Browse

The U.S.-Israel relationship that most people recognize today, which includes enormous amounts of U.S. military aid to Israel, a powerful strategic alliance, and an American willingness to acquiesce to Israeli occupation of certain Arab territories taken in 1967, came into existence between 1967 and 1975. The U.S. Congress played a key role in shaping American-Israeli relations during this period (as it does today) and, therefore, occupies a central place in this book. No book-length treatment of U.S.-Israel relations focuses primarily on the role of Congress. The imbalance in the scholarly perspective has created a misleading narrative that treats the legislative branch as being incidental to foreign policymaking. But in the years between the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the 1975 Sinai II agreement, an activist Congress, empowered by the quagmire in East Asia and popular distrust of the presidency, and increasingly influenced by the Israel lobby, played a central role in reworking U.S.-Israel relations, and U.S. relations with the Middle East more generally.

Frances Sage Bradley (1862-1949) was one of the first female graduates of Cornell University Medical College (1899). She spent the next half century advancing the causes of public health and medical care for neglected women, infants, and children. In 1915 she closed her private practice and became a medical field agent for the US Children’s Bureau in isolated rural areas of ten states, including Appalachia. Enactment of the federal Maternity and Infant Protection Act of 1921 [Sheppard-Towner Act] opened further healthcare reform opportunities. A prolific writer, the doctor generated voluminous official reports and dozens of freelance articles and stories. Those trying today to provide primary healthcare to underserved Americans face many of the same obstacles that challenged Dr. Bradley a century ago.

The Eagle on My Arm details the journey to recovery of Vietnam veteran Patrick Bradley. Enlisting at the age of eighteen, Bradley was mortified by the scenes in the North Vietnam jungles, and found himself unable to cope. At a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Bradley traveled to the Canadian wilderness where he spent three years studying and documenting bald eagles and their behavior. He made groundbreaking discoveries during his research, linking the use of chemical DDT to the decrease in southern bald eagle populations. Additionally, he made notable progress in his recovery, able to better control his previously unmitigated anger and rage. Bradley teamed up with other veterans to form the Avian Veteran Alliance in 2015, a non-profit that pairs wounded warriors with injured birds of prey. Where the Eagles Soar, written by biographers Dava Guerin and Terry Bivens, is one of only a handful of books concerned with the unique link between avian therapy and wounded warrior recovery. Introducing the psychiatric benefits of avian and animal therapy is crucial to the cultural climate regarding mental health, and sheds light on positive and exciting alternatives in the study of PTSD among war veterans.

In 1966, the Peace Corps and Tanzania, both newly established, faced a major international crisis when a Peace Corp volunteer was to be tried in Tanzania on a charge of murdering his wife, also a volunteer. This book examines how each of these entities arrived at this juncture—that is, the founding of the Peace Corps and the path to independence for Tanzania, the trial and its aftermath. Two assessors acted as jury, one a white American working in Tanzania, the other a black Tanzanian who had recently returned from graduate studies in the United States and who had been part of the famous African Airlift that brought Africans to America, including Barack Obama’s father, to study. That program, designed to undercut Russian efforts to lure Africans to the Soviet Union, foreshadowed many of the Cold War conflicts between the United States and Tanzania, including the U.S. role in the Congo, the Vietnam War, and apartheid in South Africa. The book explores how government officials, both American and Tanzanian, private attorneys, friends and relatives of the couple, and witnesses dealt with the complex situation.

This book is a collection of fourteen solutions for some of the twenty-first century’s greatest challenges. Each of the contributors—selected for their expertise and accomplishments in fields as varied as medicine, finance, international development, and history—employs Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points as inspiration, providing historical background to situate Wilson’s ideas in their full context. First presented in 1918 as World War I raged, the original Fourteen Points offered a thoughtful and synthetic plan for overhauling the international order. Inspired by its magnitude and impact, the contributors use Wilson’s framework to prescribe remedies to the following problems: politics; development; migration; environmentalism, medicine, and health care; statecraft, international cooperation, and military restraint; privacy and technology; and food security. Collectively, the volume reassesses and calls for a renewal of the globalism at the heart of Wilson’s influential Fourteen Points a century after they were first offered, with the goal of solving our own century’s most pressing problems.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, alumni and students from historically black colleges and universities contributed to the American Protestant mission movement in West Africa. Those contributions extended beyond the manual labor endeavors promoted by Booker T. Washington and the Phelps Stokes Fund; African American missionaries also adapted classical studies and self-help ideology to a transnational context. This book analyzes the effects and significance of black education strategies through the ministries of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston from 1902 to 1941. Brown specialized in language, music, and cultural analysis while her husband engaged in preaching, agricultural research, and mediation on behalf of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in what became the Belgian Congo. Personal and professional partnership motivated the two missionaries to interpret their responsibilities as a combination of training from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Stillman Institute. Each of these institutions held a symbolic meaning in the contexts of the Southern Presbyterian Church and European colonialism in Africa. Denominational administrators and colonial officials understood African American missionaries as leaders with the potential to challenge racial hierarchies. This perception influenced the shifting relations between African Christians and black missionaries during the development of village churches. The Edmistons’ pedagogical interest in adapting to local conditions encouraged Presbyterian converts and students to promote their interests and their authority within the Congo Mission. At the same time, occasional segregation and expulsion of African American missionaries from overseas ministry enabled them to influence early civil rights activities in the American South.

A native of London, Kentucky, Dr. Katherine Jackson French (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1906) collected over sixty British Isle ballads in the hills of Kentucky in 1909 and attempted to publish them in 1910 with the help of Berea College, an endeavor that never came to pass due to an intriguing tangle of motives, gender biases, wavering support from her hoped-for patron, and ruthlessness on the part of fellow collectors. (Her ballad collection, “English-Scottish Ballads from the Hills of Kentucky,” sees publication here at last and comprises the last section of the book.) An unwitting participant in the Ballad Wars of the early 20^th Century, French went on to a full professorship at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, where she was also the co-founder of the Woman’s Department Club and President of the UUAW. This book sets the story of Jackson’s life against the backdrop of the social upheaval of the early 20^th century, highlights Jackson’s focus on women as ballad keepers, discusses the long-lasting Anglo-only depiction of Appalachia, and reimagines what effect publication of her collection in 1910 (seven years before Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp’s landmark English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians) might have had upon our first and lasting view of Appalachian balladry.

Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia is a narrative nonfiction book that tells the compelling story of four adults and twelve children from southwestern Kentucky who, after being freed from slavery, migrated to Liberia. It is also the tale of Ben Major, the white man who freed them. The Majors and their former neighbors, the Harlans, were sixteen of the 16,000 black people who left the United States under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. It was the largest out-migration in the country’s history. The emigrants were of African ancestry, but they were not Africans, and were unprepared for the deprivation, disease, and disasters that awaited them. Unlike many former slave owners, Ben stayed in touch with the people he had freed. He sent them much-needed items, such as seeds, tools, books, medicine, and other supplies to help them survive and flourish. In return, they sent coffee, peanuts, and other items to Ben. Liberty Brought Us Here explores this unusual relationship between former slaves and their former owner in the context of the debate over slavery, the controversial colonization movement, and the establishment of the Republic of Liberia.

The ability to change swiftly from peace, or prolonged low intensity conflict, to the high intensity of war and succeed in the initial engagements is usually discussed in terms of readiness, capabilities, and capacity, and their related materiel, personnel, doctrine, and training. Every security establishment - whether state or non-state - is familiar with these aspects. This book deals with important, complementary, but generally neglected "soft" aspects of moving from peace to war, such as the mental ability to shift from one reality to another; consolidating a coherent doctrine when war erupts in the course of an ongoing peacetime conceptual-doctrinal debate; gaining proficiency on short notice when new weapon systems become available only at the last minute (or even after units have deployed) and so forth. The book draws from historical examples of Israeli “worst case" transition scenarios – namely the Yom Kippur and Second Lebanon Wars, as well as others. Concise examples from American military history demonstrate the endurance and universality of the challenge. Recommendations aimed at enhancing military organizations' preparations for rapidly and successfully transitioning from peace to war complete each chapter and are presented comprehensively in the conclusions.

Since women first entered the University of Kentucky (UK) in 1880 they have sought, demanded, and struggled for equality within the university. The period between 1880 and 1945 at UK witnessed women’s suffrage, two world wars, and an economic depression. It was during this time that women at UK worked to take their rightful place in the university’s life prior to the modern women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. The history of women at UK is not about women triumphant, and it remains an untidy story. After pushing for admission into a male-centric campus environment, women created women’s spaces, women’s organizations, and a women’s culture often patterned on those of men. At times, it seemed that a goal was to create a woman’s college within the larger university. However, coeducation meant that women, by necessity, competed with men academically while still navigating the evolving social norms of relationships between the sexes. Both of those paths created opportunities, challenges, and problems for women students and faculty. By taking a more women-centric view of the campus, this study shows more clearly the impact that women had over time on the culture and environment. It also allows a comparison, and perhaps a contrast, of the experiences of UK women with other public universities across the United States.

The Second World War in Yugoslavia is notorious for the brutal struggle between the armed forces of the Third Reich and the communist-led Partisans. Less known is the fact that the two sides negotiated prisoner exchanges virtually since the beginning of the war. Under extraordinary circumstances, these early contacts evolved into a formal exchange agreement, centered on the creation of a neutral zone—quite possibly the only such area in occupied Europe—where prisoners were regularly exchanged until late April 1945, saving thousands of lives. The leadership of both sides used the contacts for secret political talks, for which they were nearly branded as traitors by their superiors in Berlin and Moscow. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of prisoner exchanges and the accompanying contacts between the German occupation authorities and the Yugoslav Partisans. Specifically, the book will argue that prisoner exchange had a decisive influence on the POW policies of both sides and helped reduce the levels of violence for which this theater of war became infamous. It will also show that the contacts, contrary to some claims, did not lead to collusion between these two parties against either other Yugoslav factions or the Western Allies.

Drawn from interviews conducted from 2003 to 2019, Picturing Peter Bogdanovich is a unique double portrait of a filmmaker and a fan. As the director of such New Hollywood classics as The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich is considered one of the first superstar directors of the 1970s, whose celebrity equaled that of many movie stars of the era. Growing up as an admirer of Bogdanovich’s films, film critic and journalist Peter Tonguette first had the chance to interview Bogdanovich for an online magazine piece in 2003—kicking off what became a decade-and-a-half series of conversations about his life and his films. The first part of the book features Tonguette’s exhaustive, film-by-film survey of Bogdanovich’s career and personal account of getting to know Bogdanovich; the second features a Q&A drawn from sixteen years’ worth of interviews, encompassing all of his film and TV projects, his background, his triumphs, his tragedies. The result is a film book like few others in its depth and detail.

Bucking the current trend of explaining revolutions via impersonal forces, this book argues that without revolutionary personalities revolutions would not occur. The great revolutionaries of the past two centuries have arrived in pairs. Though each pair differed in how they met, bonded, and diverged, they were similar in having an alpha partner, who recognized his need for the other and never seriously contemplated a separation. This book, in comparing the revolutionary careers of the five pairs also offers a cross-cultural analysis of revolutions, and, by focusing on the personal dimensions of the revolutionary process, puts meat on the bones of the current approach.

The book explores the nexus of the world’s most popular sport and diplomacy, as a tool of the nation-state–based diplomacy, as diplomacy of soccer as a non-state actor, and via the relationship between soccer and a variety of diplomatic actors in the subnational, national, and transnational context. Over the past century any number of states have sought to conduct diplomacy via soccer games, tournaments, and the sport’s governance structures, including the international governing body FIFA itself. FIFA’s tournaments, including its World Cup for men, youth players, or women, as well as regional tournaments provide numerous opportunities for diplomacy, from bidding for events to hosting them, and sending teams to tournaments to diplomatic reports about events, including how one’s country represented the state.

This broad-ranging study examines the complex factors leading to the US imposition of the Turkish arms embargo (1974–1978), which marked a major turning point in relations between the two NATO allies. Focusing on domestic politics, the work draws on newly available archival materials at presidential libraries and from a broad array of rarely used personal papers of key senators and congressmen to provide new details and insights into the struggle between the executive and Congress. It reveals the constant interaction and complex maneuvering required to fashion successful strategies away from the public view, giving considerable attention to the neglected yet critical role of the Republican minority in Congress. It analyzes the pervasive influence of both the drug crisis and Turkophobia in initiating and prolonging the embargo and reveals how local ethnic lobbyists across the country organized to encourage grassroots support for Cyprus and opprobrium toward Turkey. The book elaborates on the contemporary context in the eastern Mediterranean and how the governments of Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus worked to influence American policy, often with remarkable success. And it reflects on the conflicted response of Israel and its American supporters to the extended crisis. Many issues analyzed in this study still concern us today, and its insights can provide guidance for future bilateral policy.

A prolific director of classic Hollywood cinema, George Cukor was known for his romantic comedies and dramas and his work with difficult leading ladies. For such work, he was labeled a “woman’s director.” He did build or enhance the careers of many strong, independent actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. However, the tag was also derogatory, referencing the fact of Cukor’s homosexuality. He was also called an “actor’s director,” for he emphasized his connections with his stars to draw out compelling performances even within his less effective films. Taking a queer feminist approach to these labels, the director, and his directing style, this volume explores issues of gender and sexuality within groups of Cukor pictures. Chapters reach across and among eras and genres to study small groups of films by theme, nuanced by ethnicity, class, and race. Topics covered include female friendships, the male alcoholic, domesticity and ethnic assimilation, gender performance, drag acts, and queer musical excess.

This book is about politics, exploring the general outlook of a group of Americans called Whigs. The Whigs were one of the two great political parties in the United States between the years 1834 and 1856, battling their opponents the Jacksonian Democrats for offices, prestige, and power. This book explores how Whiggish Americans understood human nature, society, and the role of the state, and explains how they reflected on the past and anticipated the future. A Whig worldview resonated with a vast array of future-looking people in large cities and small villages, in factories and on farms, and in the varied state houses across the country, as well as the in halls of Congress. The Whig Promise attracted those Americans seeking middle-class achievement, community, and meaning through collaborative effort and self-control in a world growing more and more impersonal.