A Bibliography of American Travellers’ Books about Cuba Published before 1900

1966 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold F. Smith

The Nearness of Cuba to the United States, lying as it does a scant ninety miles from the coast of Florida, has always provided a strong reason for American preoccupation with the “Pearl of the Antilles.” This geographic proximity has been a source of political consideration and concern for over a century. The historical roots of the western hemisphere, with Columbus’ landings in the Caribbean, the Spanish, English, and French colonization and imperialism, and our own interest, expressed most notably in the Monroe Doctrine, have kept Cuba central in our thoughts. Our continued interest during the twentieth century, following the removal of Spanish control from the island at the turn of the century, has intensified through the years, partly because its sugar has been important to our economy, and partly because the island has become politically unfriendly in the past decade.

1987 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Abraham F. Lowenthal

The Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and consequently their relations with the United States, have changed considerably during the past 25 years. Latin American and Caribbean nations are more populous, urban, industrialized, organized, and assertive than they were a generation ago. Even in a period of extensive economic difficulty, Latin America's nations are today more prosperous than in 1960. Most are better integrated into the world economy and are much more involved in international politics.


1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Gene A. Sessions

For nearly three decades after the turn of the twentieth century, the United States took upon itself the policing of the Caribbean and Central America. Under an expanded interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine known as the Roosevelt Corollary, American policymakers justified numerous military interventions in those small republics until Monroeism became a synonym in Latin America for imperialism and expansionism. By 1930, this policy of attempted hegemony by force was a failure: Public opinion at home and abroad had opposed the “big stick” concept of hemispheric relations almost from the beginning; the interventions seldom achieved their nebulous goals.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Esther B. Schupak

Abstract Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.


Author(s):  
Philip Gleason

A great many Catholic colleges existed in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. Exactly how many it is impossible to say with certainty because any answer presupposes agreement on the answer to a prior question: “What should be counted as a college?” The Catholic Directory for 1900 listed 10 universities, 178 “colleges for boys,” 109 seminaries, and 662 “academies for girls.” According to this count, there were no Catholic women’s colleges at that time, although the College of Notre Dame of Maryland graduated its first baccalaureate class in 1899 and is included among the 128 colleges for women listed in U.S. Commissioner of Education’s Report for 1899-1900. The same Report, however, listed only 62 Catholic institutions among the 480 included under the heading: “Universities and colleges for men and for both sexes.” No doubt some Catholic colleges simply failed to provide the information necessary to appear in the Commissioner’s Report. But their failure to do so is in itself significant; and even assuming that is what happened, it still leaves an enormous gap between the Commissioner’s figures and the 188 colleges and universities reported in the Catholic Directory. Moreover, many of the “colleges for boys” could, with equal justice, have been called academies, since elementary- and secondary-level students made up the majority of their student bodies. As the case of Notre Dame of Maryland indicates, Catholic “academies for girls” were beginning to upgrade themselves to collegiate status. Had the word college been more freely applied to non-Catholic institutions for women at an earlier date, a good many of these academies would probably have called themselves colleges long before, for they did not differ all that much from the “colleges for boys” in terms of curricular offerings and age-range of students. While the situation of Catholic institutions was particularly murky, the question “What makes a college a college?” engaged the attention of practically everyone involved in secondary and collegiate education at the turn of the century.


2019 ◽  
pp. 171-176
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington

The epilogue, which opens by tracing the legacy of Frieda Kliem’s Berlin throughout the rest of the twentieth century, insists that we cannot understand this famous twilight of “old” Germany and its transition into “new” Germany unless we take seriously the tensions surrounding love, intimacy, and dating that play out in Love at Last Sight. It further contends that the modern world—epitomized by the modern metropolis—not only exacerbated some of the long-standing and inherent risks of love, but also created a whole new set of dilemmas with which men and women throughout Germany, Europe, and the United States continue to grapple as they pursue love using similarly radical methods and technologies (most notably, online dating). The story of the Berliners who negotiated these same tensions at the turn of the century, the epilogue concludes, is thus eminently relevant to and instructive for our own contemporary world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin

This paper deconstructs the folklore surrounding an early twentieth-century zinc figure of an American Indian that stands in the center of the village of Mount Kisco, New York. The identity that “Chief Kisco” has assumed over the past hundred years elides the nature of the origins of the statue, which was intended not as a statement of communal identity, but rather as the exact opposite. As a ready-made art object, the statue was emblematic of a new network of commodified goods that transformed the cultural geography of the United States; as it was utilized in Mount Kisco, the statue was a piece of temperance propaganda with strong nativist undertones that tapped directly into the class, religious, and ethnic divisions running through the turn-of-the-century village.


1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bernell

The bitter rivalry between the United States and Cuba has occupied a position as one of the principal political disputes in the Western Hemisphere for the past 35 years. Since the rise of Fidel Castro, the governments of these two countries have placed themselves on opposite sides of almost every major regional and global issue. They have long held vastly different ideas about what constitutes a good and just government, what kind of international behavior is legitimate, and the ends that foreign policy should serve. Moreover, they have not only harbored political differences but also maintained a very intense dislike of one another. The United States has attempted to sustain a picture of Cuba as an international outlaw, the source of much turmoil, crisis, and mischief in the world. Adding a personal dimension to the attacks, the United States has also sought to demonize Castro, creating and continually portraying an image of him as the embodiment of evil.


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