Japanese Multinationals in the United States: Continuity and Change, 1879–1990

1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Wilkins

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-611
Author(s):  
FORREST D. PASS

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.


2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Cumming ◽  
Grant Fleming

We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.


2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wells

As U.S. cities burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, their environmental problems multiplied. In response, some urban elites worked to rebuild the city to alleviate its environmental ills; others relocated to more environmentally enticing surroundings in new suburban developments. For members of both groups, new forms of transportation infrastructure profoundly shaped how they responded to the era's environmental crisis. Whereas efforts to rebuild and retrofit downtown were hampered by the difficulties and expense of working in densely built and populated areas, efforts to build on the urban fringe faced few serious obstacles. As a result, the most significant late nineteenth-century attempts to use transportation to remake city dwellers' relationships with nature in the United States - including tools developed with an eye on rebuilding dense city centers - exercised far greater influence on the expanding periphery of cities than on their environmentally fraught cores.


Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points of the preceding chapters. For the period up to World War I, it became clear that the elites of the United States, and its businessmen on the East and West coasts in particular, saw their country as a highly dynamic and modern industrial and financial power. Based on the idea of a competitive capitalism, American big business, in the wake of the great merger wave of the late nineteenth century and congressional legislation that had banned the formation of cartels and monopolies, developed in the direction of an oligopolistic market organization. These developments shaped corporate attitudes and practices toward the domestic and international economy from 1900 onward. No less important, the emergence of the United States as a major industrial power stirred Britain and Germany into responses to the American challenge.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


Peyote Effect ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 44-54
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Dawson

This chapter explores the first sustained efforts to enact a federal ban on peyote in the United States. Missionaries and Indian Agents began pressing for a ban in the late nineteenth century, only to be thwarted by Native American peyotists and their allies in the Bureau of American Ethnology, who argued both that peyote worship should be protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and that it was not deleterious to the health of individual peyotists. By 1917, however, state governments were beginning to pass local bans, with the first prohibitions passed in Colorado and Utah. In early 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the cause, holding hearings on a proposed ban. The record of those hearings offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways that racial anxieties were articulated through anxieties over peyotism in the early twentieth century. The ban passed the House but failed in the Senate.


Author(s):  
Gavin Miller

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.


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