American Perceptions Research Articles

Review: Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands, by Benjamin Hoy

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands, by Benjamin Hoy Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. By Benjamin Hoy. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2021. 344 pp.) David-Paul B. Hedberg David-Paul B. Hedberg Outdoor History Consulting Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2023) 92 (2): 316–317. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.316 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David-Paul B. Hedberg; Review: Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands, by Benjamin Hoy. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 2023; 92 (2): 316–317. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.2.316 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search I’ll look at Peace Arch Park at the Canada-U.S. border differently the next time I pass by to see my family living on the other side. Benjamin Hoy’s Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada–United States Border Across Indigenous Lands is both an important contribution to the scholarship of borderlands and more broadly to Canadian and U.S. history. Readers of Hoy’s book will come to see the border as a colonial tool for the mass starvation of indigenous people; as a calculated line that attempted to reorder kinship relations and definitions of nationality and indigeneity; as an ambiguous zone of control where goods and people moved through colonial power structures and inability to regulate or fathom the Indigenous world that existed before the border. Hoy argues the Canada-U.S. border developed differently from the U.S.- Mexico border “because of American perceptions of cultural similarity and military prowess” (p. 6). The... You do not currently have access to this content.

How African Americans With Severe Mental Illness and Trauma Experience Diet and Exercise.

African Americans have a higher prevalence of obesity and obesity-related diseases than other racial/ethnic groups; among persons with serious mental illness (SMI), African Americans fare worse as well. This qualitative study focused on the perceptions of African Americans with SMI in regard to 1) their experiences with diet and exercise behaviors post trauma and 2) how diet and exercise programming can address trauma. A community-based participatory research (CBPR) team developed the interview guide, research protocols, and conducted three focus groups. The team used thematic analysis to analyze the data. Participant (N = 27) responses on the experience of trauma were coded into the following themes: 1) emotional eating, 2) appetite loss, 3) hesitancy to exercise due to community violence, 4) staying home due to mental health symptoms, and 5) substance use. Themes around how programming can address trauma included: 1) support, 2) communication, 3) strategies to avoid trauma, and 4) engagement in programming. Findings suggest the need for human service professionals to infuse trauma-informed communications and practices throughout programming, incorporate peer-led services and address concerns related to community violence.

Tone-Deaf Propaganda: American Perceptions and Misperceptions of Italy during the Great War

One of the ways in which Wilsonianism permeated Europe during the Great War was through the activities of the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Historians are still discussing the effectiveness of the CPI's propaganda abroad. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on and problematising the case of Italy. The Italian scenario confronted the CPI with a series of challenges that exposed the limits of America's germinal public diplomacy. The author's argument is that, in spite of its numerous attempts, the CPI's activities in Italy resulted in a substantial failure, which was mostly due to an inter-institutional conflict of interests and competences between the CPI and the US embassy in Rome. Such a short-circuit prevented US propagandists from developing a genuine understanding of the Italian public's preferences and resulted in what people in the Peninsula perceived as a general lack of empathy.

Política nuclear americana durante a guerra na Ucrânia

The United States and Russia, whose agenda is dominated by strategic matters, possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. Efforts to reduce their number and salience in American nuclear strategy have been affected by domestic resistance and international developments. Currently, Moscow’s pattern of disrespect for arms control agreements, in a context of war in Ukraine, and of repeated Russian nuclear threats, is joined by an American perception of a massive expansion of Chinese nuclear forces. Those events serve as an impetus for American nuclear modernization and make dialogue to limit the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals more difficult.

African American Perceptions of Service Provided by Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education: A Qualitative Exploration

ObjectiveTo assess African Americans’ satisfaction with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) in Louisiana. MethodsAfrican American facilitators conducted 5 focus group discussions with 25 African American SNAP-Ed participants according to issues identified by African American SNAP-Ed implementers in Louisiana. Focus group discussion transcripts were coded independently using inductive and in vivo coding by 2 members of the research team. ResultsParticipants viewed lessons as race-neutral and thought they should include more information about African American history and culture. Participants also noted a lack of engagement with the African American community and stressed the need for the program to employ African American staff. However, participants thought the information was important for African Americans in the context of medical issues faced by their community. Conclusions and ImplicationsFindings indicate that SNAP-Ed in Louisiana be modified to address African American food history and culture, additional African American staff and better engagement with the African American community.

Postcolonial Dilemma in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

In this paper, the researcher shows how Laila Halaby presents mainstream Americans’ perception of Arab Americans post 9/11 America in her novel Once in a Promised Land. Halaby narrates how the mainstream Americans provided the Western gaze upon the Arab-American citizens. Halaby symbolizes in the characters an America which is conspiratorial and submerged with religious passions. After 9/11, Halaby’s mainstream American characters become increasingly fanatical and mistrustful of Arabs, specifically, and Islamic religion, in general. Halaby, then, portrays intolerant and xenophobic American characters overwrought with doubts and discloses a post 9/11 America that is prevalent with anti-Arab racism. Halaby also propounds that the widespread American perception of a world patently divided between East and West only arouses global crises such as drought, poverty and war. She also declares that the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, were a direct result of these epidemics. Moreover, Halaby offers a perspective of Americans who are ignorantly perceiving the United States as separated from crises affecting all nations. For this reason, Halaby's novel functions as a cautionary tale decreeing Americans to transcend a binary frame of reference to avoid further crises from escalating within or beyond American borders.

The National Endowment for Democracy at 40: Back to Basics?

The world system is increasingly characterized by a New Cold War competition between the USA, Russia and China, framed as a battle between “democracy” and “autocracy” by the Biden Administration. This article focuses on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a key instrument of U.S. democracy promotion in support of national security over the last 40 years. It analyses the extent to which it will remain a valid and effective actor in U.S. foreign policy during the New Cold War. The first two sections focus on the two structural elements that enable the NED to function. The first section focuses on the conceptual framework which has legitimated democracy promotion as an element of U.S. foreign policy. While this has been a U.S. policy imperative since the foundation of the state, its salience and the methods used to pursue it have been determined by shifts in the power of the United States and American perceptions of threats from foreign actors. The second section analyses the factors that have shaped the institutional and strategic position of the NED in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. When the U.S. foreign policy elite perceives a unitary threat from a political-ideological actor, coupled with a need to transform closed regimes, the Executive and Congress align to empower the NED through provision of support and resources. The third section examines the position of the NED in the Biden Administration’s strategy and argues it is being supported to the maximum as the lead institution for promoting democracy in hostile authoritarian competitors. It concludes that the NED has shown a high level of institutional survivability but that its model of democracy promotion is increasingly challenged by closing political space in other states, and the erosion of the U.S. economic, military, and ideological power.

Assessing Political Demoralization: A Framework for Public Policy Analysis and Evaluation

Background: The United States symbolizes democracy in the new world and contributes to global prosperity. Nevertheless, incrementalism is a historically dominant national approach to public policy implementation that delays democracy and undermines human dignity. Human flourishing and national development are endangered by slow-moving democratic changes. This necessitates a social justice framework that traces the exploitation of incrementalism and the consequences of opportunity gaps. Objectives: This study aimed to answer and address the following research question: Are anti-democratic concepts part of a process or strategy that hinders democratic change, and what reinforces it, if anything? Methods: Two categories emerged from a grounded theory of democratic social change. This combination of anti-democratic tenets and democratic principles led to abductive reasoning to fill the research gap. Results: The key finding was the existence of a systematic approach that led to democracy while simultaneously disempowering the same group through legal and extralegal means. Two processes hinder democracy: incrementalism and an anti-democratic demoralizing process. A constructivist social justice grounded theory was developed to analyze and evaluate public policy for barriers and facilitators of democracy. A thorough analysis and evaluation of the impact and consequences of public policy is recommended to better understand how such policies impede democracy and influence American perceptions of justice.

Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction

This essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints. My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes. The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others. My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale. Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-selling non-fiction books: Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. Weisman’s The World Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People, Scranton’s We’re Doomed, Now What? Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, Rich’s Losing Earth and others. Academic books by Nixon, Scranton, Ghosh, Purdy, McClintock, and others.

The Hero Who Disappointed: Images of Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49 in Livermore’s Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph

This article studies US American perceptions of the European Revolutions of 1848/49, especially the different receptions of the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth’s sojourn in the US, through an analysis of a rather unknown novel Zoë; or the Quadroon’s Triumph (1855). Benefiting from different sources, the article examines the impacts of the revolutions of Europe in the US literary, cultural, religious, and political sceneries by pointing to how even non-canonical works reflected upon these influences.

Relying on Research for Effective Response: A Survey Tool for Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 to Create Extension Resources

The UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (PIE Center) conducted a series of national public opinion surveys to examine the perceptions of Americans related to COVID-19. The PIE Center shared the survey data using Extension and outreach communication pieces, including issue guides, kinetic typography videos, webinars, and communication toolkits. Data collected from the PIE Center on Americans’ perceptions related to COVID-19 also informed two communication toolkits developed for Extension. This new 5-page article, published by the UF/IFAS Department of Agricultural Education and Communication, describes the instruments used to collect public opinion data related to COVID-19. Written by Lauri M. Baker, Ashley McLeod-Morin, Shelli Rampold, Anissa Zagonel, Ricky Telg, Angela B. Lindsey, Michaela Kandzer, Sandra Anderson, Sydney Honeycutt, Phillip Stokes, Valentina Castano, and Alena Poulin.https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/wc426

Similarities and Differences in Countries’ Perceptions of the Concept of the Middle East: From the Perspective of State Administration

The concept (term) of the Middle East is dynamic and unstable in its geographical, security, political, and economic dimensions. This concept (term) is according to the perceptions and motives of each country. The only constant in its geography is the Arab region, except North Africa, specifically the "Maghreb,” where it sometimes expands to include the entire Arab region in addition to the Islamic countries of Central Asia, the Balkan countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of from China, Turkey, Israel and Iran, and sometimes it narrows and shrinks to include the Gulf region only. Hence, it is a concept or term that is not clear-cut according to American perception. Most of the country’s perceptions of the Middle East reflected a disturbance in defining its political geography and periphery. Most of those perceptions expressed a manifestation of identification or the competition between the regional and international powers over the Arab region in general and the Gulf in particular.

The United States and Revolutions

Revolutions are rare in human history. This study details and evaluates American policy toward five truly revolutionary situations in the post-World War II era: China, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, and Nicaragua. American policy in these cases progressed through four relatively distinct phases: (1) American officials failed to recognize the seriousness of the threat to the incumbent pro-American regime. (2) Once policymakers became aware of the threatening situation, they encouraged the leader in the target state to initiate reforms. (3) Failure of the reform effort and a successful opposition movement led the U.S. to seek to guide the transition to a new regime. (4) While opposed to the regime which was eventually established, the U.S. still hoped to establish productive relations with it. The prevailing pattern in these cases is attributed to a misunderstanding of Third World realities and the processes of change there, and to exaggerated notions of American influence. The concluding portion of the article recommends ways to improve American perceptions and policy in such situations.

A Gendered and Racialized Educational Hierarchy: Disparities in Elementary School Teachers’ Perceptions of Student Behavior

AbstractThis paper uses an intersectional framework to account for the degree to which race, when intersecting gender, relates to teachers’ evaluations of US elementary school children over time. Drawing on longitudinal data from the 2011 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohort, we employ growth curve modeling to study descriptive trends in teacher perceptions of student behavior from kindergarten through fifth grade. We find that educators’ perceptions of White, Asian American, and Latinx girls increase over time, while their perceptions of Black girls remain flat. Meanwhile, a different longitudinal trend emerges among boys. Although teachers’ views of Black boys decrease over time, their views of other boys increase to the levels of Black girls, or higher, by the end of fifth grade. This analysis reveals how teachers’ perceptions coalesce into an emerging hierarchy that—by the end of fifth grade—most sharply contrasts the behavior of Asian American girls and Black boys. Our intersectional approach and the theoretical framework informing it underscore the limits to considering how educators distinguish students by gender or race alone. Together, gender and race more fully account for differences in how educators perceive student behavior over time.

Validity of a scale of Latin American perception of fear and concern transmitted by the media during the pandemic (MED-LAT-COVID-19)

IntroductionThe pandemic has caused fear, especially due to the daily disseminated news; however, there is not an instrument to measure this fear in multiple realities. ObjectiveTo validate a scale for Latin American perception of fear and concern transmitted by the media during the pandemic. MethodologyThis is an instrumental study. The survey was based on an instrument which was pre-validated in Peru and submitted to 15 experts in almost 10 countries. Subsequently, thousands of people were surveyed in 13 Latin American countries, whose answers were used for descriptive statistics for validation. ResultsConfirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) generated two re-specifications, where four items were eliminated from the original scale. With these changes, the global goodness of fit (absolute and incremental) were satisfactory (CFI = 0.978; TLI = 0.964; GFI = 0.976; AGFI = 0.949; RMSEA = 0.075 and RMR = 0.029). The first factor measures the media exaggeration (three questions); the second, the fear transmitted by the media (three questions); and the third, the fear transmitted by others different from the media (two questions). The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was higher than 0.70 for the scale and its factors. ConclusionThe MED-LAT-COVID-19 scale reported a good adjustment. It has eight items in three factors, which could be measured in an isolated way, or along with other tests that assess mental health in the current pandemic context.

African American Perceptions of Participating in Health Research Despite Historical Mistrust.

A qualitative descriptive approach examined perspectives of African Americans (AA) on their participation in health research despite historical research mistreatment. Nineteen AAs participated in semistructured interviews that provided data that were analyzed using thematic analysis. Salient themes included race concordance, being respected and valued by the researcher, research participation motivators, and cultural experiences of racism in health care. This study challenges dominant ideology that AAs are unwilling to participate in research and offers solutions to promote research inclusive of their perceptions. Therefore, researchers need to design research with inclusiveness and transparency that openly displays how research will impact future generations.

‘An Extremely Mild Form of Slavery … of the Worst Sort’: American Perceptions of Slavery in the Sulu Sultanate, 1899–1904

ABSTRACT This chapter discusses the so-called Good Treatment Thesis in relation to slavery in the Sulu Sultanate, southern Philippines, during the first years of the American colonial period from 1899. Up until 1902, virtually all official assessments of Sulu slavery emphasized its mild and benign character, but the perception changed abruptly in the middle of 1902. This was because of greater American understanding of Sulu society, including non-elite perspectives; the increased push for economic and social reform in the southern Philippines after the end of the Philippine–American War; and the formal abolition of slavery in the Philippines by the United States Congress in July 1902.

COVID-19 비대면 교육과정 운영에 관한 교사들의 인식과 경험

This qualitative study examined American teachers' experiences and perceptions of teaching virtual classes during the Covid-19 pandemic period. Data was collected through individual phone interviews with 2 kindergarten teachers and 2 second grade teachers at VN Elementary School in the M school district which is located in the Midwest of the United States. The M district had a radical increase in COVID cases during March of 2020 so that all of the schools in the area were closed down. The school district had all the schools go with virtual learning through the end of the school year. According to the results, the shift to the virtual learning was made in an efficient way. The school district sent Chromebooks to all the students and teachers redesigned the curriculum which would be more suitable for the virtual learning environment. This neat process was possible because the students already used Chromebooks in their classrooms and teachers already practiced their own autonomy in choosing curriculum topics and methods. Based on these findings, the researcher made some suggestions for online education in South Korea.

Black and Desi: Indian American Perceptions of Kamala Harris

ABSTRACT How do voters evaluate descriptive representatives who vary in prototypicality? Specifically, how do Indian American voters evaluate Black women candidates who are also Indian American, or Indian American women candidates who are also Black? Using the case of Kamala Harris, we present findings from an original survey experiment of over 1,000 Indian Americans collected just prior to the 2020 election. We examine the power of shared identity cues for Indian American voters, who represent a growing political bloc of Asian American voters. We find that relative to being framed as Indian alone, Indian American respondents are less likely to support the Biden-Harris ticket when Harris is framed as Black and Indian American. This is true for Indian Americans who believe that Indian Americans have something in common. This study extends our knowledge of Black women in politics, Indian American politics, Asian American politics, and voter evaluations of mixed-race descriptive representatives.

Public Opinion in a Pandemic: Four Surveys Conducted with Americans throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

The UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (PIE Center) conducted a series of national public opinion surveys to examine the perceptions of Americans related to COVID-19. The PIE Center conducted four surveys with ~1,500 Americans per survey from mid-March 2020 to January 2021. The surveys sought to understand Americans’ perceptions of a range of topics including health and communication concerns, vaccination perceptions and acceptance, mask understanding and willingness, and compound disasters and stress. Presentations in this panel highlight key areas of research from this survey series and share how communicators can use this research to craft campaigns to effectively reach Americans during COVID-19 and future public health crises.