Shaping America Research Articles

How many nuclear weapons does Russia have? The size and characteristics of the Russian nuclear stockpile

Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, backed by frequent nuclear threats, has focused attention on the scope of Russia’s nuclear capabilities. The short assessments the United States Government provides are inadequate. Because of the very limited U.S. government information on the scope of Russia’s nuclear capabilities, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates are cited globally as if authoritative and definitive; they clearly are not. The numerous FAS numbers are largely undocumented and little documentation apparently exists to support their data. It is possible that the Russian nuclear force may be in the size range that the FAS estimates but it is also possible that it is twice as large or even larger. The Russian nuclear advantage may already be several to one and it is growing. The Russian advantage is particularly notable in non-strategic nuclear weapons. An accurate understanding of Russia’s nuclear capability is a critical element in shaping America’s nuclear deterrence requirements.

SHAPING AMERICA'S PERCEPTION OF MUSLIMS: The Transnational Approach to Globalization’s Role in Popular Culture

SHAPING AMERICA'S PERCEPTION OF MUSLIMS: The Transnational Approach to Globalization’s Role in Popular Culture

The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger by Tim Kane

In 1951, Handlin began his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Uprooted, by centering the role of immigration in the history of the United States: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”1 Kane now makes an equally bold claim in The Immigrant Superpower, contending that the greatness and prosperity characterizing the American past and present are the products of immigration more than of any other factors.The subtitle of Kane’s volume was chosen with far more than alliteration in mind. In Kane’s view, newcomers’ “brawn” yielded economic dividends derived from their labor. Their “bravery” translated into patriotism and contributed to the military strength and security of the United States, and their “brains” fueled the innovation that has made the United States a model for every nation aspiring to world leadership.Kane’s book is a history but also unabashedly a work of advocacy. Conservative politically, Kane does not hesitate to criticize those Republicans, including Donald Trump, who push for a restrictive approach to immigration. Kane views immigration as an essential ingredient in preserving this country’s dominant place in the world order. He views immigration as both “central to American identity” and a “force multiplier,” essential to the grand strategy that today makes the United States “a dominant superpower,” capable of fending off foreign threats such as a “technologically surging China” (7, 10). Although seasoned with colorful anecdotes, Kane’s evidence is grounded in a carefully constructed quantitative analysis of economic data. What emerges is a portrait of how immigrants have enriched the United States with a “demographic vibrancy” expressed in their physical strength and vitality, their commitment to serving their country patriotically in the military, and the brainpower they contributed to their adopted home, evidenced by the number of patents acquired, companies started, and prestigious awards won in science and medicine (11).According to Kane, immigration advocacy has also proven to be the key to political success for American presidents. He counts Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and George W. Bush as successful presidents because they advocated opening America’s doors to the foreign-born, while rejecting the criticisms of nativists. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency is clearly not among Kane’s favorites. Kane reminds readers of President Roosevelt’s “shameful turning away of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution” (66). In contrast, he praises President Truman who “encouraged the country to ‘fulfill our responsibilities to these suffering and homeless refugees of all faiths’” (90).Kane finds immigration advantageous at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels of analysis. His microeconomic perspective on immigration suggests that the local impact of immigration on the job market is mixed and not nearly as disruptive to less privileged Americans as some critics, such as Borjas, have sometimes claimed.2 He finds the macroeconomic effect of immigration even more positive because in an open economy immigration contributes to efficiency and productivity.Kane also addresses critics who charge that newcomers from abroad pose a threat to the culture of the American people. Nativists see in the nation’s increasing cultural diversity a threat best neutralized by exclusion. Kane, however, sees cultural diversity as an American strength that was present from the earliest days of the country’s history. He deplores the contemporary conflating of immigration and racial-identity politics, focusing instead upon “the common unity of ideas embodied in [the United States’] founding documents,” such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (13).At times, Kane’s pro-immigration argument seems unrelentingly positive. His focus on the long-term benefits of immigration causes him to pay scant attention to its short-term burdens on local communities. Therefore, he does not adequately address immigration reform from the perspective of redistributing the immediate costs of settling newcomers into homes, jobs, and schools.Kane’s abundant evidence in support of immigration’s importance in shaping America’s strength and prosperity throughout its history fuels a persuasive argument that will engage scholars in think tanks and classrooms. It will also stoke the fire of an already heated contemporary debate about current policies.

The Danish Gevær M/1889: A Developmental History of the Krag–Jørgensen Rifle in Denmark

The Krag–Jørgensen rifle is perhaps best known in the Anglosphere for the important role it played in shaping America’s modern military, ushering the country into the era of smokeless powder and magazine-fed, repeating firearms at the end of the 19th century. Although several books have been written on the American Krag–Jørgensen models, very little has been written in English on their Scandinavian counterparts. The Krag–Jørgensen rifle, although developed in Norway, was first adopted in Denmark as the Gevær M/1889. The lack of reliable scholarship examining Scandinavian rifles of this period has given rise to a range of false narratives and misinformation connected with the early development of the rifle and its adoption by the Danish armed forces. This article seeks to address these issues head-on, providing a verifiable—if general—narrative of the early development of the weapon and its early trials and adoption.

The Work That Maps Do

Martin Brückner’s The Social Life of Maps will appeal to scholars from many disciplines—material studies and English literature (his home fields), geography, American studies, and, not least, the U.S. historical community. Maps have never been the preserve of geographers, certainly not in their making nor, as Brückner convincingly shows, in the various practices of public and popular “mappery.” One of the strengths of this book is that it re-affirms and deepens the connections of geography as an educational and imaginative practice with the power of the historical imagination in shaping America’s national identity, territorial reach, and, if only nascent in the period that Brückner considers, empire.

I'm Still Not Oprah!

Three times before, I have shared my recommendations on books I think every water professional should read (kind of like what Oprah Winfrey used to do). In this column, I want to share a fantastic book—The Source, by Martin Doyle. It is different from any other book I have read on water because it looks at rivers through a different lens. The subtitle of Doyle's book—How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers—provides an indication of how a professor of river science and policy might view the symbiotic relationship between rivers and society. What I liked most about The Source is Doyle's fresh context for understanding how our relationship with rivers evolved to where we are now. All too often, we view things as they currently are and assume they have always been that way. Doyle, on the other hand, explains that rivers have served many changing and positive purposes throughout America's history. In fact, in The Source, Doyle takes us back to the source of how America came to rely on rivers as the fundamental building block of our society and how this reliance has evolved to what it is today. While history is certainly part of Doyle's story, it only serves to set the stage for America's needs and goals during different eras. The actors in this story are the institutions that have influenced how rivers are used and viewed. Front and center is America's federated government—with all levels playing key roles during various times in our history—and the other is America's private sector industry. But rest assured, this is not a dull recounting of building governmental bureaucracy or private sector expansion. Instead, it is the story of how these public and private institutions worked and struggled together on the use of rivers for positive outcomes for society. Stop for a moment and think about America's leaders in the late 1700s and their views of the land and rivers. Back then, the state of rivers was raw, unharnessed, and natural, and the vastness of America was unknown and unexplored. From that time forward, rivers have been the key to the expansion of America and its strategic physical and economic advantages. The Source tells that story. As America moved west, rivers enabled private sector commerce, and the government played a role in defining how rivers would be used for interstate commerce. These were critical factors in shaping America's economy into a single economy rather than a collection of independent state economies. Along the way, different rules were needed in the West than in the East. The riparian water allocation system of the East was not viable in the West, where water was scarcer. As a result, the prior appropriations doctrine of the West—viewing water as a property right—was created to protect water owners and facilitate national goals. Economic systems have been created because of the importance of rivers to society. Doyle walks us through different periods of America's financial prosperity and decline and shows how, after each decline, America's financial power shifted from states, to local municipalities, to the federal government. While Doyle does not say this directly, it seems logical that today's attachment to the importance of locally owned and operated water and wastewater utilities stems from the economic downturn of the 1890s, after which cities became America's economic engine, municipal bonds were introduced to fuel the engine, and utilities were built. As America and its economic systems and institutions grew, the use of rivers also grew. And just as a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy is not as crisp as the original, the quality of rivers eroded. As a result, society has become concerned about America's environmental integrity, and the institutions have responded. Doyle discusses how present-day institutions, like the US Environmental Protection Agency, along with various environmental acts and laws, provide the framework and powers to clean rivers, make water safe to drink, protect endangered species, and so on. These shifts in focus reflect America's goals in the present, including the importance of remaking our rivers. The Source shows us how important rivers are to the people working on them. Doyle's narrative takes us on his personal journey as he traveled to the places he wrote about, and the reader gets to know the people he met. This in itself is a story worth telling. Doyle's views on America's rivers are clearly those of a scholar, but his passion for this scholarship comes, I believe, from his intimacy with rivers. As a paddler of boats and kayaks, Doyle cares that we protect the natural state of rivers—not just because of their beauty but because, as The Source outlines, rivers enable everything else we desire.

Beyond Aggregation: “The Wisdom of Crowds” Meets Dialogue in the Case Study of Shaping America’s Youth

The present interpretive case study examined how an interorganizational partnership facilitating five large-scale public dialogues on childhood obesity, held throughout the United States, carried out its commitment to engage nonexperts in solutions. Leaders of the Shaping America’s Youth collaboration, believed the wisdom of crowds is facilitated through discussion. Accordingly this study has implications for deliberative practice as it provides a heuristic for eliciting the voice of nonexperts. In particular we describe empirically grounded dialogic principles that underlay a successful participation process: voice, diversity, transparency, preparedness, and neutrality. Additionally, the study documents perceived outcomes linking dialogic process and product by identifying changes in the rules and resources available to the public in light of the problem, including local and state policy level changes, and strengthened relationships and credibility with the media and funders. Finally, the case challenges theoretical assumptions about the wisdom of crowds as simply an aggregate of individually held knowledge.

Book Review: America at the Crossroads: Explosive Trends Shaping America's Future and what you can do about it

Book Review: America at the Crossroads: Explosive Trends Shaping America's Future and what you can do about it

A Harvey Cox Reader ed. by Robert Ellsberg

Reviewed by: A Harvey Cox Reader ed. by Robert Ellsberg Mara Willard A Harvey Cox Reader. Edited by Robert Ellsberg. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016. 264pp. $30.00. Reverend Dr. Cox has led an amazing life by any of the measures that mean the most to him. To read The Harvey Cox Reader is to travel through key terrains of post-war American theology, sociology, and politics that Cox has inhabited. In this collection of largely occasional essays, Harvey Cox speaks in a conversational tone conditioned by curiosity in and warmth for the Christian tradition. “I love to preach and do so whenever I am invited, often in my own Baptist congregation here in Cambridge,” he says in the book’s introduction (xvii), perfectly preparing us for a companionable, distinctively American Christian guide through the signs of the late-modern times. The Reader opens with our author’s religious and intellectual autobiography. From his 1973 essay on the power of formation in a town “amply blessed with churches . . . More churches than filling stations, more churches than saloons, more churches than restaurants” (4), the collection proceeds roughly chronologically. Cox went on to war-crushed East Berlin, serving as a young American Baptist minister. There he connected strongly with his lifelong theological and political hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ministering on both sides of the wall, Cox sought to awaken Bonhoeffer’s vision for a “religionless Christianity.” Cox’s breakthrough book The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965) properly fills a significant portion of this collection, given its still-astonishing scope of readers. Cox became an almost overnight giant, shaping America’s thinking about religion and modernity. Written when he was just 35 years old, The Secular City is Cox’s explication of the power of Christianity to shape even ostensibly post-religious culture. He also proffers theological charges for how distinctively modern Christians might live out God’s commands for work in the world. Rowan Williams hailed this a “groundbreaking work,” among the “undoubted classics of the great upheaval in religious thinking that took place in the sixties.” [End Page 97] Yet reviewing the other essays that comprise the The Harvey Cox Reader, the singularity of Cox as a man of a passing historical epoch stands out more particularly than the acumen of any particular piece of writing. As a world-renouned Christian thinker, Cox became both theologically and politically aligned and personally friendly with other great progressive Christian leaders and thinkers. He lived in Peru with Gustavo Gutiérrez and walked for civil rights with Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington. As his academic career matured, Cox became intrigued by religious epiphenomena in their variety. In “Turning East” (on America Muslims, Zen Buddhists, and Sikhs) and “Fire from Heaven” (on American Pentecostalists), Cox walks his readers into religious worlds that are new to him. He is eager to share the beauty and possibilities that he discovers. Cox speaks from his open, confident, joyful alignment with the progressive strains of American Protestant Christianity. This “continued to constitute what theologians call the ‘master narrative’ that gives my life coherence,” he says. “They have stayed with me not just as ideas and values but as a cluster of deep and ineradicable affective traces: feelings of joy, terror, awe, history, and well-being” (242). Today, one senses the rarity of freedom from second-order estrangment, particularly among scholars of religion. Even the essays such as “The Future of our Faith,” and “Why I Am Still a Christian” that close the Reader have a conspicuously twenty-first century flavor. While Cox’s tone is always inviting, the reader cannot forget that she travels under the auspices of a man enthusiastically ordained and sustained by his religious community and professionally accustomed to Harvard students writing down his words. This is not a shortcoming of The Harvey Cox Reader so much as a reality of the authorial voice. At times, Cox reaches for more credit than his readers may want to grant him. For instance, when quoting from The Secular City, he states in retrospect that “in this paragraph I was actually proposing a new agenda for the next stage of theology, one...

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!: Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence

The Old Peace of Absalom, Absalom!:Interwar Faulkner and the Tradition of Nonviolence Caitlin Cawley (bio) Introduction William Faulkner's life was shaped by war. He lived through World War I and World War II, and despite being born thirty years after President Andrew Johnson signed Proclamation 157, "Declaring that Peace, Order, Tranquility and Civil Authority Now Exists in and Throughout the Whole of the United States of America," the Southerner wrote about the wrote about the uniquely American Civil War throughout his work. In 1950, Faulkner used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to address the question that had come to define humankind in the wake of atomic warfare: "When will I be blown up?" Twelve years later, as he lay dying in Byhalia, Mississippi, the United States was once again preparing for war, this time in Vietnam, a conflict which would lack the Manichean frames of reference shaping America's collective memory of the First and Second World Wars. That war would come to epitomize Jason Compson Sr.'s advice to his son Quentin in The Sound and the Fury: "[N]o battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools" (76). Faulkner created a body of work that, among many things, labors to subvert the conditions and illusions that support war and, in turn, underwrite the modern individual's terrorised state. And while scholars have attended to this labor for decades, there is little critical consensus over Faulkner's views on war and its antinomy, pacifism. Like many of his fellow modernists, Faulkner had a complicated relationship with pacifism that reflects the socio-political climate in the United States and Europe between WWI and WWII as well as the writer's personal history. [End Page 127] In 1918, the Mississippi native made a rather ignominious attempt to join the fight against the Central Powers. Inspired partly by the legacy of his great grandfather who served as an officer in the Civil War and partly by by his heartbreak over a beloved high-school sweetheart marrying another man, the twenty-year-old joined the Royal Air Force in Canada. He never saw combat, but Faulkner made a mountain out of his five months as a RAF cadet, posing for years as a combat veteran and fabricating an elaborate mythology around this posture. Donald Kartiganer sums up the paradoxes that characterize this layer of the Southerner's biography as Faulkner "honoring the combatants of that war through the flattery of imitation and yet also [importantly,] mocking the mythology that had attached itself to them … Faulkner's war consists of zany theatrics, gallant pratfalls: gestures so empty of serious military content that they become at once farcical and heroic" (632). Faulkner's ironic and critical bellicosity found its way into his interwar fiction as well. His writings from the period are replete with naive Southern characters who enthusiastically participate in the Civil War and First World War. And while Kartiganer insists that Faulkner's "doubleedged performance becomes the key to the wars he described in his fiction, wars that reflect, with increasing complexity, the characteristic Southern conflict of 'looking two ways'" (632), Faulkner's life and interwar fiction also register a broader transatlantic intellectual and political movement. By the 1930s, pacifism had gained significant ground on the left. However, Hitler's programme of remilitarization led many of the American writer's British contemporaries to question their campaigns for peace and disarmament. At the Labour Party Conference in 1935, the party leader, George Lansbury, decided to support rearmament despite his self-professed commitment to Christian pacifism (Briggs 314–5). Virginia and Leonard Woolf were in attendance at the conference, and like England's pacifist-leaning literati, the couple was divided on the decision. Virginia reflected on the conference in her diary, writing that her "sympathies" were with "non-resistance," and through figures like Antigone and mediums like her political pamphlets, she worked to advance a precedent for resisting perpetual warfare, culminating in her pacifist manifesto Three Guineas (1938) (Woolf 315). Leonard, on the other hand, who was closely involved in...

Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott

Reviewed by: Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era by Ellen C. Scott Courtney Baker Ellen C. Scott.Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015. 268pp. $29.95. In her book Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era, media scholar Ellen C. Scott provides a well-researched critical history of black repression in the American film industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The study is a welcome addition to important recent publications in African American television and film studies such as Sarah Torres’s Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton UP, 2003) and Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke UP, 2015). All of the projects provide a careful and thoroughgoing account of the visual media industry and its representations of black life. Scott’s book significantly advances our understanding of the conditions of film production by investigating the impact of censorship in the constitution of narratives and the framing of black bodies on screen. Cinema Civil Rights undertakes media studies as a material cultural studies project, referring readers to the cinematic objects while contextualizing and critiquing the material and social conditions for those objects’ construction. Scott’s work stands out among these other books for its study of mainstream Hollywood film—a genre that would seem not to provide as rich a terrain for the discussion of black representational politics. However, Scott’s canny readings reveal that an anxiety about black representation in the context of civil rights discourse in popular film has been, for more than one hundred years, a central and abiding organizing principle for studios and directors in the most powerful and longstanding film industry in the world. Scott’s analysis of “the structure of limitation” in the film industry during its Golden Age is rooted in an understanding of civil rights as a project of “equal citizenship” that compelled and confounded African Americans throughout the [End Page 289] twentieth century (1). By examining texts that document both repression and resistance, Scott exposes how censorship boards and industry complacency “ultimately failed to avoid the civil rights questions they repressed” (3). The first two chapters trace how some films resisted industry and state policies and codes that forbade, if not outright censored, cinematic suggestions of miscegenation and racial injustice. Chapter one focuses on self-regulation and censorship that Scott divides into five eras, each attached to three regulating boards—the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the Studio Relations Committee, and the Production Code Administration—and their changing leadership. Over the course of this period, extending from 1926 to 1961, Hollywood films struggled to remain topical—taking on such subjects as chain gangs, lynching, and interracial sex—while attempting at the same time not to offend Southern racist sentiment nor to foreground race—and in particular black-white relations—as sources of conflict and titillation. Analyzing works such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Imitation of Life (1934), Pinky (1949), The Burning Cross (1947), and several others in the context of correspondence between the regulating boards and studios as well as revisions to scripts and shooting drafts reveals a pattern of careful compromises that did not ban, but rather “muted and dampened” reference to black-white racial conflict and miscegenation (66). State standards were in many ways more restrictive and no less influential, “vitally shaping America’s system of film vetting” (67) as well as industry censorship-board standards. Scott’s concern in this chapter is on the local impact of censorship on spectatorship that, “through censored shots and banned scenes, worked to bend the racial trajectory of the cinema on important local American screens and in specific communities” (69). The chapter looks at the treatment of not only mainstream films, but also “foreign, B, and independent films” (107) by the censors in particular states—specifically, Ohio, Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia—at the height of their influence (1915 to 1952). While the selection of films and states discussed in this section appears...

Book Review: Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story

Book Review: Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story

Book Review: Kraut and Gerber, eds., Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story, by Caroline Merithew

Book Review: Kraut and Gerber, eds., Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story, by Caroline Merithew

Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising by Robert Schmuhl

Reviewed by: Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising by Robert Schmuhl Claire A. Culleton (bio) IRELAND’S EXILED CHILDREN: AMERICA AND THE EASTER RISING Robert Schmuhl, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 199xvii + pp. $29.95. The years leading up to 2016, and 2016 itself, saw the publication of dozens and dozens of critical, academic books focused on the events and history of the Easter Rising, its planners and fund-raisers, its sites, its martyrs, its legacies, and so forth, one hundred years later during this decade of centenaries. Notre Dame Professor Robert Schmuhl’s contribution, Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising, examines the American response to the Easter Rising as news of it made its way slowly across the Atlantic, referencing in his book’s title the line from the Proclamation that the Ireland the signatories were proclaiming was a vision of Ireland “supported by her exiled children in America” (15). He writes in his prologue, “To a large extent, the roots of the Rising grew in U.S. soil and … the American reaction proved critical to determining its consequences” (2) by shaping public opinion, especially after fury swept through America when fourteen rebel leaders were executed by a firing squad that May. Schmuhl focuses his book on four Americans who were crucial in shaping America’s, and especially Irish-America’s, response: John Devoy, Eamon de Valera, Joyce Kilmer, and Woodrow Wilson. He explains: For Devoy, a naturalized American living in New York, the Rising, which he helped to plan and to fund, was the culmination of a half-century struggle to free the place of his birth from British rule. The Rising established de Valera, who was born in New York, as an Irish leader, one who somehow escaped execution to launch a political and governmental career that spanned nearly six decades. … A journalist and poet, Kilmer was quick to put into words for American readers what the rebels had done. By contrast, Wilson did his best to avoid committing to a stand on an international and domestic situation loaded with what he viewed as political dynamite. (13) Schmuhl serves these four key figures well, except that Kilmer seems like the odd man out with no Irish or Irish-American background. The chapter on Kilmer’s importance to the Rising, and to the American response to it, is not entirely convincing, whereas the other three chapters are expertly argued, especially the opening chapter on Devoy and “his unbending commitment to ‘bloody sacrifice’” (19). The chapters on Wilson and de Valera are excellent and provide a wealth of fresh research. As Schmuhl explains early in his book, each chapter “uses an individual to tell the larger story of what happened in each phase: the preparation, the fighting, and the aftermath. Thus, each chapter is principally a biographical essay, combining personal [End Page 155] details and fitting them within the context of the Rising and the greater Irish-American connection” (12). This smartly structured book, then, explains the main figures and all of their connections: the author brings together a wealth of information on people readers would expect to find in a book on this topic—Roger Casement, Michael Collins, Thomas J. Clark, James Connolly, Joseph Mary Plunkett, John Quinn, Joseph McGarrity, and a host of Woodrow Wilson’s aides and chiefs of staff such as Joseph Patrick Tumulty, though Schmuhl notes that Wilson often preferred to keep his own counsel and “could never seem to disentangle himself from the Irish Question” (93): The American Irish were led to believe the president understood their viewpoint in seeking remedies to their problems and the larger resolution of Ireland’s future. In private, however, Wilson operated differently. What he said or did showed a deliberate resolve to keep at arm’s length almost every matter explicitly related to Irish-American interests. (89) In fact, Schmuhl argues that Wilson kept dodging the topic publicly and fulminated about the Irish Question privately. Though it was “an issue that demanded a definite policy stand, the president decided to do nothing” (117). Chapter 4 on de Valera is interesting but is full of repetition. On almost every third or...

Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story

Journal Article Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story Get access Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. xii, 208 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $28.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 3, December 2014, Page 906, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau597 Published: 01 December 2014

Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber, editors. Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story

Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber, editors. Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America's Immigration Story

Delivery of Appropriateness, Quality, Safety, Efficiency and Patient Satisfaction

Although radiology’s dramatic evolution over the last century has profoundly affected patient care for the better, the current system is too fragmented and many providers focus more on technology and physician needs rather than what really matters to patients: better value and outcomes. This latter dynamic is aligned with current national health care reform initiatives and creates both challenges andopportunitiesforradiologiststo find ways to deliver new value for patients. The ACR has responded to this challenge with the introduction of Imaging 3.0 TM , which represents a call to action to all radiologists to assume leadership roles in shaping America’s future health care system through 5 key pillars: imaging appropriateness, quality, safety, efficiency, and satisfaction. That enhanced value will require modulation of imaging work processes best understood through the concept of the imaging value chain, which is introduced in this first of a 7-part series. Further articles will then prescribe in detail the pathway forward at each link in the value chain to effect the work process changes necessary for radiologists to deliver better value and outcomes for patients.

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy

In Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith Andrew Preston draws attention to the important role that religious ideas and institutions have played in shaping America's relationship with the world. More than simply a synthesis of existing scholarship, this work is based on an immense amount of archival research, drawing on the holdings of several presidential libraries, theological schools, and the papers of several religious denominations. The publisher should be commended for putting out a reasonably priced book of this length (613 pages of text) that includes extensive endnotes and a comprehensive bibliography. Preston's readable account starts with the founding of British North America in the early 1600s and ends with President Barack Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The most interesting sections of this work examine World War II and the Cold War. Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian realists loom large in the debates over how to respond to the threat of Nazi Germany and later the Soviet Union. To understand Franklin D. Roosevelt, Preston insists that one must take into account his Christian faith and his firm belief in protecting religious liberty and promoting interfaith tolerance. To Roosevelt, the Nazis transcended American national security, threatening the very existence of religion in the world. One of the most significant wartime legacies of World War II would be the efforts of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace established by the Federal Council of Churches to lay the groundwork for public acceptance of the United Nations in 1945.

Public Policy, Popular Culture, Celebrity, and the Making of a Spiritual-Industrial Marketplace in Postwar America

Public Policy, Popular Culture, Celebrity, and the Making of a Spiritual-Industrial Marketplace in Postwar America Lerone Martin (bio) The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War. By Jonathan P. Herzog. New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. By Kathryn Lofton. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011. Several trends hallmark religion in postwar America. Scholars have identified several major forces including: the increased vitality of “world” religions, suburbanization, the decreasing significance of denominationalism, the political emergence of the religious right, and the increasing popularity of therapeutic spirituality and religious commodities. Traditional sources, including denominational figures and studies, church mapping and architecture, nationwide religion polls, and the activities of iconic figures and commodities such as revivalists Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and the success of the latter’s best seller, The Power [End Page 53] of Positive Thinking (1952), have been readily implored to describe how religion took shape during the era. However, recently scholars have increasingly turned to under-utilized sources in the study of postwar religion. Jonathan Herzog’s focus on government sources and the influence of public policy on religion following World War II and Kathryn Lofton’s study of the religious and spiritual affect of commercial icon Oprah are two intriguing examples of this trend. It has long been noted that President Eisenhower’s administration was wedded to the Cold War and the military-industrial complex following World War II. In his Presidential Farewell Address, the military hero stated that the dangers of the postwar world required the nation to no longer depend on the “makers of plowshares . . . to make swords.” Rather, in Cold War America, the nation had to “create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”: a military-industrial complex.1 This pronouncement and the subsequent influence of the Cold War upon postwar American politics and foreign policy is well known. However, lesser known is the Cold War’s explicit influence in shaping America’s religious landscape. In The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, Jonathan Herzog painstakingly chronicles how the Cold War influenced religion in postwar America via what he refers to as the “spiritual-industrial complex”: the collective and deliberate leveraging of state, federal, commercial, media, and celebrity resources for national religious revitalization. The ultimate goal of this political, commercial, and theological composite was to create a resurgence of religiosity and religious adherence as a means to combat and eventually defeat godless Communism (6). For Herzog, this spiritual mobilization was “sacralization,” not to be confused with “civil religion.” Herzog defines civil religion as the “use of the sacred to legitimatize the secular.” Spiritual “Cold War Warriors,” however, did the opposite; they “used the secular to legitimize the sacred” through a “deliberate and managed use of societal resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940’s and 1950’s” (6, 179). The author traces the genesis of this spiritual complex to the religious and political rhetoric of the successive presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower as well as a host of other political and cultural Cold War crusaders. These policy makers, religious professionals, and commercial icons boiled down the intricate nature of the Cold War between American and Soviet ideology into a series of simplistic dichotomies: American freedoms vs. communist slavery; good vs. evil; or faithful vs. faithless (81). Moreover, Communism was defined as a belief that was held by its communicants with “religious” fervor (197). As Herzog points out, President Truman aptly stated in one Christmas Eve address, “We are all joined in the fight against communism. Communism is godless . . . Democracy’s most powerful weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith—faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God” (79). Accordingly, Herzog displays how policy makers and clergy framed the Cold War not as an “economic and political struggle between the oppressed and the powerful,” but rather a holy war between traditional religious/Christian faith, freedoms, and [End Page 54] American livelihoods in opposition to the godless religious zeal of Communism (81, 126). The Cold War, at heart, was a spiritual battle. In 1933, President Hoover’s research committee noted, “The most fundamental change...

Religion in the Public Square: Interactions Between the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial and Revolutionary America

Religion in the Public Square: Interactions Between the Sacred and the Secular in Colonial and Revolutionary America Frank Lambert (bio) Mark Valeri. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xiii + 337 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. Thomas S. Kidd. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 298 pp. Notes and index. $26.95. Over the past three decades, books on religion in America have often overstated or understated religion’s role in the public square. So-called “evangelical” historians stress religion as one of the most powerful formative agents in shaping American politics and culture. More secular historians sometimes dismiss or ignore religion’s influence outside the private realm. Framing these widely different interpretations is secularization, which directs the narrative toward that of religious declension or religious persistence. The result is a historiographical debate in which one body of work depicts the steady march of secular forces in economics, politics, and culture pushing religion to the margins of American public life. An opposing body of work sees religion as ever-vital in all arenas of American life, including the marketplace and the statehouse, while its vitality has been largely undermined by liberal politicians and ignored by secular historians. One of the most daunting challenges for the historian wishing to explore religious influence in America is to measure that influence. If one gauges influence by rhetoric, then there is a strong case to be made that religion has, from the beginning of the republic, shaped public affairs. Sermons abound that speak to political issues of the day, couching them in biblical and moral language. Political addresses teem with references to divine guidance and providential favor for public undertakings. This is especially the interpretation of evangelicals, who, by their self-understanding, are called to proclaim the gospel to the world. Whether in the mid–eighteenth-century Great Awakening or in today’s culture wars, evangelicals make bold proclamations. They present [End Page 594] their case with great passion and certainty, and they excel in exploiting all forms of media to reach a mass audience. But does this rhetoric translate into a changed reality? Liberal and secular academic historians question the change that religion effects in the marketplace and the political arena. They point out that the greater change is that of America shaping religion rather than that of religion shaping America. While arguing that religion has had profound influence on American life, Mark Valeri and Thomas Kidd acknowledge that the influence between religion and American culture is bidirectional. Their arguments focus on interaction between the sacred and secular, and they view these interactions as dynamic. While writing about different eras and focusing on different arenas, Valeri and Kidd share a common approach to their treatments of religion in the public square. Both challenge the idea that secularization has pushed religion to the sidelines. Both refute the notion that religion is strictly private and has no public role in American life. Neither panders to those who wish to rewrite the story of religion in America in search of a usable past. Partisans in today’s culture war will no doubt be disappointed that neither of these books champions their respective positions. Accommodationists who wish to see a cozy relation between church and state from the creation of the republic will be troubled by the powerful influence of secular forces, while separationists who read a strict separation between church and state will fret over the prominence of religious language and symbols during the founding era. Mark Valeri examines the interaction between religion and commerce in Puritan New England. He rejects the secularization interpretation that explains an ever-widening distance between religion and commerce, with religion all but disappearing in the wake of expanding trade that hews only to laws of the marketplace. Instead, he argues that Puritan ministers developed views of commerce that changed over a very long period of time and that Puritan merchants continued to be influenced by new understandings of their place in God’s providential plan. Valeri identifies four distinctive theological interpretations that spanned the period from initial settlement in the early seventeenth...