American Empire PDF Download

Author: Neil Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520230272
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Roosevelt's, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy.".

Author: Andrew J. BACEVICH
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674020375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In a challenging, provocative book, Andrew Bacevich reconsiders the assumptions and purposes governing the exercise of American global power. Examining the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton--as well as George W. Bush's first year in office--he demolishes the view that the United States has failed to devise a replacement for containment as a basis for foreign policy. He finds instead that successive post-Cold War administrations have adhered to a well-defined "strategy of openness." Motivated by the imperative of economic expansionism, that strategy aims to foster an open and integrated international order, thereby perpetuating the undisputed primacy of the world's sole remaining superpower. Moreover, openness is not a new strategy, but has been an abiding preoccupation of policymakers as far back as Woodrow Wilson. Although based on expectations that eliminating barriers to the movement of trade, capital, and ideas nurtures not only affluence but also democracy, the aggressive pursuit of openness has met considerable resistance. To overcome that resistance, U.S. policymakers have with increasing frequency resorted to force, and military power has emerged as never before as the preferred instrument of American statecraft, resulting in the progressive militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Neither indictment nor celebration, American Empire sees the drive for openness for what it is--a breathtakingly ambitious project aimed at erecting a global imperium. Large questions remain about that project's feasibility and about the human, financial, and moral costs that it will entail. By penetrating the illusions obscuring the reality of U.S. policy, this book marks an essential first step toward finding the answers. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction 1. The Myth of the Reluctant Superpower 2. Globalization and Its Conceits 3. Policy by Default 4. Strategy of Openness 5. Full Spectrum Dominance 6. Gunboats and Gurkhas 7. Rise of the Proconsuls 8. Different Drummers, Same Drum 9. War for the Imperium Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [A] straightforward "critical interpretation of American statecraft in the 1990s"...he is straightforward, too, in establishing where he stands on the political spectrum about US foreign policy...Bacevich insists that there are no differences in the key assumptions governing the foreign policy of the administrations of Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II--and this will certainly be the subject of passionate debate...Bacevich's argument persuades...by means of engaging prose as well as the compelling and relentless accumulation of detail...Bring[s] badly needed [perspective] to troubled times. --James A. Miller, Boston Globe Reviews of this book: For everyone there's Andrew Bacevich's American Empire, an intelligent, elegantly written, highly convincing polemic that demonstrates how the motor of US foreign policy since independence has been the need to guarantee economic growth. --Dominick Donald, The Guardian Reviews of this book: Andrew Bacevich's remarkably clear, cool-headed, and enlightening book is an expression of the United States' unadmitted imperial primacy. It's as bracing as a plunge into a clear mountain lake after exposure to the soporific internationalist conventional wisdom...Bacevich performs an invaluable service by restoring missing historical context and perspective to today's shallow, hand-wringing discussion of Sept. 11...Bacevich's brave, intelligent book restores our vocabulary to debate anew the United States' purpose in the world. --Richard J. Whalen, Across the Board Reviews of this book: To say that Andrew Bacevich's American Empire is a truly realistic work of realism is therefore to declare it not only a very good book, but also a pretty rare one. The author, a distinguished former soldier, combines a tough-minded approach to the uses of military force with a grasp of American history that is both extremely knowledgeable and exceptionally clear-sighted. This book is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the background to U.S. world hegemony at the start of the 21st century; and it is also a most valuable warning about the dangers into which the pursuit and maintenance of this hegemony may lead America. --Anatol Levin, Washington Monthly Reviews of this book: American Empire is an immensely thoughtful book. Its reflections go beyond the narrow realm of U.S. security policy and demonstrate a deep understanding of American history and culture. --David Hastings Dunn, Political Studies Review I have long suspected our nation's triumphs and trials owed much to the American genius for solipsism and self-deception. Bacevich has convinced me of it by holding up a mirror to self-styled idealists and realists alike. Read all the books you want about the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world, just be sure American Empire is one of them. --Walter A. McDougall, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, University of Pennsylvania This deeply informed, impressive polemical book is precisely what Americans, in and outside of the academy, needed before 9/11 and need now even more. Crisp, lively, biting prose will help them enjoy it. Among its many themes are hubris, hegemony, and the fatuousness of claims by the American military that they can now achieve 'transparency' in war-making. --Michael S. Sherry, Northwestern University The United States could not possibly have an empire, Americans think. But we do. And with verve and telling insight Andrew Bacevich shows how it works and what it means. --Ronald Steel, author of Temptations of a Superpower: America's Foreign Policy after the Cold War

Author: David Reynolds
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465020054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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"The best one-volume history of the United States ever written" (Joseph J. Ellis) It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great "empire of liberty." This paradoxical phrase may be the key to the American saga: How could the anti-empire of 1776 became the world's greatest superpower? And how did the country that offered unmatched liberty nevertheless found its prosperity on slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans? In this new single-volume history spanning the entire course of US history—from 1776 through the election of Barack Obama—prize-winning historian David Reynolds explains how tensions between empire and liberty have often been resolved by faith—both the evangelical Protestantism that has energized American politics for centuries and the larger faith in American righteousness that has driven the country's expansion. Written with verve and insight, Empire of Liberty brilliantly depicts America in all of its many contradictions.

Author: Stephen Kinzer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627792171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The public debate over American interventionism at the dawn of the 20th century is vividly brought to life in this “engaging, well-focused history” (Kirkus, starred review).

Author: Howard Zinn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805087444
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Adapted from the critically acclaimed chronicle of U.S. history, a study of American expansionism around the world is told from a grassroots perspective and provides an analysis of important events from Wounded Knee to Iraq.

Author: A. G. Hopkins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1002

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Book Description
"Compelling, provocative, and learned. This book is a stunning and sophisticated reevaluation of the American empire. Hopkins tells an old story in a truly new way--American history will never be the same again."--Jeremi Suri, author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office.Office.

Author: Tanner Mirrlees
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774830174
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
From Katy Perry training alongside US Marines in a music video, to the global box-office mastery of the US military-supported Transformers franchise, to the explosion of war games such as Call of Duty, it’s clear that the US security state is a dominant force in media culture. But is the ubiquity of cultural products that glorify the security state a new phenomenon? Or have Uncle Sam and Hollywood been friends for a long time? Hearts and Mines examines the rise and reach of the US Empire’s culture industry – a nexus between the US’s security state and media firms and the source of cultural products that promote American strategic interests around the world. Building on and extending Herbert I. Schiller’s classic study of US Empire and communications, Tanner Mirrlees interrogates the symbiotic geopolitical and economic relationships between the US state and media firms that drive the production of imperial culture.

Author: Amy Kaplan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The United States has always imagined that its identity as a nation is insulated from violent interventions abroad, as if a line between domestic and foreign affairs could be neatly drawn. Yet this book argues that such a distinction, so obviously impracticable in our own global era, has been illusory at least since the war with Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and the later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. In this book, Amy Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. The neatly ordered kitchen in Catherine Beecher's household manual may seem remote from the battlefields of Mexico in 1846, just as Mark Twain's Mississippi may seem distant from Honolulu in 1866, or W. E. B. Du Bois's reports of the East St. Louis Race Riot from the colonization of Africa in 1917. But, as this book reveals, such apparently disparate locations are cast into jarring proximity by imperial expansion. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.

Author: Anthony J. Hall
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773530065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 740

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Book Description
In a book that Naomi Klein says could "change the world," Anthony Hall shows that the globalization debate actually began in 1492.

Author: Lester D. Langley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780842050470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 offers a sweeping panorama of America's tropical empire in the age spanned by the two Roosevelts and a detailed narrative of U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean and Mexico. In this new edition, Professor Langley provides an updated introduction, placing the scholarship in current historical context. From the perspective of the Americans involved, the empire carved out by the banana warriors was a domain of bickering Latin American politicians, warring tropical countries, and lawless societies that the American military had been dispatched to police and tutor. Beginning with the Cuban experience, Langley examines the motives and consequences of two military occupations and the impact of those interventions on a professedly antimilitaristic American government and on its colonial agents in the Caribbean, the American military. The result of the Cuban experience, Langley argues, was reinforcement of the view that the American people did not readily accept prolonged military occupation of Caribbean countries. In Nicaragua and Mexico, from 1909 to 1915, where economic and diplomatic pressures failed to bring the results desired in Washington, the American military became the political arbiters; in Hispaniola, bluejackets and marines took on the task of civilizing the tropics. In the late 1920s, with an imperial force largely of marines, the American military waged its last banana war in Nicaragua against a guerrilla leader named Augusto C. Sandino. Langley not only narrates the history of America's tropical empire, but fleshes out the personalities of this imperial era, including Leonard Wood and Fred Funston, U.S. Army, who left their mark on Cuba and Vera Cruz; William F. Fullam and William Banks Caperton, U.S. Navy, who carried out their missions imbued with old-school beliefs about their role as policemen in disorderly places; Smedley Butler and L.W.T. Waller, Sr., U.S.M.C., who left the most lasting imprint of A