Debate In Washington Research Articles

A Terminological History of the Acadian Tragedy

ABSTRACT In his book A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), historian John Mack Faragher explains that the 1755–63 Acadian deportation can be termed “ethnic cleansing,” following contemporary United Nations and scholarly usage of the expression. In this paper, instead of addressing the terms of contemporary UN or scholarship, as Faragher does, to see which terms can be used for the Acadian tragedy, I provide a terminological history of the Acadian tragedy. This terminological history studies the terms used for the Acadian tragedy since the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century and shows how they recur in the mid-twentieth century discussions on genocide. First, I investigate Edmund Burke’s treatment of the Acadian tragedy seen as resulting from acts of destroying, rooting out, and extirpating, and the Abbot Raynal using terms for the tragedy such as embarking, transporting, driving away (later deporting), destroying, perishing, depopulating, and, indirectly, crime against humanity. I also focus on the nineteenth-century account of the Acadian tragedy by Catherine Reed Williams, who expanded Raynal with notions of barbarity, banishment, expulsion, extermination, and moral shock, and on others after her who brought terms for Acadians such as annihilation, atrocity, evacuation, and clearing. Second, I highlight Acadian memory in the 1950s genocide debate in Washington (DC) and how the terminological history of the Acadian tragedy appears in a document Raphael Lemkin had on Acadians. I also explain how Lemkin, unknowingly or not, rearticulated in publications and texts and found in his research the terms already used for Acadians as he addressed his genocide concept.

Commentary: Ukrainian Domestic and U.S. Foreign Affairs— Regarding a 2021 Washington Debate and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

Commentary: Ukrainian Domestic and U.S. Foreign Affairs— Regarding a 2021 Washington Debate and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS IN A DEEP SOUTH CITY

AbstractIn 2010, the Alabama GOP took control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The next year, in a sharply partisan vote, the legislature passed, and Governor Robert Bentley (R) signed into law, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, also known as House Bill 56, the harshest immigration law in the country. This punitive state law was the impetus for Black elites in Birmingham to frame the immigration debate as a matter of civil rights and thus to see the issue in a new light. When Alabama Republicans moved to the Right on immigration, Black leaders in Birmingham moved Left. In this study, backed up by an event analysis of local newspapers, an analysis of interviews with members of the Black elite in Birmingham in 2013, who were previously interviewed in 2007, helps to substantiate this claim. In the summer of 2007, against the backdrop of an immigration debate in Washington, our Black elite study participants largely told us they had no stake in immigration. By 2013, many were willing to fight for immigrant rights at the highest level.

Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration by Linda C. Noel (review)

Reviewed by: Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration by Linda C. Noel Miguel A. Levario Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration. By Linda C. Noel. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Pp. 264. Notes, bibliography, index) Linda Noel’s Debating American Identity is a comparative study that brings to light the fluid and highly complex strategies of political and cultural identity formation in New Mexico and Arizona during the first third of the twentieth century. Noel focuses on four national immigration debates of exclusion, assimilation, pluralism, and marginalization that erupted after the United States’ expansionist wars of the nineteenth century. National political leaders and anti-immigration groups voiced their reluctance in admitting New Mexico and Arizona into statehood due to their ethnic Mexican and American Indian populations and cultural differences. People of Mexican descent and their mixed heritage disrupted the nativist concept of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon citizenry unified through the English language and customs. As Noel points out, New Mexico and Arizona’s political and social elite formulated differing strategies, pluralism and marginalization respectively, in seeking statehood. The evolving nature of their political strategies and cultural identities is outlined in three parts that follow a trajectory of accommodation and assimilation as political, economic, and social landscapes shifted in the early decades of the twentieth century. New Mexicans and Arizonians were concerned that their territorial status would lump them with the island territories acquired after the Spanish-American War and delay their admittance into statehood since exclusionists adamantly wanted to preserve national homogeneity and unity. The principal strategies of exclusion and assimilation were argued at the national level forcing the former Mexican territories to adapt or risk prolonging their territorial status. New Mexico’s political elite adopted a pluralistic strategy of inclusion that would demonstrate the better [End Page 331] qualities of Americanism, such as European ancestry and class, while allowing New Mexicans to preserve key cultural qualities, such as the Spanish language. On the other hand, Arizona adopted a marginalization approach that reflected the political and economic base dominated by Anglo transplants into the territory. Debating American Identity effectively contrasts the political strategies by Arizona and New Mexico. The political, economic, and social context of each territory yielded to the differing approaches of pluralism by New Mexico and marginalization by Arizona. New Mexico had a bigger and much more politically active Hispano population that was economically versatile. The conflation of middle-class status and an emphasis on Spanish ancestry projected an acceptable image of prosperity and modernity sufficient for statehood. In contrast, Arizona did not house a large Mexican population and Anglos almost exclusively dominated its territorial politics. Marginalization served as a more effective approach towards statehood. In other words, an effectively controlled and marginalized Mexican community coincided with national ideas of Anglo-Saxon homogeneity and unity. Noel effectively portrays the differing political strategies by New Mexico and Arizona seeking statehood. On the other hand, a closer review of the political debate in Washington could shed light on the effectiveness of the differing strategies. Noel does offer some insight to the consequences of marginalization and pluralism after 1912, but it should be understood that these concepts of identity and culture are highly politicized. Nevertheless, Noel offers a keen analysis of demographic change in both states in the 1920s and 1930s and its effect on the ideas of Spanish heritage and class difference. Overall, Noel tackles an incredibly difficult and complex history with great nuance and clarity. Defining American Identity contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion of the fluidity and potency of political and cultural identity. Readers are privy to a better understanding of the heterogeneity of the American Southwest by reviewing New Mexico and Arizona’s respective political strategies to obtain statehood and their approach to identity formation. Defining American Identity makes a significant contribution to the studies of identity, race, southwestern history, and Mexican American history. Miguel A. Levario Texas Tech University Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

LTC-Vital Medicaid Is on the Bargaining Table

LTC-Vital Medicaid Is on the Bargaining Table

Education Entrepreneurs on the Potomac

Some 900 bankers, entrepreneurs, and policy experts crowded into an Education Innovation Forum in late January to hear U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the director of the White House National Economic Council, the White House chief technology officer, and other speakers talk about revolutionizing education and reimaging learning. As part of the event, 175 capitalists, corporate investors, and foundation officers heard presentations from 19 investment-ready start-up companies--such as Better Lesson LLC, School Town, and Drop the Chalk--during a venture fair designed to drive investment dollars into innovative solutions, where talk turned to deal flow and innovation ecosystems. event was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. But it wasn't standard conference. Following on the heels of President Obama's State of the Union address, in which he told Congress that The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation, the event represented a very different role for the federal government in promoting school improvement and reflected the Obama Administration's commitment to finding new strategies for leveraging change in the nation's schools. A New Strategy When the U.S. Department of Education opened its doors in 1980, Washington's primary role in public was to send federal aid to states and school systems. Organizations that represented teachers, school boards, and other stakeholders played the leading roles in the Washington debate. But by 1990, that began to change when President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander seized on entrepreneur Chris Whittle's idea to establish a New American School Development Corporation to fund a competition for new school models. Clinton Administration championed the emerging charter school movement. And by the late 1990s, a new, entrepreneurial wave of school reform was gathering momentum, drawing on both major strands of school reform that had emerged over the previous decade: a commitment to school accountability and the rise of school choice and charters. movement was led by a new generation of socially conscious entrepreneurs drawn to public by the opportunity to help the nation's many disadvantaged students. Freed from school bureaucracies and union contracts by charter school laws and committed to the campaign for greater accountability in education, they sought to create a new, performance-driven brand of public schooling. A key early leader was John Doerr, a partner in a prominent Silicon Valley capital firm and an investor in Netscape, Amazon, and later Google. In 1998, Doerr, Brook Byers, and Kim Smith, a Stanford business school student, created the NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco to apply the principles of capital investing to reform. Financed by such Silicon Valley luminaries as Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and then by a new generation of foundations--the Walton Family Foundation (WalMart), the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund (The Gap), the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (SunAmerica), and, of course, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Microsoft)--NewSchools helped launch New Leaders for New Schools, Teach-scape, New Teacher Project, Academy for Urban School Leadership, Wireless Generation, and a string of high-profile charter school networks such as Uncommon Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and KIPP. Blending Two Agendas Obama Administration has sought to both draw on and promote this entrepreneurial wing of school reform. In a video link to hundreds of entrepreneurs gathered at the NewSchools annual conference in California in 2009, Duncan pledged to bring together your ideas with our dollars. And he followed through. …

The New Détente in the Taiwan Strait and Its Impact on Taiwan’s Security and Future

At first glance, the current detente between Beijing and Taipei has been a welcome development for all parties involved in the security of the Taiwan Strait: Taiwan, China, and the United States. However, this is an armed detente in which security issues have yet to be addressed. While accelerated economic integration is allowing China to exert increasing influence over Taiwan, the threat of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has continued to intensify unabated. Taiwan’s defence effort has been stagnating in spite of the recent US package announcement, and Taiwan’s will to fight depends more and more directly upon the US commitment to Taiwan’s security. This commitment has remained strong. But the PLA’s rapid modernisation drive, coupled with China’s growing influence over Taiwan, its politicians, its business people, and its society at large, have triggered a new debate in Washington about both the sustainability of the US security commitment, enshrined in the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), and its very raison d’etre. As a result, more questions remain unanswered.

Introduction

Introduction

Lessons from the New Deal: Did the New Deal Prolong Or Worsen the Great Depression?

Since the current recession began in December 2007, New Deal legislation and its effectiveness have been at the center of a lively debate in Washington. This paper emphasizes some key facts about two kinds of policy that were important during the Great Depression and have since become the focus of criticism by new New Deal critics: (1) regulatory and labor relations legislation, and (2) government spending and taxation. We argue that initiatives in these policy areas probably did not slow economic growth or worsen the unemployment problem from 1933 to 1939, as claimed by a number of economists in academic papers, in the popular press, and elsewhere. To substantiate our case, we cite some important economic benefits of New Deal–era laws in the two controversial policy areas noted above. In fact, we suggest that the New Deal provided effective medicine for the Depression, though fiscal policy was not sufficiently countercyclical to conquer mass unemployment and prevent the recession of 1937–38; 1933’s National Industrial Recovery Act was badly flawed and poorly administered, and the help provided by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 came too late to have a big effect on the recovery.

Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon

CONTENTIOUS AS the current debate over Iraq is, all sides seem to make the crucial assumption that to succeed there the United States must fight the Vietnam War again-but this time the right way. The Bush administration is relying on an updated playbook from the Nixon administration. Pro-war commentators argue that Washington should switch to a defensive approach to counterinsurgency, which they feel might have worked wonders a generation ago. According to the antiwar movement, the struggle is already over, because, as it did in Vietnam, Washington has lost hearts and minds in Iraq, and so the United States should withdraw. But if the debate in Washington is Vietnam redux, the in Iraq is not. The current struggle is not a Maoist people's war of national liberation; it is a communal civil with very different dynamics. Although it is being fought at low intensity for now, it could easily escalate if Americans and Iraqis make the wrong choices. Unfortunately, many of the policies dominating the debate are ill adapted to the being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the

The W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington Debate: Effects upon African American Roles in Engineering and Engineering Technology

The messages of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois could not have been more diverse. The philosophical rivalry between Washington and DuBois has deep historical roots. To be on the same side fighting for the same purpose, progress, and uplifting of the Black race, these two Black intellectuals harbored radically divergent views on how to assist African Americans to free themselves from their often subhuman conditions. Both men were aware that technological advancement was of foremost importance to the advancement of African Americans. Washington’s (1901) Up From Slavery and DuBois’ (1903) The Souls of Black Folks were immediately hailed as classic commentary due to their efforts to address the then “Negro” problem in America. There were a number of Black Americans who made a valiant effort to mitigate poverty, illiteracy, racial discrimination, high mortality rates, and other desolate conditions that plagued many African Americans, particularly at the turn of the century. However, due to their influential appeal among certain constituencies, both Washington and DuBois garnered ample attention from many segments of the American intelligence, many of which were European in ethnic origin. Thus, acknowledgment from the White power structure (this was particularly true in the case of Washington) provided both men a platform to promote their message.

The President, the Press, and the War‐Making Power: An Analysis of Media Coverage Prior to the Persian Gulf War

This study examines media coverage of war powers for a five‐month period before the Persian Gulf War. Previous research has shown that the range of foreign policy debate reported in the media is a function of the range of debate in Washington, DC. Based on an analysis of ABC News, the New York Times, and presidential news conferences, the authors find that reporting on war powers–and in particular, the perspective that congressional authorization is required prior to the use of military force–is linked to the dynamics of institutional debate in Washington. In the midst of a massive military buildup wherein the prospect of conflict with Iraq was a distinct possibility, the issue of war powers was virtually ignored by media sources until it became a source of conflict between Congress and the Bush administration. The authors argue that the lack of independent reporting on war powers works to the advantage of the executive by diminishing the extent to which a constitutional constraint on its behavior will be subject to public debate.

Gore, Bush Aides in Friendly Tussle

There are substantive differences between George W. Bush and Al Gore Jr. on science and technology policy, standard-bearers for the two candidates said during a Washington debate last week. But the genial 90-minute joust revealed a lot of similarities, too. (See page 262 for the candidates' own responses to questions posed by Science.)

Facing off on Social Policy: Can the Right and Left Find Middle Ground?

Many believe that the country's shift to conservatism, which gained considerable media and political attention with the elections of 1994, has not only transformed the terms of the social policy debate in Washington but forced progressives to entertain new ideas. Rather than facilitating a process that identifies and exploits common ground between the two positions, however, this shift has led to discourse mired in ideology, rhetoric, and political stalemates-a luxury neither conservatives nor progressives can afford given the complexity of current issues and legislation. This article examines the conservative roots of the new pragmatism in social policy debates, provides a progressive critique of its assumptions, and poses issues for both progressives and conservatives to address in the pursuit of developing more effective and responsive social policies.

The ethical neutrality of prospective payments: justice issues.

The U.S. healthcare system has been subject to unprecedented scrutiny over the past three years; one of the results of this scrutiny has been recognition of the serious problems that exist in both healthcare delivery and reimbursement mechanisms. While the verbal debate in Washington has essentially ceased, within the healthcare community a historic shift has taken place in the way healthcare reimbursement is structured: increasingly, traditional fee-for-service reimbursement methods are being replaced with capitation reimbursement methods. While this phenomenon originated on the West Coast, it has spread to all geographic sectors of the United States in varying degrees and can be expected to dominate the funding patterns of healthcare over the next decade.