scholarly journals Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation

1998 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Crafts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Growth Potential ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Relative Decline ◽  
Specific Learning

This paper considers Britain's failure to maintain its lead in economic growth in the face of overtaking by the United States. Recent cliometric research is reviewed and it is argued that early nineteenth century Britain had a low growth potential by twentieth century standards and that the American growth of the early twentieth century was of a quite different kind. Neither traditional nor new growth theories can encompass this experience and it is suggested that natural resource endowments, location-specific learning processes, and the international migration of factors of production were central aspects of American overtaking of Britain.

Japan's Role in Asia-Pacific Cooperation

1991 ◽  
Vol 513 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
SABURO OKITA
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
International Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Growth Potential ◽  
The Other ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
International Trading

The Asia-Pacific countries achieved rapid economic growth with the flying-goose model in the 1980s, growth buttressed by export-oriented development strategies and the policy culture in these countries. While Japan and the other Asia-Pacific countries still have strong growth potential, many problems remain, including trade imbalances with the United States and the rise of protectionism there, the Asia-Pacific economies' vulnerability, and the need to consolidate the infrastructure for growth. It is imperative that Japan contribute to the development of the region by responding effectively to these issues and that it strengthen the international trading arrangements by promoting Asia-Pacific cooperation premised on openness. Given the region's great internal diversity, Asia-Pacific economic cooperation can well serve as a model for international economic coordination.

The Journey of Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Erikson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The University ◽  
Migrant Stream

This chapter tells the story of peasants from rural Poland who entered a migrant stream around the turn of the twentieth century that carried them, along with tens of millions of others, across a number of clearly marked national borderlines as well as a number of unmarked cultural ones. The peasants were a couple named Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak, and the words spoken by them as well as the events recalled here are based on the hundreds of letters and diaries gathered in the 1910s by two sociologists from the University of Chicago, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. The chapter first describes the world into which Piotr and Kasia were born, focusing on family, village, and land. It then considers their journey, together with millions of other immigrants, and how they changed both the face of Europe and the face of the United States.

Planning or Improvisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-120
Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Governance Strategies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Imperfect Knowledge

This chapter assesses the role of planning in the design of governance strategies. Enthusiasm for large-scale planning—also known as overall, comprehensive, long-term, economic, or social planning—boomed and collapsed in twentieth century. At the start of that century, progressive reformers seized on planning as the remedy for the United States' social and economic woes. By the end of the twentieth century, enthusiasm for large-scale planning had collapsed. Plans could be made, but they were unlikely to be obeyed, and even if they were obeyed, they were unlikely to work as predicted. The chapter then explains that leaders should make plans while being realistic about the limits of planning. It is necessary to exercise foresight, set priorities, and design policies that seem likely to accomplish those priorities. Simply by doing this, leaders encourage coordination among individuals and businesses, through conversation about goals and tactics. Neither is imperfect knowledge a total barrier to planning. There is no “law” of unintended consequences: it is not inevitable that government actions will produce entirely unexpected results. The more appropriate stance is modesty about what is known and what can be achieved. Plans that launch big schemes on brittle assumptions are more likely to fail. Plans that proceed more tentatively, that allow room for testing, learning, and adjustment, are less likely to collapse in the face of unexpected results.

Modern Folk Dance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Walkowitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
Rapid Industrialization

Modern folk dance is a turn of the twentieth-century revivalist practice based upon a participatory dance form originating within village-based ethnic communities of northern Europe. It arose as part of the effort to define the modern European nation-state in the last half of the nineteenth century and gained most of its adherents in the United States and northern Europe. In the face of rapid industrialization, revivalists celebrated traditional dances with roots in the premodern medieval and Renaissance eras that they associated with a pristine, rural idyll in order to revitalize subalterns who they imagined as a "foreign race" and adapt it to modern life.

scholarly journals Scaling Commercial Law in Indian Country

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-140
Author(s):  
Marc Lane Roark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Commercial Law ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Indian Country ◽  
Secured Transactions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Indian Tribes

How do you drive economic enterprise in a financial desert? Indian tribes, academics, economists, and policy makers have considered the means and methods for energizing economic growth for forty years. Efforts such as the creation and promotion of the Model Tribal Secured Transactions Act (“MTSTA”) promise much toward creating conditions that would gather financial opportunity to tribal regions that experience poverty at a strikingly higher rate than any other place in the United States. And yet, while the law has been available for more than ten years, tribes have been reticent to adopt it. This Article fills the vacuum in the literature around the promise of uniform laws in Indian Country by describing the inherent tension that exists between downscaling uniform laws into tribal contexts and the localism that seeks to preserve localized values. This Article argues that tribal choices to accept uniformity or reject uniformity in these areas are built around a combination of formal associations and organic relationships designed to create “institutional thickness” in the face of other scarce resources.

Invitation to Empire: Tariffs and American Economic Expansion in Canada

1973 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Scheinberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Independence ◽  
Economic Expansion ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Economic Influence

The growth of the United States' economic influence in twentieth-century Canada was intimately related to the continuation of the “National Policy” of protectionist tariffs. Professor Scheinberg argues that Canadians initially welcomed America's consciously expansionist thrust, and that they eventually became entangled in the problems of seeking rapid economic growth along with economic independence from both the older imperialism of Great Britain and the newer variety represented by the United States.

Current Historiographic Trends in the Study of the Twentieth-Century Congress

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-331
Author(s):  
Joel H. Silbey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
United States Congress ◽  
Imperial Presidency ◽  
Complex Development ◽  
The Face

Once upon a time, historians and political scientists expended a great deal of effort in tracing the complex development of the United States Congress in the twentieth century—a time, especially from the 1930s onward, during which Congress faced a remarkable expansion in government activity as a surge of new concerns, foreign and domestic, and, as a result, an unprecedented load of business, all but overwhelmed the institution. During this same time, Congress’s role within the American political system has been Social Science transformed in the face of the rise of the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court’s insistence on changing rules of representation, and the consequent shift in the institution’s makeup and internal power structure. Finally, public perceptions of Congress, increasingly negative as they have become, have had some significant impact on the transformation of Congress within the American political system as well (Sundquist 1981; Harris 1993; Rieselbach 1994).

Ideologies Are (Usually) Not Monolithic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Owen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western History ◽  
Islam And Secularism

This chapter considers the second lesson that is relevant to political Islam and secularism today: ideologies are (usually) not monolithic. It first considers the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when European conservatives claimed that the divide between republicanism and constitutional monarchism was a distinction without a difference. It then examines the dilemma faced by the House of Habsburg in Europe during the early seventeenth century: since Protestantism seemed to be polylithic, should they try to exploit divisions among the Protestants? The chapter proceeds by discussing the fault lines separating communists and socialists in the twentieth century before concluding with some reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from Western history for the United States in dealing with Islamists today. It suggests that whether Islamism is monolithic or polylithic is a question that matters, especially for U.S. foreign policy.

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