends by suggesting that Laredo never needed a literal border wall because the children's embrace "differentiates American and Mexican populations symbolically but effectively enough to avoid having to compromise trade and security relationships that actually produce quantifiable benefits" (128). Are the cross-border cooperation strategies inspired by Washington's birthday celebrations a solution to immigration restrictions or are they a sophisticated articulation of a longer history of exclusion on the border? This book provokes these and other important questions. Elliott Young Lewis & Clark College Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 by Billy Coleman

Reviewed by: Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 by Billy Coleman Rebeccah Bechtold (bio) Music, Music history, Civil society Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865. By Billy Coleman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 268. Cloth, $27.95.) When Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison narrowly defeated Martin Van Buren in 1840, it was largely thanks to the power of music, or so Democratic critics of Whig electioneering practices insisted. As the Albany Argus—a Democratic newspaper disgruntled by the election's results—proclaimed late in that year, "By their glee-clubs and other kindred appliances," the Whigs "have endeavored to debase the minds of the people" (quoted on 107). Certainly, music's use in political campaigns was far from novel. Yet, as Billy Coleman deftly argues in Harnessing Harmony, early Americans approached such music "as if it were akin to a new technology" (92). Taking as its primary subject how early Americans "thought about music in relation to politics" (6), Harnessing Harmony ultimately argues that music became a deliberate vehicle in which elite ideals about the American democratic system were disseminated to a larger populace. Musicologists and historians alike have unraveled music's at times divisive position in the lives of early Americans. Thanks to the efforts of Richard Crawford, Nicholas Tawa, and Karen Ahlquist, among others, we have a clear sense of music's origin and reception in the early United States. More recent works by Daniel Cavicchi, Joanna Brooks, and Laura Lohman have complicated these narratives further, demonstrating how Americans from diverse backgrounds participated in music in both private and public ways. Although clearly indebted to these scholarly traditions, Harnessing Harmony challenges the oft-held view that populist music was primarily exercised to confront those in power; rather, in Coleman's analyses, popular music was a tool "elite Americans consistently and adaptively" used "as a means of social control" (3). [End Page 346] Most notable perhaps is Coleman's rereading of the political lineage of Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner." Coleman argues that Key, a southern Federalist outspoken on the importance of national unity, drew on a Federalist tradition of defining music as "an effective means of convincing people to forgo partisanship and rally behind the wisdom of the nation's leaders" (26). Returning "The Star-Spangled Banner" to its early history helps us better understand how Federalists used popular music as a "ready-made means for fostering precisely the kind of political culture . . . in which elite values shaped American values" (47). This top-down approach established a tradition influencing antebellum electoral politics in the ensuing years—eventually leading Harrison to the presidency. Even though Whig campaign songs like "Good Hard Cider" and "Log Cabin" seemed to emphasize "your average laborer," they were often marketed to an aspirationally elite clientele who would appreciate the songs' "lavish lithographs by Nathaniel Currier" and "high-quality print work" (102). For Whigs, campaign music offered a respectable outlet through which middle-class Americans could participate in a grassroots campaign, all while avoiding the more unruly processes associated with popular democracy. This Federalist approach to popular music also paved the way for the establishment of musical organizations like the Boston Handel and Haydn Society (founded in 1815), the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia (founded in 1820), and the Boston Academy of Music (founded in 1833). The publication of The Boston Handel and Haydn Society's Collection of Church Music in 1822 certainly solidified the American public's interest in a collective music practice by quickly becoming the "nation's common source of accessible and respectable music" (60). Yet not all Americans agreed over the appropriate relationship between civil society and its governing body. When the Boston Academy of Music, led by Samuel Atkins Eliot, proposed that Boston incorporate music into its public-school curriculum, the Common Council initially turned down the proposal. While not objecting to the value of music per se—public sentiment generally was in favor of musical education—they proved wary of what seemed to be a "larger partisan-based attempt to influence public culture through civil society institutions," particularly what...

The Marshall Plan and the European Integration: The Stance of Great Britain and France (1947–1948)

The development and implementation of the Marshall Plan has been studied quite thoroughly in both Russian and foreign academic literature. Nevertheless, certain aspects of this problematique require further examination, particularly the reaction of the Western European countries to the initiative of the Secretary of State G. Marshall, as well as the impact of the Plan on the process of the European integration in general. The paper demonstrates that this reaction was far from simple and often contradictory since the key Western states had very different views on the future of mutual relations, as well as on the prospects for post-war recovery and development of Europe. The paper examines the evolution of the French and British leaders’ views on these issues from the first discussions of the projects to provide US aid to Western Europe to the implementation of the Marshall Plan. The negotiations revealed significant points of disagreement among the parties particularly regarding the relations with the USSR, the German question, and conditions for receiving assistance from the United States. The author stresses that the need to defend their interests during the course of negotiations with the US representatives contributed greatly to the rapprochement of Britain and France and, at the same time, catalyzed debates on the integration of Western Europe. In this regard the author emphasizes that the idea of regional economic integration received mixed reaction in the American elites. While some considered this process as an effective means of bringing the Western countries together, particularly, over the German question, others feared that integration of Western Europe could potentially lead to the emergence of a new competitor to the USA. The author concludes that the growing popularity of integration projects in Europe in 1947–1948 stemmed from a range of factors, including both a combination of internal European political processes and short-term and long-term consequences of the Marshall Plan. Whereas in terms of economic development of Western Europe the latter were rather ambiguous and are still the subject of controversy, in terms of world politics the Marshall Plan exacerbated block-to-block confrontation in Europe, characteristic of the Cold War period.

Liberal militarism and republican restraints on power: the problems of unaccountable interventions for American democracy

ABSTRACT The average American citizen no longer directly pays, fights or votes for war. The war on terror and the rise of debt fuelled militarism has detached the average American citizen from the use of force. This has left American elites largely unaccountable and able to use military force with minimal oversight. This paper examines how democratic peace theory has neglected the changing nature of modern warfare. It further calls for a return to the consideration of republican restraints on power. A belief in the importance of individuals playing a role as active citizens was fundamental to Kant’s arguments in Perpetual Peace. Modern democratic peace theory largely ignores the routine use of military force and the implications this has on the role of American citizens as a check on power.

Whose India? SITE and the origins of satellite television in India

ABSTRACT This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.

The interaction of elite networks in the Pinochet regime's macroeconomic policies

AbstractThe Chilean military regime offered a prime example of interactions among elite groups in the making of macroeconomic policies. Through the lens of both Bourdieu's field theory and Mills's elite coordination through networks, we show how Chilean elites sought to implement these policies despite being divided by their transnational and national ties. We have constructed an original database on the 62 most influential individuals within the space of macroeconomic policies using a variety of descriptive methods (multiple correspondence analysis, cluster analysis, and social network analysis), only used on very few occasions to study South American elites. We explore the internal divisions in these elites in terms of their orientation to national and transnational capital and biographical trajectories. We identify three groups – high‐ranking military officers, Chicago academic economists, and public and private sector professionals. Military officers were mostly endowed with national assets, while civilian groups relied on transnational resources. Moreover, the Chicago economists, characterized by their transnational and scientific legitimacy, were the closest to influential state positions overall (the Ministry of the Treasury and the Central Bank). Finally, we categorize the same three groups through (national and transnational) network ties. Organizational ties between those groups were significant, particularly among Chicago economists and professionals, which suggests an intense coordination process, facilitated by transnational affiliations and profile.

Questões éticas a partir do filme “O clube do imperador”: uma revisão bibliográfica

O filme americano O Clube do Imperador (2002) retrata os dilemas éticos enfrentados por um professor e um aluno em meio a uma escola destinada a filhos da elite estadunidense. A partir de um episódio onde o professor William Hundert desvia-se de sua retidão moral para ajudar o arrogante aluno Sedgewick Bell, filho de um inescrupuloso político, o qual posteriormente vem a trapacear no concurso titulado de “Júlio Cesar”, surge à problemática do ser “ético”, bem como as questões comportamentais e a relação família e escola presentes na formação do caráter do jovem. Tais ideias éticos, aparentemente antagônicas, podem ser aplicadas com sintonia, basta imaginar um ser o qual antes de agir tenha sua conduta pautada no pensar kantiano de estar agindo certo e nesta certeza buscar a felicidade, sua e do próximo, com qualidade. Não se está dizendo que é fácil tal agir, mas é plenamente possível tal conduta.

Nobody Is a Prophet in their Own Land? Evaluations of Pope Francis in Latin America

Using data drawn from surveys of Latin American elites and citizens, this article aims to analyse the determinants of evaluations of Pope Francis, with a special focus on ideology and religious denomination, religiosity, and trustworthiness of the Catholic Church. Results show that the Pope remains linked to opinions on the Church, but not to religiosity, and that differences in personal religious affiliations (or lack thereof) among respondents are sharper among citizens than among elites. Furthermore, Pope Francis is found to be not closely associated to the left–right axis in Latin America, except in the case of Argentine MPs, where the right‐leaning members express lower opinions of the Pope.

The Swearer's Prayer

At the time elite Americans abandoned or modified Christian theologies of perdition, American procedural law relied ever more strongly on the traditional link between law and the theology of divine punishment: the testimonial oath. While conventional histories of American evidence law tell a rather straightforward modernization story of a move from premodern sacral modes of prooftaking to rational forensic modes of examination, this paper shows that oathtaking did not diminish under modern law reform but significantly expanded with the influence of New York's code of 1848. For the first time in America, procedure codes required all pleadings to be sworn by the parties, and all parties and interested witnesses were made competent to take the oath and testify on the stand. Lawyers at first expected the dread of cross examination to deter perjury, but they quickly adjusted their theories in practice to detect lying under oath, which they believed had become rampant under the codes. The lawyers' faith in their ability to detect truth were stymied as racialized witnesses came before the bar. In order to account for racial disqualifications on testimony in a world increasingly open to party testimony (and perjury), lawyers revived an older theology of perdition, swirling together supposedly premodern and rational modes of investigation well into the twentieth century.

H. Baldwin’s Memorandum for the US Government “On Military Cooperation of Russia in the Pacific War” (1942) as a Historical Source

Issues related to US attempts to engage the USSR in a direct clash with Japan during the Second World War are examined. The relevance of the study is due to the fierce ongoing debate regarding a number of aspects of the history of the war years. Particular attention is paid to the study of a document sent by the Soviet intelligence agencies to I. V. Stalin in 1942. The novelty of the study is seen, first of all, in the fact that the document under study was declassified only at the present time and has not been published before. Meanwhile, the document testifies to the strategies proposed to the US government by a number of very influential and informed representatives of the American elite, aimed at drawing the Soviet Union into the war with Japan. It is shown in this document that the role of the USSR in the Pacific theater of operations is rightly defined as very significant. Of particular interest is the list of recommendations cited in the article by H. Baldwin, the author of the document studied, recommendations designed to ensure the involvement of the USSR in the war with Japan. The conclusion is formulated that the studied “Memorandum” confirms the readiness of the Allies to do a lot to achieve the desired. At the same time, it demonstrates the temporary nature of a community of interests and is by no means an allied attitude towards our country.