Future Of America Research Articles

At the Base of the Giant's Throat: The Past and Future of America's Great Dams

At the Base of the Giant's Throat: The Past and Future of America's Great Dams

Review of “The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession”

Review of “The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession”

Americans misperceive the frequency and format of political debate

Disagreement over divergent viewpoints seems like an ever-present feature of American life—but how common is debate and with whom do debates most often occur? In the present research, we theorize that the landscape of debate is distorted by social media and the salience of negativity present in high-profile spats. To understand the true landscape of debate, we conducted three studies (N = 2985) across online and lab samples. In contrast to the high-profile nature of negative debates with strangers, we found that people most commonly debate close contacts, namely family members and good friends. In addition, they often report feeling positive after engaging in debate. We then directly measured misperceptions regarding debate in a representative sample of Americans (N = 1991). We found that Americans systematically overestimated how often others engage in debate. This overestimation extended across debate partners (family members, good friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and strangers) and contexts (in-person and online; p’s < 0.001, d’s > 0.98), most strongly overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online. This misprediction may be psychologically costly: overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online significantly predicted greater hopelessness in the future of America. Together, our findings suggest that Americans may experience a false reality about the landscape of debate which can unnecessarily undermine their hope about the future.

At the Base of the Giant's Throat: The Past and Future of America's Great Dams

At the Base of the Giant's Throat: The Past and Future of America's Great Dams

The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke (review)

The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke (review)

Global Warming, Home Runs, and the Future of America’s Pastime

Abstract Home runs in baseball—fair balls hit out of the field of play—have risen since 1980, driving strategic shifts in gameplay. Myriad factors likely account for these trends, with some speculating that global warming has contributed via a reduction in ballpark air density. Here we use observations from 100,000 Major League Baseball games and 240,000 individual batted balls to show that higher temperatures substantially increase home runs. We isolate human-caused warming with climate models, finding that &gt;500 home runs since 2010 are attributable to historical warming. Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming. Adaptations such as building domes on stadiums or shifting day games to night games reduce temperature’s effects on America’s pastime. Our results highlight the myriad ways that a warmer planet will restructure our lives, livelihoods, and recreation, some quantifiable and easily adapted to, as shown here, many others, not.

Smoky Mountain Air: Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music (mini-series)—“E3: Sacred and Spiritual Music in the Mountains”

“It ain't a thing,” I said to Matt Sparks as he approached me to write this review of Episode 3 of the Smoky Mountain Air podcast mini-series Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music. And truly, it was an enjoyable fifty-nine minutes. Since I am a non-American, it didn't come naturally to me to review a podcast from such a distant environment. Listening to the episode, at times, I felt as if I were looking into another world—but throughout my digital visit to the Appalachian podcast-scape, my stay was educational, interesting, and, most importantly, enjoyable. If you are looking for an hour of singing, spirituality, and snack-sized tidbits of knowledge about music and America, set your sights on this mini-series.Set up as a review of the music of the Black churches of Appalachia, the podcast features an array of distinguished professors as they converse about the history and future of America. Standing out is Dr. Kathy Bullock, who accompanies Episode 3 with beautiful singing and piano playing. Joining her are the Rev. Dr. Virgil Wood, a longtime church leader, educator, and civil rights activist, and the hosts: Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson. These four participants put great effort into almost an hour of discourse centered on “sacred and spiritual music.”The interaction of the guests on the show evokes a strong sense of community. They share common experiences of growing up in America and a deep love of music. Throughout the episode, Bullock bursts into songs and hymns glorifying spirituality, perseverance, and the power to overcome hardship. The grace with which the podcast guests traverse difficult subject matter, including a shared history of racial struggle, is to be admired.The distinguished guests are a remarkable beacon of excellence in America. Each participant serves as an example that, despite the hardships of racial as well as economic issues, America manages to produce individuals of extraordinary merit and achievements. In the first part of the podcast, Bullock explains the difference between spiritual music and gospel music. Her explanation is succinct as well as encompassing, pointing out that spiritual music was associated with the enslaved of America, while gospel music is influenced by blues and jazz and, in her words, is “today's spiritual.” Throughout the podcast, there are pauses to enjoy old-timey spiritual music. These rare and authentic recordings carry a tradition of freedom, salvation, and spirituality, as if carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.The podcast is a pleasant hour of discussion riddled with anecdotes about the history of spiritual music in America, and of course, some good music from a distant, yet still controversial past. As Bullock states in the introduction: “If you're singing together, you can't be arguing.”

From Dong Dang to Da Nang: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Thirty Years War for Asia

From Dong Dang to Da Nang: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Thirty Years War for Asia

Stance and dialogicity in Barack Obama and George W. Bush's farewell addresses to the nation: Effectivity, epistemicity and (contrastive) negation

The aim of this article is to compare choices in epistemic and effective stance markers and negation as a marker of stance in the farewell addresses by US presidents Obama and Bush. The discussion focuses on how these choices reveal specific stance-taking acts of positioning towards topics and alignment/disalignment with communities of speakers and how they contribute to construing two different idiosyncratic interactional or dialogic stance styles. The analysis reveals that Obama's interactional stance style can be argued to be highly dialogic and relies on a combination of stance markers, among which directivity and contrastive negation stand out, since they are absent in Bush. Directivity is used to engage directly with his audience and persuade them to take specific courses of action regarding the future of America, while contrastive negation is used to write in different voices in his speech, creating complex relations of (dis)alignment with communities of speakers. Bush's interactional stance style relies more on choices which involve the expression of epistemic certainty and deontic modality, as a means of legitimizing a positioning towards America in which the safeguard of national security is his major concern.

Negotiating Science and Religion in America: Past, Present, and Future

Negotiating Science and Religion in America: Past, Present, and Future

The Racialization of International Trade

Despite their less vulnerable economic status, white individuals' attitudes toward overseas trade in the United States may have become more protectionist than those of economically disadvantaged minorities. We present results from five different studies examining two different ways in which trade may have become racialized. First, we examine the extent to which a person's racial identity is associated with levels of trade support. Second, we examine whether the predominant racial identity of a potential trading‐partner country influences people's willingness to trade with that country. Using various surveys and multiple survey experiments conducted over the past 12 years, we find that white individuals have become less supportive of trade than minorities and that whites are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries. We suggest that minority support for trade is due to four well‐documented differences in the psychological predispositions of whites and minorities in the United States. Minorities have lower levels of racial prejudice, are lower in social dominance, and express less nationalism than whites. At the same time, there is evidence of rising ingroup racial consciousness among whites. Each of these characteristics has been independently linked to trade support in a direction encouraging greater support for trade among minorities. As the United States grows ever closer to becoming a “majority minority” nation, the racialization of trade attitudes may stimulate shifts in the likely future of America's trade relationships.

The Racialization of International Trade

Despite their less vulnerable economic status, white individuals’ attitudes toward overseas trade in the U.S. may have become more protectionist than those of economically disadvantaged minorities. We present results from five different studies examining two different ways in which trade may have become racialized. First, we examine the extent to which a person’s racial identity is associated with levels of trade support. Second, we examine whether the predominant racial identity of a potential trading partner country influences people’s willingness to trade with that country. Using various surveys and multiple survey-experiments conducted over the past twelve years, we find that white individuals have become less supportive of trade than minorities, and that whites are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries. We suggest that minority support for trade is due to four well-documented differences in the psychological predispositions of whites and minorities in the United States. Minorities have lower levels of racial prejudice, are lower in social dominance, and express less nationalism than whites. At the same time, there is evidence of rising ingroup racial consciousness among whites. Each of these characteristics has been independently linked to trade support in a direction encouraging greater support for trade among minorities. As the U.S. grows ever closer to becoming a “majority minority” nation, the racialization of trade attitudes may stimulate shifts in the likely future of America’s trade relationships.

Sino-American Competition and the Future of America’s European Strategy

Competition with China has become the main lens through which the United States looks at the world. How will this affect US strategy in Europe? First, Washington’s increased focus on China leaves fewer US resources available to influence security developments in and around Europe. This compels US policy-makers to seek ways to preserve a favorable regional balance in Europe that require less of the United States. Second, Sino-American competition is leading Washington to view its transatlantic relationships in terms of how they affect its position relative to China. As the Euro-Atlantic area becomes less central to US grand strategy, global – and particularly China-focused – considerations will play an increasingly important role in the context of the transatlantic relationship.

Can America Truly Turn Socialist?

Few believe old-fashioned socialism can be a reality in the U.S. The author analyzes two new moderately radical treatises of what socialism can really look like in America. One is an important reading of John Maynard Keynes’ thinking. Is this the future of America?

The American Nightmare:America’s Future as a Wasteland in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007) An Ecocritical Study

Cormac McCarthy (1933) is a contemporary American novelist whose novels often bear violent and relentless visions about mysterious parts of humanity. Most of his novels delineate the relationship of man to nature and environment; and how far both affect man negatively. He is often preoccupied with uncovering the hidden nature of the universe. He believes that human beings are always aware of the influence of nature on their lives in the form of air, food and drink. But what if human beings lose good provisions of nature? What if nature and environment overturn against man? This paper discusses Cormac McCarthy’s awesome future vision of America as a wasteland in his novel, The Road (2007) in terms of the theory of ecocriticism. McCarthy’s The Road is a dull, terrifying story about the future of America. It tells the story of a father and his son’s journey across a ruined landscape. Some unknown disaster has hit the world and caused destruction and environmental pollution everywhere. All people have died except some remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs. The sky is always covered by dust and toxic particles. The weather is very cold and damp. Aspects of civilization have collapsed; the beauty of the natural world has disappeared; and the few human survivors roam the land in daily search for food. The unnamed father and son live a real nightmare through setting like a wasteland.

Attendance trends threaten future operations of America’s state park systems

This research examines how the operating expenditures of America's state park systems will be affected by a continued growth in attendance consistent with observed trends as well as potential climate futures. We construct a longitudinal panel dataset (1984-2017) describing the operations and characteristics of all 50 state park systems. These data are analyzed with a time-varying stochastic frontier model. Estimates from the model are used to forecast operating expenditures to midcentury under four different scenarios. The first scenario assumes annual attendance within each state park system will continue to grow (or decline) at the same average annual rate that it has over the period of observation. The subsequent scenarios assume statewide annual mean temperatures will increase following the RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 greenhouse gas emissions trajectories. Operating expenditures under a scenario where annual growth in attendance stays consistent with observed trends are forecasted to increase 756% by midcentury; this is an order of magnitude larger than projected expenditures under any of the climate scenarios. The future climate change scenarios yielded increases in operating expenditures between 25% (RCP2.6) and 61% (RCP8.5) by 2050. Attendance is the single largest factor affecting the operations of America's state park systems, dwarfing the influence of climate change, which is significant and nontrivial. The future of America's state park systems will depend upon increased support from state legislatures, as well as management actions that generate funds for the maintenance of existing infrastructure and facilities, and the provisioning of services.

Introduction: Articulating Race and Utopia

Introduction: Articulating Race and Utopia

“‘The Mighty Meaning of the Scene’” Feminine Landscapes and the Future of America in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

Like many of her contemporaries, Margaret Fuller had great hopes for the West. The Western lands, open for America’s future, held the promise of what America could become. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller sketches what she hopes America will become. Using the landscape aesthetics of her age, such as the work of Andrew Jackson Downing and the Hudson River School of landscape painting, Fuller describes the ideal landscape as one that is more feminine and nurturing, one in which humankind lives in harmony with nature. Fuller’s landscape descriptions both point to a better future for America and critique the values of her contemporaries. Fuller contrasts America’s more male vision of conquest of the land with her feminine ideal of harmony with nature—a cultivated garden—to show what America’s future should be, as it builds westward.

Wounds and Words: The Traumatic Memory in Omar El Akkad’s Dystopian Novel

This paper discusses the literary portraying of personal trauma in Omar El Akkad’s dystopian novel American War. The purpose of this research is twofold:&amp;nbsp; (1) identify the way in which the traumatic memory of war victims is transmitted from the first generation to next generation and (2) understand how the narrator constructs his discourse about the future of America and the world. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. The researcher uses Christa Schönfelder’s theory on postmodern trauma texts. This research shows that the main narrator’s choice to positioning Sarat as a war victim, not a perpetrator of biological genocide, makes the narrative of Sarat’s traumatic memory political. It exposes that the first generation’s desire for personal narration becomes unnaratable, and that there is second/third generation’s urge for a future beyond trauma. The conclusion proves that American War contains the quest for stability out of disruptive experiences, constituting a crucial aspect of the need for narrative in the face of a dystopian future.

Let them cook: Overcoming regulatory hurdles to the growth of local food micro-ventures

From local community centers, to the halls of Congress, the future of America’s food policy is taking center stage. Increases in diet-related health issues, growing populist attitudes about hyperlocal economies, and large private sector investments into new and novel food-related businesses have made the issue of “how Americans eat” almost as important as “what Americans eat.” Many of the most important decisions about the future of America’s food systems are not being made at the federal or state level, but by local city councils and boards of supervisors. This article offers concrete policy recommendations that local leaders can utilize to grow local food economies that create jobs and more vibrant local communities.