Canada and Pan America

1968 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Holmes

Herman Kahn said recently that Canada is a regional power without a region. Canada is something of a sport, a nuisance to those who like their political geography neat—rather like Australia or Albania. There are arguments for attaching us to various regions or groups of states. If there is one region, however, to which Canada does not naturally belong it is the so-called Western Hemisphere. Although the Rio Treaty somewhat presumptuously included Canada and Greenland in the area to the defence of which Argentina would rush, we are for purposes of election to the Security Council attached to Western Europe. The Western Hemisphere, as I understand it, begins in the east end of London, includes most of England, all of Ireland, and then goes westward into Siberia. The term has acquired a certain geopolitical significance because it has been a handy way to describe the unnatural but historical relationship between the United States and Latin America.

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Phillips Newton

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.


1958 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-430
Author(s):  
Gustave Weigel

One of the constant worries of the United States, since the role of a dominant world-power has been thrust on her, is the situation of Latin America. Relations with Canada require thought and preoccupation but they produce no deep concern. Canada and the United States understand each other and they form their policies in terms of friendly adjustment. Yet the same is not true when we consider the bloc of nations stretching to the south of the Rio Grande. They form two thirds of the geographic stretch of the western hemisphere, and they constitute a population equal to ours. The dependence on Latin America on the part of the United States in her capacity as an international power is evident. What is not evident is the way to make our friendship with our southern neighbors a more stable thing than the fragile arrangement which confronts us in the present.


Author(s):  
Brian Loveman

U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America in the 19th century initially focused on excluding or limiting the military and economic influence of European powers, territorial expansion, and encouraging American commerce. These objectives were expressed in the No Transfer Principle (1811) and the Monroe Doctrine (1823). American policy was unilateralist (not isolationist); it gradually became more aggressive and interventionist as the idea of Manifest Destiny contributed to wars and military conflicts against indigenous peoples, France, Britain, Spain, and Mexico in the Western Hemisphere. Expansionist sentiments and U.S. domestic politics inspired annexationist impulses and filibuster expeditions to Mexico, Cuba, and parts of Central America. Civil war in the United States put a temporary halt to interventionism and imperial dreams in Latin America. From the 1870s until the end of the century, U.S. policy intensified efforts to establish political and military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, including periodic naval interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, reaching even to Brazil in the 1890s. By the end of the century Secretary of State Richard Olney added the Olney Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (“Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition . . .”), and President Theodore Roosevelt contributed his own corollary in 1904 (“in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to exercise an international police power”). American policy toward Latin America, at the turn of the century, explicitly justified unilateral intervention, military occupation, and transformation of sovereign states into political and economic protectorates in order to defend U.S. economic interests and an expanding concept of national security.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Jessie Sherwood

When he declared, “the physical book really has had a 500-year run” in a 2009 interview, Jeff Bezos might well be forgiven for thinking that the book began with Gutenberg. Histories of the book have tended to give the impression that it emerged with movable type and existed largely, if not exclusively, in Mainz, New York, London, Paris, Venice, and environs. The first edition to A Companion to the History of the Book, first published in 2007, was a welcome, albeit modest, corrective to this narrow focus. While the bulk of its attention was on print in Western Europe and the United States, it incorporated chapters on manuscripts, books in Asia and Latin America, and the Hebraic and Islamic traditions, broadening the scope of book history both chronologically and geographically.


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