The Lost Promise Of Patriotism

Download or read book The Lost Promise of Patriotism written by Jonathan M. Hansen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? In this book, Jonathan Hansen tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what Hansen calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime.

Download or read book Young Castro written by Jonathan M. Hansen and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intimate, revisionist portrait of Fidel Castro, showing how an unlikely young Cuban led his country in revolution and transfixed the world, is “sure to become the standard on Castro’s early life” (Publishers Weekly). Until now, biographers have treated Castro’s life like prosecutors, scouring his past for evidence to convict a person they don’t like or don’t understand. Young Castro challenges us to put aside the caricature of a bearded, cigar-munching, anti-American hothead to discover how Castro became the dictator who acted as a thorn in the side of US presidents for nearly half a century. In this “gripping and edifying narrative…Hansen brings imposing research and notable erudition” (Booklist) to Castro’s early life, showing Castro getting his toughness from a father who survived Spain’s class system and colonial wars to become one of the most successful independent plantation owners in Cuba. We see a boy running around that plantation more comfortable playing with the children of his father’s laborers than his own classmates at elite boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. We discover a young man who writes flowery love letters from prison and contemplates the meaning of life, a gregarious soul attentive to the needs of strangers but often indifferent to the needs of his own family. These pages show a liberal democrat who admires FDR’s New Deal policies and is skeptical of communism, but is also hostile to American imperialism. They show an audacious militant who stages a reckless attack on a military barracks but is canny about building an army of resisters. In short, Young Castro reveals a complex man. The first American historian in a generation to gain access to the Castro archives in Havana, Jonathan Hansen was able to secure cooperation from Castro’s family and closest confidants. He gained access to hundreds of never-before-seen letters and interviewed people he was the first to ask for their impressions of the man. The result is a nuanced and penetrating portrait of a man at once brilliant, arrogant, bold, vulnerable, and all too human: a man who, having grown up on an island that felt like a colonial cage, was compelled to lead his country to independence.

Download or read book The Lost Promise of Civil Rights written by Risa L. Goluboff and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listen to a short interview with Risa Goluboff Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane In this groundbreaking book, Risa L. Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education has long dominated that history. Since 1954, generations of judges, lawyers, and ordinary people have viewed civil rights as a project of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in the context of public education. Goluboff recovers a world before Brown, a world in which civil rights was legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs. Then, the petitions of black agricultural workers in the American South and industrial workers across the nation called for a civil rights law that would redress economic as well as legal inequalities. Lawyers in the new Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice and in the NAACP took the workers' cases and viewed them as crucial to attacking Jim Crow. By the time NAACP lawyers set out on the path to Brown, however, they had eliminated workers' economic concerns from their litigation agenda. When the lawyers succeeded in Brown, they simultaneously marginalized the host of other harms--economic inequality chief among them--that afflicted the majority of African Americans during the mid-twentieth century. By uncovering the lost challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the promise of civil rights.

Download or read book Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe written by Michael L. Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since ancient times, Jews have had a long and tangled relationship to cosmopolitanism. Torn between a longstanding commitment to other Jews and the pressure to integrate into various host societies, many Jews have sought a third, seemingly neutral option, that of becoming citizens of the world: cosmopolitans. Few regions witnessed such intense debates on these questions as the lands of East Central Europe as they entered the modern era. From Berlin to Moscow and from Vilna to Bucharest, the Jews of East Central Europe were repeatedly torn between people, nation and the world. While many Jews and individuals of Jewish descent embraced cosmopolitan ideologies and movements across the span of the nineteenth century, such appeals to transcend the nation became increasingly suspect with the rise of integral nationalism. In Germany, Poland, Russia and other lands, Jews and other supporters of cosmopolitan movements were marginalized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although such sentiments reached their peak during the Second World War, anti-cosmopolitan propaganda continued throughout the Cold War when it often became an integral part of anti-Jewish campaigns in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania. Even after the end of the Cold War, the connection between Jews and cosmopolitanism continues to befuddle ideologues, cultural leaders and politicians in Europe, North America and Israel. The fourteen chapters amassed in this volume address these and other questions including: What lies at the roots of the longstanding connection between Jews and cosmopolitanism? How has this relationship changed over time? What can different cultural, economic and political developments teach us about the ongoing attraction and tension between Jews and cosmopolitanism? And, what can these test cases tell us about the future of Jews and cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Download or read book Nationalism in Europe and America written by and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationalism in Europe and America

Download or read book Lost Battalions written by Richard Slotkin and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-11-29 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the United States' history of ethnic assimilation and racial strife through the experience of World War I regiments, the fabled Harlem Hell Fighters of the 369th infantry and the legendary "lost battalion" of the 77th division.

Download or read book Guantánamo written by Jonathan M. Hansen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An on-the-ground history of American empire Say the word "Guantánamo" and orange jumpsuits, chain-link fences, torture, and indefinite detention come to mind. To critics the world over, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is a striking symbol of American hypocrisy. But the prison isn't the whole story. For more than two centuries, Guantánamo has been at the center of American imperial ambition, first as an object of desire then as a convenient staging ground. In Guantánamo: An American History, Jonathan M. Hansen presents the first complete account of this fascinating place. The U.S. presence at Guantánamo predates even the nation itself, as the bay figured centrally in the imperial expansion plans of colonist and British sailor Lawrence Washington—half brother of the future president George. As the young United States rose in power, Thomas Jefferson and his followers envisioned a vast "empire of liberty," which hinged on U.S. control of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Politically and geographically, Guantánamo Bay was the key to this strategy. So when Cubans took up arms against their Spanish rulers in 1898, America swooped in to ensure that Guantánamo would end up firmly in its control. Over the next century, the American navy turned the bay into an idyllic modern Mayberry—complete with bungalows, cul-de-sacs, and country clubs—which base residents still enjoy. In many ways, Guantánamo remains more quintessentially American than America itself: a distillation of the idealism and arrogance that has characterized U.S. national identity and foreign policy from the very beginning. Despite the Obama administration's repeated efforts to shutter the notorious prison, the naval base is in no danger of closing anytime soon. Places like Guantánamo, which fall between the clear borders of law and sovereignty, continue to serve a purpose regardless of which leaders—left, right, or center—hold the reins of power.