scholarly journals Dilemmas of World-Wide Thinking: Popular Geographies and the Problem of Empire in Wendell Willkie's Search forOne World

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-319
Author(s):  
Samuel Zipp

This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller,One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered auniversalview of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial powercontested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial powerobscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour fromOne World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.

Author(s):  
Isa Blumi

This chapter offers what the historiography tells of Yemen’s rise as a modern, unified (and recently fragmented, chaotic polity). Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century when Yemen was administered by the Ottoman and British Empires, the narrative repositions Yemen as being at the heart of modern European imperialism until World War II. This chapter challenges conventional wisdom by way of providing an accounting for how and why European financial interests sought and finally, through appropriated state resources in Britain, France, Italy, Ottoman Empire gained access to Yemen’s natural and human resources. Beyond this, accounting for the arrival of the United States in this manner by the 1920s seems critical. It is in fact by way of engaging Yemen and the larger Red Sea, often on local Yemeni terms, that the very modern institutions and practices synonymous with American Empire emerge. This rethinking the nature of the relationship Yemenis had with an emergent globalist regime starts with clashes locals had with British capitalist interests, by the mid-nineteenth century firmly entrenched in South Yemen. The relationship that would help create Saudi Arabia, for instance, is drawn specifically from the fact British bankers could not subordinate the ruling family of Northern Yemen—the Imams—forcing them to resort to new tactics, including promoting the rise of KSA and ultimately political Islam as we know it today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254
Author(s):  
Andreu Espasa

De forma un tanto paradójica, a finales de los años treinta, las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos sufrieron uno de los momentos de máxima tensión, para pasar, a continuación, a experimentar una notable mejoría, alcanzando el cénit en la alianza política y militar sellada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El episodio catalizador de la tensión y posterior reconciliación fue, sin duda, el conflicto diplomático planteado tras la nacionalización petrolera de 1938. De entre los factores que propiciaron la solución pacífica y negociada al conflicto petrolero, el presente artículo se centra en analizar dos fenómenos del momento. En primer lugar, siguiendo un orden de relevancia, se examina el papel que tuvo la Guerra Civil Española. Aunque las posturas de ambos gobiernos ante el conflicto español fueron sustancialmente distintas, las interpretaciones y las lecciones sobre sus posibles consecuencias permitieron un mayor entendimiento entre los dos países vecinos. En segundo lugar, también se analizarán las afinidades ideológicas entre el New Deal y el cardenismo en el contexto de la crisis mundial económica y política de los años treinta, con el fin de entender su papel lubricante en las relaciones bilaterales de la época. Somewhat paradoxically, at the end of the 1930s, the relationship between Mexico and the United States experienced one of its tensest moments, after which it dramatically improved, reaching its zenith in the political and military alliance cemented during World War II. The catalyst for this tension and subsequent reconciliation was, without doubt, the diplomatic conflict that arose after the oil nationalization of 1938. Of the various factors that led to a peaceful negotiated solution to the oil conflict, this article focuses on analyzing two phenomena. Firstly—in order of importance—this article examines the role that the Spanish Civil War played. Although the positions of both governments in relation to the Spanish war were significantly different, the interpretations and lessons concerning potential consequences enabled a greater understanding between the two neighboring countries. Secondly, this article also analyzes the ideological affinities between the New Deal and Cardenismo in the context of the global economic and political crisis of the thirties, seeking to understand their role in facilitating bilateral relations during that period.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 324
Author(s):  
Zheming Zhang

<p>With the continuous development and evolution of the United States, especially the economic center shift after World War II, the United States become the economic hegemon instead of the UK and thus it seized the economic initiative of the world. After the World War I, the European countries gradually withdraw from the gold standard. In order to stabilize the world economy development and the international economic order, the United States prepared to build the economic system related with its own interests so as to force the UK to return to the gold standard. The game between the United States and the UK shows the significance of economic initiative. Among them, the outcome of the two countries in the fight of the financial system also demonstrates a significant change in the world economic system.</p>


2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. CHRISTOPHER JESPERSEN

The frequent use of the Vietnam analogy to describe the situation in Iraq underscores the continuing relevance of Vietnam for American history. At the same time, the Vietnam analogy reinforces the tendency to see current events within the context of the past. Politicians and pundits latch onto analogies as handles for understanding the present, but in so doing, they obscure more complicated situations. The con�ict in Iraq is not Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, but this article considers all three in an effort to see how the past has shaped, and continues to affect, the world the United States now faces.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce P. Montgomery

AbstractShortly following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an American mobile exploitation team was diverted from its mission in hunting for weapons for mass destruction to search for an ancient Talmud in the basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police (Mukhabarat) headquarters in Baghdad. Instead of finding the ancient holy book, the soldiers rescued from the basement flooded with several feet of fetid water an invaluable archive of disparate individual and communal documents and books relating to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in the world. The seizure of Jewish cultural materials by the Mukhabarat recalled similar looting by the Nazis during World War II. The materials were spirited out of Iraq to the United States with a vague assurance of their return after being restored. Several years after their arrival in the United States for conservation, the Iraqi Jewish archive has become contested cultural property between Jewish groups and the Iraqi Jewish diaspora on the one hand and Iraqi cultural officials on the other. This article argues that the archive comprises the cultural property and heritage of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora.


Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger

This chapter analyzes the consolidation in 1942 of the two major, religiously defined institutional forces of the entire period from World War II to the present. The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, was the first moment at which rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together and agreed upon an agenda for the postwar world. The chapter addresses the following questions: Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?


Author(s):  
Viviana D’Auria

Sanabria is a representative figure of the second generation of 20th-century Venezuelan architects. He studied in the United States of America after World War II and had a rigorous functionalist orientation, paying attention to natural conditions, environmental features, the relationship between architecture and geography, the influence of architecture in civic culture, structural and technological expressiveness, and the links between architecture, art, and the urban scale. After graduating as an engineer (1941–1945) from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), he embraced a functionalist approach during his studies (1945–1947) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard Walter Gropius, Martin Wagner, Ieoh Ming Pei, Hugh Stubbins, and Marcel Breuer were among his professors. He returned to Venezuela in 1947 and worked as professor of Architecture for Engineers at the UCV’s School of Engineering. By 1948 he was director of the Department of Architectural Composition at the School of Architecture in the Faculty of Engineering. In 1954 he became the first director of the School of Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, founded that year.


Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips

This chapter focuses on the political economy of development. It first considers the different (and competing) ways of thinking about development that have emerged since the end of World War II, laying emphasis on modernization, structuralist, and underdevelopment theories, neo-liberalism and neo-statism, and ‘human development’, gender, and environmental theories. The chapter proceeds by exploring how particular understandings of development have given rise to particular kinds of development strategies at both the national and global levels. It then examines the relationship between globalization and development, in both empirical and theoretical terms. It also describes how conditions of ‘mal-development’ — or development failures — both arise from and are reinforced by globalization processes and the ways in which the world economy is governed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-86
Author(s):  
Charlotte Nunes

This article examines how P.E.N., an organisation born in imperial Britain, endeavoured in some cases and floundered in others to create conditions for collaboration between Indian and British writers. Drawing on the P.E.N. archives at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC), I examine communication among and between Indian and British writers in P.E.N.'s orbit during the World War II era and leading up to the Indian Independence Act of 1947. As a forum for collaboration among writers internationally not only to develop writing and editing projects together, but also to forge a unifying conception for the modern era of the relationship between literature and political freedom, P.E.N. aimed to create opportunities for exchange among Indian and British writers. Analysing Indian writers' articulation of the necessary conditions for cross-imperial collaboration, I consider how mutuality was compromised under political conditions of imperialism hinging on hierarchal notions of culture.


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