American Ideas Research Articles

Remembering Australian Constitutional Democracy

For many years, historical accounts of Australian Federation ignored the distinctive ideological origins of the Australian Constitution. From the mid 1980s until the 2000s, however, a generation of historians remembered how the Australian drafters built a distinctive constitutional democracy that combined trust in parliament with a direct constitutional role for a plural ‘people’: the people of Australia and the people of the states. Drawing on Chartist and American ideas of popular sovereignty, this system of popular political constitutionalism textually guarantees that ‘the people’ can ‘directly’ choose both houses of parliament, break deadlocks between these houses and make constitutional law. The definition of ‘the people’ in this distinctive form of constitutional democracy was, however, racially exclusive. In particular, First Australians were excluded from the plural people of Australia. This intellectual history of the Australian Constitution, however, has had remarkably little impact on constitutional interpretation and discourse. This paper will begin the process of examining those implications. First, it will show how this history provides important contextual support and direction to the implied limitations on parliamentary power that stem from the constitution’s guarantee of representative democracy in sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution. Second, it will demonstrate how it aids in better understanding Australia’s unique constitutional system. To date, this system has remedied the racist roots of the original constitutional definition of the people largely through legislative reform. The constitutional recognition of First Australians is a critical step in acknowledging that First Australians are a distinct part of the plural Australian people. In the aftermath of the failure of the First Nations Voice to Parliament proposal, meaningful constitutional recognition for First Australians must address their structural exclusion from the plural Australian people.

Army Orientations and Student Handbooks: Two Perspectives on Student Exchange during the US Occupation of Japan

In 1951, the largest cohort of Japanese exchange students in history arrived in the United States. Between 1949 and 1952, around 787 Japanese nationals received Government Aid and Relief in Occupied Areas (GARIOA) scholarships, intended to cultivate a learned group of people to spread American ideas in Japan. The purpose was to provide Japanese university graduates with first-hand experience of US democracy; earning advanced degrees was secondary. The Army produced elaborate orientations and films to explain this goal to GARIOA recipients, who were among the only Japanese able to travel abroad and attend US universities. Because students found Army materials insufficient in preparing them for the challenges of studying and living in the United States and because they wanted to use the GARIOA program to their own ends, they wrote their own handbooks. A prime example is A Handbook for Japanese Students Going to America (Beikoku seikatsu sama zama), 1956, by the Exchange Student Association (Beikoku ryūgakusei kai). This article argues that Army orientations and student handbooks described Occupation-era educational exchange from two different perspectives and helped both groups to achieve their version of success and to engage in a larger conversation about the political role of exchange students in Cold War diplomacy.

INDIAN MYTHS AS THE BASIS OF HART CRANE’S MYTHMAKING

The article focuses on the specific significance of the myths of the indigenous peoples of North and South America for the formation of a special artistic creation of Crane’s “myth to God” (the definition of the poet). The purpose of the research is to identify and analyze the ancient mythologies used by Hart Crane to construct the future of America, which will be inspired by the new myth. This new myth, according to Crane, will emerge from the synthesis of all mythologies existing on the American continent, the achievements of all cultures whose peoples participated in the discovery and development of the New World, and the incredible success in the development of civilization that the Americans achieved. Crane’s poetry space is homogeneous. Probably somewhat eclectic, but homogeneity is achieved by a purposeful orientation to the subordination of all components to the American idea, that is, Crane’s space is a poetic melting pot. In accordance with the indicated homogeneity, in conducting the research the synergy of literary methods is used: biographical, which made it possible to follow the works from the initial idea to their creation; cultural-historical, due to which the characteristic features of the era of modernism are identified in the poet’s works; comparative, which makes it possible to compare the elements of work of different poets (not only modernists, but also remotely distant literary periods); ritual-mythological, intended for direct analysis of the paradigm of Indian myths; historical-functional, which made it possible to identify the reception of Crane’s works from total non-acceptance to the granting of program status; systemic-holistic, to which all the above-mentioned methods are subordinated, because it helps to highlight the main core (idea) of works (Crane’s “myth to God”), to which all other images, motives, plots, etc. are subordinated. In Hart Crane’s works, almost every word holds a mythological potential, it always functions in its original meaning, based on which the mythical context prevails. It can be the name of Pocahontas or the name of Atlantis, stirring up myths about the Indians and the conquest of America by the whites, or about the love of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, about Plato’s mythological Atlantis and the migration of the first settlers across the Atlantic, which in Crane’s time had also become a myth. Or maybe the seagull is one of Crane’s favorite images: an ordinary bird that circles over the Brooklyn Bridge and a permanent character in Native American mythology, in which the boundlessness of freedom and the ingenious mind of a trickster are combined. That is one verbal marker of Crane – the seagull – holds and simultaneously produces several meanings, from concreteness to the symbolism of the myth, as the majestic image of the Brooklyn Bridge, which removed the mythological dimension, became the new myth created by Hart Crane.

Le musée, l’artiste et l’identité comme marques : le cas du musée d’art latino-américain de Buenos Aires (MALBA)

The Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) illustrates what Robert Fleck (2014) calls the "21st Century Museum": a new type of museum built on branding. This concept is aligned with the debates that, since the 1980s, have proposed the end of the museum as an elitist place for the conservation of the canon, to make way for a museum institution conceived as a mass medium that adheres to the logic of the spectacle, as Andreas Huyssen (1994) postulates. The author describes the phenomenon of musealisation, which is evident in the increasing number of museum openings and the public’s growing interest in the museum experience. This article studies the MALBA as a paradigmatic case in which two conceptual categories coexist: a 21st-century museum conceived as a mass media. From its exhibition proposals to its communication strategies, the museum appropriates the logic of the spectacle, constituting a "star system" of Latin American art, variable according to marketing objectives. We are interested in how the institution constructs itself as a brand, and in the discursive mechanisms through which certain Latin American artists and ideas of "Latin Americanness" serve institutional positioning. We also observe how MALBA adopts some of the positioning strategies of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This article therefore presents a) a study of the institutional communication strategies of the two museums; b) an analysis of four curatorial discourses of the museum’s collection (from 2010 to 2022) in order to observe the different ways in which MALBA presents Latin American art history and Latin Americanness; and c) an analysis of the construction of the MALBA brand based on the artists that make up its collection.

"I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I was a slave": Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue and the Sexual Economy of US Slavery

Abstract: This article traces the powerful currency of notions of feminine virtue among enslaved women in the antebellum US South. Early nineteenth-century white American ideas of "female virtue" were limited to white womanhood and legitimized US white supremacist and patriarchal imperialism. Exploited for their reproductive and productive labor, enslaved women were denied the assumption of feminine virtue. Rather, they were positioned at the center of slavery's sexual economy. Yet, enslaved women developed a transnational and multifaceted understanding of feminine virtue that they enlisted and passed on to their daughters as a form of subversion. This article argues that enslaved women's concerns with and actions around virtue reveals a strategy through which they struggled for sexual autonomy.

Gendering Dissent: MeToo Travels to Scandinavia in the Early Twenty-First Century

In May 2018, the #MeToo movement picked up wind when Harvey Weinstein was charged by the New York County District Attorney’s Office with rape and sexual misconduct. But #MeToo was slow to take hold in Scandinavia, specifically in Denmark, where the consensus seemed to be that inequality and sexual harassment had long been overcome. Both the Women’s March, which Ralph Young includes in Dissent: The History of an American Idea (2015), and the belated #MeToo movement in Denmark demonstrate the importance of American dissent, though the American Studies community has ignored national differences within #MeToo. Taken together, #MeToo protests in the United States set in motion a fourth wave of Americanization in Scandinavia, though the movement changed as it traveled across the Atlantic. Recent examples from Danish media and monographs suggest that the local #MeToo movement focused on the men involved and on class and the Danish Welfare State, which might topple if trade unionists did not take sexual violence seriously. Even the royal family would ultimately feel the sting of #MeToo and its relentless demand for equality.

“For the Advancement and Betterment of Humanity”: The Fight for Women's Suffrage at Utah's Constitutional Convention

“For the Advancement and Betterment of Humanity”: The Fight for Women's Suffrage at Utah's Constitutional Convention

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Space Arms Control or Space Behavior Control? The Competition between American and Chinese Ideas of an International Space Order

The weaponization and battlefieldization of outer space is becoming increasingly evident. China and the United States have obvious differences in their proposals for maintaining space security. China advocates a legally binding international treaty according to international law to limit outer space armament based on multilateralism with the framework of the United Nations at its core. The United States advocates establishing voluntary rule‐based agreements within the allied system as rules for the international community to constrain space behavior. The contest between China and the United States over how to maintain space security is in actuality a competition between the two countries over what type of international space order to establish. In the foreseeable future, the outcome of the competition between the two countries could be that an international space order based on US rules prevails, partially absorbing China's rules.

Buttered Bagels

Buttered Bagels

Review: Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America, by Dael A. Norwood

Dael Norwood offers an engaging account of how Sino-American intercourse shaped the political economy of the United States in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Norwood situates the China Trade—by the late 1870s, the “China Market” (p. 157)—within a developing American national identity that trumpeted the United States’s centrality to systems of capitalism and global commerce. Through a series of vignettes highlighting crucial figures, legislation, and debates related to Sino-American trade, Norwood charts the rise and decline of U.S. commerce with the Qing Empire and its lasting impact on how Americans conceived of their nation’s place within the world economy.Trading Freedom is foremost a history of the United States, and therein lie its strengths. Norwood brings a metropolitan perspective to debates that have captured the attention of China trade historians for years. Discussions linking the opium trade to American ideas of sovereignty (pp. 78–92), or debates connecting the trade in indentured Chinese labor to immigration law (pp. 130–32), masterfully interweave the complex agendas of the government, domestic lobbyists, and China merchants. Especially interesting in this regard is Norwood’s account of Asa Whitney’s campaign for a transcontinental railroad—a movement that used the prospect of Pacific trade with China to drive America’s global commercial ascendency (p. 111) while, ironically, directing much-needed capital away from a flagging China trade (p. 163). In these examples, and indeed throughout the book, Norwood makes a compelling case for China’s importance to the realization U.S. imperial ambitions.The book is particularly effective in its discussion of Sino-American trade’s late nineteenth-century decline—a topic that has received only a light touch to date. Norwood ties this decline to the evolving industrial landscape of a maturing economy that saw the U.S. shift gears from an agricultural producer to a manufacturing giant intent to vent “surplus goods to overseas markets” (p. 176). The convincing argument contextualizes and expands greatly upon that advanced in Thomas McCormick’s China Market, providing a necessary answer to why old American China firms practicing outdated models of commission, brokerage, and shipping failed so spectacularly in the 1870s and 1880s.Still, while the book is an American history, it would have been illustrative to see more nuanced accounts of the relationship between American private enterprise and politics in China. The filibusters hinted at (Frederick Townsend Ward comes to mind) were rather more of an issue to Sino-American relations than the discussion of Anson Burlingame’s diplomatic struggles suggests (p. 141). The Confederate raider Alabama never sailed further north than Borneo but did wreak havoc on American trading and Anglo-American politics (p. 141). The Taiping Civil War (p. 139)—quickly recognized as a disaster for commerce—proved integral to Sino-American and Anglo-American debates about neutrality and sovereignty both in China and at home.Such points should not, however, detract from the impressive deft with which Norwood weaves together complex political and commercial developments unfolding in the United States and China. The book is well researched, crisply written, and, importantly, addresses a long-overlooked aspect of Sino-American contact. Trading Freedom is certain to become a vital reference point for scholars interested in the political economy of the United States, new histories of capitalism, and U.S. imperial ambitions.

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Два подхода к социальной политике в немецкой консервативной политической философии конца XX века

Introduction. In conservative political philoso- phy in Germany at the end of the 20th century, there developed two main approaches to social policy. The first one, paternalistic and corporat- ist approach continued the line that had been established in the 19th century and assumed the active participation of the state in regulating social support. The second, the market one, adopted American ideas of the second half of the 20th cen- tury and proposed limiting the scope of the welfare state in order to save resources and avoid a nega- tive impact on the labor market. The purpose of the study is to analyze the argu- ments of the two directions of German conserva- tism at the end of the 20th century, their philo- sophical origin and their significance for politics. Methods. The article is based on the comparative historical approach, analysis of institutions and legal documents, and the hermeneutic method for studying the political, administrative and ideological context of the development of German conserva- tism at the end of the 20th century. Scientific novelty of the research. The article focuses on the intellectual heritage of German theorists, while the main attention of domestic and foreign researchers of conservative political philosophy of the late 20th century was attracted by American and British authors. Results. The key arguments of the paternalistic approach to social issues include pointing out the responsibility of elites for the well-being of the population and a strong state as a means of com- pensating for inequality in society. The arguments of the market approach are based on the appeal to the ideas of civic virtue and the protection of property as key forces that ensure social peace and well-being. Conclusions. In practice, the approach that offered the preservation and expansion of the welfare state prevailed, and favorable economic condi- tions, as well as institutional and ideological inertia, contributed to implementing solutions within the framework of this paradigm. But the ideas of the market approach have not lost their relevance, since the burden on the welfare state increases due to the aging of the population.

Concerning Science

Concerning Science David K. Hecht (bio) Andrew Jewett,Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 356 pp. Notes and index. $42.00 Science matters. In his impressive Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America, Andrew Jewett skillfully explores a variety of different critiques of science across twentieth-century United States history. These critiques do not always align in their particulars: some are based in religion, while others are secular. Some come from the political right, others from the left. Some seem to originate from the cultural margins, whereas others were mainstream. Moreover, as Jewett acknowledges, there is no consistent definition of science that runs through all the critiques. What unites them is a sense that there is something amiss in the world—modernity, secularism, amorality, dehumanization, totalitarianism, materialism, technocracy—and that science is to blame. Science matters, for these critics, and in all the wrong ways. Science under Fire can be profitably read as a comprehensive treatment of science skepticism in modern U.S. history. Jewett effectively distills the essences of a staggeringly wide range of thinkers and writers across many decades. “Although a concern with science’s corrupting cultural effects has never been the dominant strain in American thinking about science,” he writes, “it has been persistent, influential, and consequential for nearly a century—above all, in the post-World War II ‘golden age’” (p. 16). Having accelerated after 1945, such skepticism has become entrenched in recent decades and one of its most prominent manifestations—climate change denial—is proving to have planetary implications. However, Jewett, counterintuitively but powerfully, scarcely mentions climate change. While some readers might wish for a greater engagement with our contemporary crisis, I welcomed Jewett’s more historical focus. After all, we have any number of thoughtful analyses concerning the origin and nature of climate change denial.1 What we don’t have is exactly what Science under Fire provides: a synthesis of science skepticism before the current era. Like all good history, this book demonstrates that its subject is far more complicated than we might assume simply by considering its most recent form. [End Page 389] This is an important contribution. But science also matters here in a deeper and more methodologically novel way. Jewett uses “science” as a tool with which to explore American intellectual history more broadly. This is not a history of science, but rather an account of the many ways in which American thinkers, writers, clergyman, and educators mobilized science as a rhetorical concept in defining and pressing their social visions. Jewett explains: “this book explores conceptions of science as a social and cultural force, rather than a method or a subject” (p. 5). Precisely because these actors’ ultimate concerns lay outside of science, the stakes of the debate were monumental. Jewett writes, for example, of the concerns of many American Catholics that teaching evolution was just one more expression “of a materialistic, self-divinizing form of rationalism that had plagued the West for centuries” (p. 61). Similarly, he contends that after World War II “it became a matter of simple common sense for many scholars that the Western world was experiencing an epochal modern crisis and that scientism lay at its root” (p. 123). Few of the critics who populate the pages of Science under Fire saw their concerns in narrow, policy terms; even those who offered political critiques did so with an eye toward epic battles between democracy and freedom on one hand with totalitarianism and repression on the other. Science under Fire is thus an intellectual history of (perceived) cultural and intellectual crisis. As such, it should be read alongside such books as Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America (2019), or Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011). All three of these books—and there are certainly others—are ambitious and impressive syntheses of much intellectual history (and historiography) in the service of understanding the grand sweep of American culture and ideas. Jewett’s contribution to this literature is to focus on science. Of course, he is not the first intellectual historian...

Artifact NY: Marion Weeber's Flatware of the Future

Artifact NYMarion Weeber's Flatware of the Future Jennifer Lemak (bio) For centuries, cutlery was made from mixtures of silver, gold, pewter, or other hard metals. Silver, often purchased by wealthier families was the most common material for flatware. As a result, "silverware" was the general term used for flatware whether it was made from silver or not. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, spoons were the only utensil used at the dining table. Knives were treated as tools and were not to be used at the table. Forks were considered "coarse and ungraceful."1 Matching flatware place settings became common in the mid-nineteenth century, around the same time the new technology of electroplating was developed. Electroplating, or silver-plating, is a process in which a thin coating of silver is chemically adhered to a cheaper metal item. The resulting "silverware" was almost indistinguishable from flatware made from silver. Silver and silver-plated utensils remained the household norm well into the mid-twentieth century. However, new technologies were being developed. Stainless steel was first produced in Sheffield, England, in 1913 by Harry Brearley, a chemist and metallurgist working to improve armor plates.2 By the 1920s, stainless steel was used for medical equipment and small tools, which soon transitioned into military uses and engines during World War II; but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the material made its way into household items such as flatware. Industrial designer Marion Weeber took advantage of this new medium for flatware. Weeber's Classic Column tableware was promoted as the future in 1967 when it was selected for the U.S. Commission for Design Excellence at the International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Canada. Used in the American Pavilion at the Exposition, this tableware was made of highly polished stainless steel and featured futuristic geometric shapes that were rooted in classical forms. The design promoted specific American ideas [End Page 377] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Classic Column flatware designed by Marion Weeber, 1967. courtesy of the new york state museum, albany, h-1986.59.39. to the world: precision, polish, and forward thought, with an elegant nod to its classical past. Weeber designed several flatware sets and tableware lines in stainless steel for EKCO Products International Company. Working with stainless steel allowed her unlimited design possibilities resulting in a durable and affordable end-product.3 Like her flatware designs, Marion Weeber was ahead of her time. Born in Albany, New York in 1905, she was the daughter of Christian Weeber, an automotive pioneer and aeronautical inventor. She attended the Art Students League of New York City and became a lifetime member. At the age of twenty-three, her father encouraged her to postpone her art studies and work with him in his Albany shop as an apprentice on a helicopter rescue craft. During this time with her father and until his death in 1932, Weeber learned how to create industrial designs by producing mechanical drawings and drafts and work with patent lawyers—skills she would employ for the rest of her career.4 By the mid-1930s, Weeber returned to New York City to work for design and advertising firms, and by 1938, she started her own industrial design company, Marion Weeber, Inc., which lasted until the early 1990s. [End Page 378] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Marion Weeber models her tulip buttons and clip designs, ca. 1945. Polished silver plate with copper tulips. Designed for La Mode. courtesy of the new york state museum, albany, h-1986.59.40. As an independent industrial designer and business owner, Weeber designed and produced thousands of items—jewelry, buttons, scarves, housewares, kitchen items, lamps, and picture frames—that were sold in finer department stores.5 Additionally, she patented dozens of her designs over her long career. In the last decade of her life and still thinking about the future, Weeber donated several of her designs and finished pieces to museums all over New York State—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the New York State Museum, and the Albany Institute of History & Art. Each [End Page...

Brother Herman Zaccarelli and the influence of Vatican II on Catholic institutional food service

ABSTRACT In post-World War II United States, a Holy Cross monk named Herman Zaccarelli viewed Vatican II as an opening for the modernising of food in Catholic religious institutions. Brother Herman founded the Food Research Center for Catholic Institutions on the campus of Stonehill College outside Boston, which ran conferences and seminars for monks and nuns who sought to change their approach to cooking and eating. Zaccarelli, a product of mid-twentieth century American cultural ideas and mores, grounded his efforts in religious obligation and located the change he sought within the “spirit of Vatican II”. Many of the new ideas and practices ran counter to long-held habits and rituals regarding food – habits of restraint, asceticism and sacrifice, which set up intergenerational tensions. This story focuses on food to illustrate these larger tensions and transformations in post-WWII American Catholicism.

"The Native Produce of this Island": Processes of Invention in Early Barbados

Starting in the 1620s, Englishmen, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from the greater Caribbean lived and labored on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Through free and forced migrations, they carried unique understandings of how to make and consume alcohol with them. Once on Barbados, American, African, and European ideas and technologies coexisted and sometimes intersected. By the 1640s, rum emerged from this maelstrom—it was an invention of the Atlantic world. A close examination of the alcohols that early inhabitants made and consumed complicates assumptions that ideas and innovations from one region could conquer the Atlantic world. It unveils how the colonization of Barbados and attendant enslavement of African and Indigenous people unleashed the creative collisions of skilled practitioners, agricultural products, technologies, and ideas surrounding consumption. Initially designed to satisfy local tastes, tracing the processes of invention surrounding rum and other alcoholic beverages demonstrates how experimentation and the development of taste preceded commodification. Understanding how rum became the "native produce" of Barbados shows us how cross-cultural interactions in the early modern Caribbean—which tied together the broader Atlantic world—created new worlds for all.

Assessing US Pharmaceutical Policy and Pricing Reform Legislation in Light of European Price and Cost Control Strategies.

This article compares the pharmaceutical pricing policies employed by public and private insurers in the United States with seven price and spending control strategies employed in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Differences between American and European policies explain why American pharmaceutical prices and per capita spending are higher than in European nations. The article then analyzes two recent bills as examples of significant American reform ideas-H.R. 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act (introduced in 2019) and the Build Back Better Act (BBBA, introduced in 2021)-and compares them with European cost control strategies. Key drug price provisions of the BBBA were incorporated into the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). H.R. 3 would have used an international (mostly European) price index to cap U.S. prices; the BBBA would cap Medicare prices at a discount from average U.S. market prices. Neither bill would employ the key cost control strategies that European nations do. Both bills would have significantly less impact on prices than legislation that employs European-style cost controls. This article proposes steps that Congress could take in line with European strategies to lower purchase prices and costs for patients. These measures would have to overcome political obstacles that currently stymie reform.

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical

The United States of Medievalism

The United States of Medievalism