PRELUDE TO THE AMERICAN WAR IN VIETNAM

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: U. of California Press, 1999) ("And there is this, finally, to say about America's avoidable debacle in Vietnam: something very much like it could happen again. Not in the same place, assuredly, and not in the same way, but potentially with equally destructive results. This is the central lesson of the war. The continued primacy of the executive branch in foreign affairs--and within that branch of a few individuals, to the exclusion of the bureaucracy--together with the eternal temptation of politicians to emphasize short-term personal advantage over long-term national interests, ensures that the potential will exist. For it cannot be forgotten that, given their priorities, the decision by Lyndon Johnson and his closest advisers for major war in Vietnam made a horrible kind of sense. They were not evil individuals, but individuals who are not evil enact policies that have evil consequences. A leader will assuredly come along who, like Johnson, will take the path of immediate resistance and in the process produce disastrous policy--provided there is a permissive content that allows it. Lyndon Johnson's War was also America's War; the circle of responsibility was wide. If future Vietnams are to be prevented, the American people and their representatives in Congress will have to meet the responsibilities no less than those who make the ultimate decisions. Otherwise, American soldier will again be asked to kill and be killed, and the compatriots will again determine, afterward, that there was no good reason why." Id. at 412-413. The American War in Afghanistan (or, Bush War I). The American War in Iraq (or, Bush War II). We really did not learn the "central lesson" of Vietnam in time to avoid those two mistakes on the part of George W. Bush, his circle of advisers, and the American people.).

Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and The Making of America's Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012) ("Contrary to common wisdom, it was Diem, not the United States, who possessed the dominant voice in South Vietnamese politics. Washington never had as much influence over Vietnamese affairs after 1954 as France had had before." Id. at xix. "Successful American presidents project a populist image. They do not place themselves above their compatriots but strive whenever possible to show qualities of 'average' Americans. If they have an intellectual bent, they do their best to hide it. To be likable, smiling, and unpretentious is all-important; to express the values of middle America an essential prerequisite to greatness." Id. at 45. "And certainly this much seems clear: A decision by the Truman administration to support Vietnamese independence in the late summer and fall of 1945 would have gone a long way toward averting the mass bloodshed and destruction that was to follow." Id. at 107. "To try to improve the quality of the humint [human intelligence], French officers sometimes resorted to coercive interrogation methods, including torture.... Just how often they did so remains impossible to know in the absence of methodologically reliable studies of the issue, but Vietnamese memoirs and histories of the war leave no doubt that the army and the security services used torture from an early point in the fighting and at various points thereafter. As for the efficacy of the practice, a postwar internal study by the Deuxieme Bureau was unambiguous: The use of torture during interrogations of Viet Minh prisoners did not improve the quality of the intelligence provided." Id. at 177. "One detects subtle but important differences here in how the French and British on the one hand and the Americans on the other approached the matter of diplomacy with Communist adversaries. Partly the divergence can be chalked up to Washington's hegemonic position--top dogs are seldom much interested in compromise. But other factors were at work as well. European governments, operating in physical proximity to rival powers of comparable strength, had long since determined that the resultant pressures placed a premium on negotiation and give-and-take. Only too familiar with imperfect outcomes, with solutions that were neither black nor white but various shades of gray, most European statesmen in the post-World  War II era presumed that national interests were destined to conflict and saw diplomacy as a means of reconciling them. They were prepared to make the best of a bad bargain, to accept the inevitability of failures as well as successes in international affairs." "Americans, on the other hand, shielded from predatory powers for much of their history by two vast oceans, and possessing a very different historical tradition, tended to see things in much less equivocal terms. For them, Old World diplomacy, with its ignoble and complex political choices, had to be rejected, and decisions made on the definite plane of moral principle. The United States, that principle taught, represented the ultimate form of civilization, the source of inspiration for humankind. Her policies were uniquely altruistic, her institutions worthy of special emulation. Any hostility to America was, by definition, hostility to progress and righteousness and therefore was, again by definition, illegitimate." Id. at 316-317. "It is highly revealing in this regard that each time French policy makers inquired to Washington about exploring the possibilities for a diplomatic agreement, they were rebuffed." Id. at 318. "A major U.S. policy document, NSC-124, approved by Truman on June 25 [1952], summarized the administration's position. The United States, it declared, would oppose negotiations leading to a French withdrawal. Should Paris nevertheless prefer such a course, the United States would seek maximum support from her allies for collective action, including the possibility of air and naval support for the defense of Indochina. Should China intervene, her lines of communication should be interdicted and a naval blockade of the Chinese coast imposed. If these 'minimum' measures proved insufficient, the United States should launch 'air and naval action in conjunction with at least France and the U.K against all suitable military targets in China.' If France and Britain refuse, Washington should consider taking unilateral action." Id. at 319. Arrogant pricks, that we Americans are!! "As a U.S. undersecretary of state would say years later, in arguing vainly against making Vietnam a large-scale American war: 'No great captain has ever been blamed for a successful tactical withdrawal.'" Id. at 410. "The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at it own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle." Id. at 534. "And America's intentions were already clear. As we have seen, the Eisenhower administration refused to identify itself with the Geneva Accords, and it resolved, even before the agreement was reached, to take responsibility for 'saving' southern Vietnam without 'the taint if French colonialism' and making it a 'bastion of the free world.' After the conference, the administration moved energetically to implement this vision, trying now to do alone what it had previously sought to do in association with France: Create and sustain an anti-Communist government in Vietnam. This government, freed from the encumbrance of the old colonial presence and possessing genuine nationalist legitimacy, could, U.S. official believed, compete effectively with Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam--provided it received proper guidance and support from the United States." Id. at 623-624. "A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, meanwhile, showed Uncle Sam gazing into a dark swamp labeled 'French Mistakes in Indochina.' The caption asked, 'How would another mistake help?'" Id. at 629. "As the Viet Cong attacks increased in frequency and intensity, Eisenhower indeed deepened U.S. military involvement in a way that has extremely important implications for the future. In mid-1959, the White House authorized American advisers to accompany South Vietnamese Army battalions on operational missions to offer combat guidance. Though the advisers were still forbidden to enter 'actual combat,' the change was highly significant--hitherto they had been confined to corps and division headquarters, training commands, and logistic agencies and had been obligated to remain behind whenever their units were on patrol. Now they would be in the field, in harm's way, their 'advising' duties greatly expanded." Id. at 698. And the rest is history. More than 58,000 Americans dead in the American War in Vietnam.).

ULYSSES S. GRANT

H. W. Brand, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace (New York: Doubleday, 2012) ("The business of the military is war, and war is simple and straightforward. In war the objective is plain and the measure of success undeniable. Your side wins or it loses; you live or you die. War is brutal, but its brutality allows differences of opinion to be resolves definitely. In politics things are never so straightforward. In politics differences of opinion are rarely resolved and almost never definitively; in politics the best outcomes are typically compromises that leave all parties grumbling. In politics the ignorant and venal have as much right to their vote as the educated and upstanding." Id. at 2. "'It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may always expect the most efficient service.'" Id. at 293. "But he couldn't send Congress off without requesting legislation to give substance to the promise of political equality. Grant appreciated the momentous nature of the latest development. 'The adoption of the Fifteen Amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life,' he declared in a special message to Congress. Scarcely a decade earlier the Supreme Court had ruled that blacks were not citizens and had no rights the government and the white majority were bound to respect; now blacks were the political equals of whites. Yet he understood that paper promises often required concrete action to make them real. To this end he requested that Congress support education for the freedmen. 'The framers of our Constitution firmly believed that a republican government could not endure without intelligence and education generally diffused among the people,' he said. 'If these recommendations were important than, with a population of but a few million, how much more important now, with a population of forty million?' He left the details to Congress, but he urged the legislators 'to take all the means within their constitutional powers to promote and encourage popular education throughout the country' and 'to see to it that all who possess and exercise political rights shall have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge which will make their share in the government a blessing and not a danger.'" "Congress wasn't so generous. The egalitarian zeal that had inspired the educational programs of the Freedmen's Bureau was waning; new benefits for blacks, if they cost money, were out of the question." Id. at 466. Time passes; the song remains the same.).

THE POLITICS OF AMERICA'S WAR AGAINST MEXICO

Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012) (This  the story of issues which the United States government and the American people have still yet to come to terms. "This is the story of five men, four years, and one foreign war.... That conflict, which breached George Washington's injunction to avoid entanglements abroad, was an act of expansionist aggression against a neighboring country. It reshaped the United Stats into lord of the continent and announced the arrival of a new world power. The U.S.-Mexican conflict also tipped an internecine struggle over slavery into civil war. Though both its justification and its consequences are dim now, this, America's first war against another republic, decisively broke with the past, shaped the future, and to this day affects how the United States acts in the world." "This is also a story about politics, slavery, Manifest Destiny, Indian killing, and what it meant to prove one's manhood in the nineteenth century. It explores the meaning of moral courage in America, the importance of legacies passed between generations, and the imperatives that turn politicians into leaders. And it attempts to explain why the United States invaded a neighboring country and how it came to pass that a substantial number of Americans determined to stop the ensuring war." Id. at xiii. "This book is the tale of not just five men and their families, but also of the rise of America's first national antiwar movement." Id. at xvi. "Democratic congressional leaders attached this declaration of war as a preamble to a bill authorizing funds for the troops, placed it in front of Congress, and demanded assent. It was a shrewd but contemptible move, and new in American history. By bundling the authorization of war funds with a declaration of war attributed to Mexico, Democrats ensured that any opponent of the measure could be accused of betraying the troops. Polk's supporters skillfully managed to stifle dissent in the House by limiting debate to two hours, an hour and a half of which was devoted to reading the document that accompanied the message. The flabbergasted opposition was caught completely off guard and struggled to amend the bill. Powerless and voiceless, they watched helplessly as Polk's supporters ruthlessly stifled debate and foisted war on Congress and the country." Id. at 104. "Illinois was, of course, a free state. It was formed out of territory designated free in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. But particularly in southern Illinois, slavery was very much a reality. According to law, adult slaves became free when they moved to the state. Those under age passed through a period of indenture before earning their freedom. In reality, however, a form of indenture not unlike slavery was the norm in southern Illinois among adults as well as young people. African Americans in Illinois were usually coerced into signing indenture contracts for years at a time. They could not leave the service of their master, could be whipped if disobedient, and were even referred to in legal statutes as 'slaves.' Many of these individuals were sold back into permanent slavery before their indentures expired." "There is little evidence of African Americans in Illinois becoming free after their period of indenture was up, but there is evidence that African Americans with the legal status of slave were still living in the state at the beginning of the U.S.-Mexican War. The 1818 state constitution outlawed the importation of slaves into Illinois but did not free the slaves already there; in 1849 there were still 331 listed in the federal census." Id. at 140-141. "The [embedded] journalists also reported that U.S. troops rioted immediately after entering Veracruz, setting fire to a nearby settlement, Boca Rio, after robbing and raping the inhabitants. Scott resorted to the public hanging of a rapist and issued an order establishing military courts to try Americans for crimes against Mexicans. His actions restored order, but not before the American people realized that American atrocities would not be limited to northern Mexico." Id. 172. "But by the summer of 1847, even hardened journalists from outside New England found themselves forced to report on and condemn American atrocities that left them questioning their assumptions about American morality. It appeared that 'the harsh treatment and privations the men are subjected to soon make one callous to all but his own feelings and interests,' one journalist explained." "The February massacre at Agua Nueva, when the Arkansas Rackensackers killed at least twenty-five Mexican civilian in a cave, was a key turning point in the reporting of the war. Few soldiers who had witnessed the event and scalped corpses could refrain from discussing it, and some of those who died at Buena Vista ... described the murders in the final letters they ever wrote home." Id. at 194. "Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail after refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the war. He delivered a lecture titled 'Civil Disobedience' calling for resistance against the government, which he declared had been 'abused and perverted' in the service of war and slavery. 'Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individual using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.' New England intellectuals such as James Russell Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson published trenchant critiques of 4the war." Id. at 196. 'Among the most tenacious soldiers fighting for Mexico were U.S. deserters who made up the San Patricio (Or St. Patrick's) Battalion. Desertion had been a problem for the U.S. Army since Taylor first entered Texas, particularly among the 40 percent of the regular army who were recent immigrants. Raised in foreign cultures, many immigrants looked at America's fantasy of Manifest Destiny with skepticism, if not outright hostility." Id. at 203. "Polk got California, but it was the antiwar movement that conquered a peace. The American public had turned against the war for a number of reasons, not all of which were admirable. Many were motivated by racism, unwilling to offer citizenship to the people of Mexico. The year 1848 marked the first time that the fear of incorporating supposedly 'inferior races' into the United States limited the nation's territorial expansion. Racism would continue to shape anti-imperialism for the rest of the century, most notably when the Senate rejected President Ulysses S. Grant's treaty to annex the Dominican Republic in 1870 on racial grounds. Others opposed annexing Mexican territory because the feared the increasing power of slaveholders, Some simply concluded that Mexican land wasn't worth the sacrifice of American blood and money." Id. at 263.).

THE "THIRD NATION" AT THE MEXICO-U.S. BORDER

Michael Dear, Why Walls Won't Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("The boundaries separating nation-states are usually regarded as robust, established features of the human condition, but they are not. The map of present-day European nation-states, for example, is largely a consequence of two twentieth-century world wars; and the principal impetus for this book is an adjustment in the boundary of the Mexican nation-state that is only a century-and-a-half old. Moreover, since the 1848 Treaty, the line separating the US and Mexico has been constantly renegotiated and adjusted as a consequence of geopolitics and daily life among border-dwellers. Exigencies of place and practice have often trumped the rigid imperative of international law, as national histories become subordinated to pragmatism, convenience, local memory, and informal tradition. It is the ascendancy of such local practices and traditions that gave birth to 'alternative' spaces such as a third nation." "A 'third nation' is a community carved out of the territories between two existing nation-states. The idea encompasses notions of a people, identity, territory, and practice. We speak of a nation when referring to a group of people whose members voluntarily identify with one another on the basis of a shared history and geography, including (for example) ethnics traits, cultural traditions, and joint alliances against external threats. The sentiment that unites its members is commonly called nationalism. Because many of the characteristics underlying nationalism are nebulous and even transitory, Benedict Anderson famously referred to nations as 'imagined communities.' Attachment to the land is one important feature of identity, and when a people acquires the sovereign rights to govern a territory--and that right is recognized by others--the territory is deemed to be a nation-state." "A third nation is an 'in-between' space, transcending the geopolitical boundary that divides the constitutive nation-states and creates from them a new identity distinct from the nationalisms of the host countries. The third nation at the US-Mexican border is not yet a nation-state, but we have encountered many of the characteristics of previous nations in the borderland. These include the ancient Chichimecans, the Spanish colonialists, and the Comanche and Apache imperiums; their vestiges stand as palimpsests of the present-day third nation." Id. at 71-72. "There are no magic words to solve the problems of immigration in the US or drug-related violence in Mexico. Instead, I offer one incontrovertible conclusion regarding the borderlands: the Wall will not work. Here's why. Because the Border Has Long Been a Place of Connection [] Because the Wall Is an Aberration in History [] Because Twin City Prosperity Requires There Be No Barriers [] Because People Always Find Ways over, under, through and around Walls [] Because Governments and Private Interests Continue Opening Portals in the Wall [] Because 'Third-Nationhood' Is Already in People's Minds [] Because Diaspora and Diversity Trump the Border Industrial Complex [] Because Mexico Is Going Global and Democratic [] Because Walls Always Come Down..." Id. at 170-177.).

"WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS?"

Louis Michael Seidman, On Constitutional Disobedience (Inalienable Rights Series) (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2012) ("If judges are more likely to act out of pure sense of constitutional obligation than political actors, then we can measure the extent to which constitutional obedience protects civil liberties by looking at the judiciary's record in providing such protection against the opposition of political actors. Since courts are systematically more likely to act because of obedience, the frequency of such cases provides an indication of how much effect obedience has on civil liberties." "As it happens, this is a subject that has fascinated many scholars in recent years, and their conclusions are virtually unanimous. Over the course of our history, judges have only occasionally moved in a forceful way to counter the all-things considered judgment of political actors when civil liberties were at risk." "For example, in the early years of the Republic, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which constituted perhaps the most egregious violation of First Amendment rights in our nation's history. The law prohibited criticism of government officers, and Federalist officials used them to prosecute and jail large numbers of Republican politicians and newspaper editors. The Supreme Court never had occasion to rule on the constitutionality of the acts, but lower federal judges enforced the laws with gusto." "Throughout the Progressive Era, the Supreme Court did little or nothing to counteract pervasive violations of the civil rights of African Americans. On the contrary, with only a very few exceptions, the Court upheld racially discriminatory laws. The Court finally struck down racial segregation in the mid-1950s, but only after approximately half the country had come to oppose it and, then, only with a symbolic decision that remained almost entirely unenforced. [] Serious enforcement did not come until the 1960s when southern segregationists suffered major defeats at the polls. When white backlash emerged and the political winds shifted again, the Court quickly retreated...." "During World War II, the Court upheld the forced relocation of thousands of loyal Japanese American citizens to what amounted to concentration camps.solely because of their national background. It also upheld the execution of American citizens alleged to be enemy saboteurs after hasty findings by a military commission and without the benefit of formal trials...." "The bottom line, then, is that even though courts are more likely to act out of constitutional obligation than political officials, courts have done relatively little to protect minority rights. Of course, there are counter examples...." Id. at 110-112. From the bookjacket: "What would the framers of the Constitution make of multinational corporations? Nuclear Weapons? Gay marriage? They led a preindustrial country, much of it dependent on slave labor, huddled on the Atlantic seaboard. Many of the Founders believed that it was appropriate to own human beings, that women had no political rights, and that only people owning property should vote. Yet we still obey their commands, two centuries and one civil war later. According to Louis Michael Seidman, it's time to stop." "In On Constitutional Disobedience, Seidman argues that, in order to bring our basic law up to date, it needs benign neglect. This is a highly controversial assertion. The doctrine of 'original intent' may be found on the far right, but the entire political spectrum--left and right--shares a deep reverence for the Constitution. And yet, Seidman reminds us, disobedience is the original intent of the Constitution. The Philadelphia convention had gathered to amend the Articles of Confederation, not toss them out and start afresh. The 'Living Constitution' school tries to bridge the gap between the framers and ourselves by reinterpreting the text in light of modern society's demands. But this attempt is doomed, Seidman argues. One might stretch 'due process of law' to protect an act of same-sex sodomy, yet a loyal-but contemporary reading cannot erase the fact that the Constitution allows a candidate who lost the popular election to be seated as president. And that is only one of the gross violations of popular will enshrined in the document . Seidman systematically addresses and refutes the arguments in favor of Constitutional fealty, proposing instead that it be treated as inspiration, not a set of commands." "The Constitution is at its best, a piece of poetry to liberty and self-government. If we treat it as such, the author argues, we will make better progress in achieving both.").

MANIFEST DESTINY AND DUELING NOTIONS OF 'MANLINESS'

Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) (Boston & New York: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2012).

Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2005) ("Was Manifest Destiny gendered? It is the argument of both this image [i.e., John Gast's 1872 American Progress] and this book that it was. Gender concerns shaped both the popular understanding of the meaning of Manifest Destiny and the experience of men and women abroad in the antebellum period. Expansionism in this painting is justified largely because it is domesticated. This illustration resonated with U.S. residents in the post-Civil War era in part because the vision of expansionism as 'progress,' and progress defined as the introduction of domesticity to the wilderness, fit with the hegemonic gender norms of the era. After the upheaval and staggering violence of four years of Civil War, survivors turned away from the heroic individualism and looked toward work and home for meaning. The growth of the country, 'from sea to sea,' in the decades before the war was idealized as an essentially peaceful process, as period when harmony reigned and Americans were unified in pursuit of their destiny. American Progress is a vision of expansion, both domesticated and restrained." "As this study will explore, expansionism didn't always look this way. In the antebellum era, many Americans justified territorial expansion precisely because it was not domesticated. Potential new American territories were embraced by some American men because they offered opportunities for individual heroic initiative and for success in love and war, which seemed to be fading at home. They might not wish to gaze upon an antebellum version of 'American Progress,' featuring a bloody soldier floating over the 'new frontiers' of Central America, the Caribbean, and Hawaii, but the violent implications of such a scene would not be incompatible with their vision of America's territorial future." "While domesticated expansion, as pictured by Gast, had its antebellum proponents, many others embraced a more aggressive expansionism, in which Manifest Destiny would be achieved through the direct and rightful force of arms." Id at 2-3. "This study investigates the meaning of Manifest Destiny for American men and women in the years between the U.S.-Mexican and Civil Wars, based on written accounts from letters and journals to political cartoons and newspapers, " Id. at 5. "This study argues that the American encounter with potential new territories in the antebellum period was shaped by concerns at home, especially evolving gendered ideals and practices. Dramatic changes in American society, economy, and culture reconfigured the meanings of both manhood and womanhood in the 1830s and 1840s. Antebellum Americans lived through an astonishing array of changes, including mass immigration from Europe; the emergence of evangelical Christianity in the Second Great Awakening; the end of bound labor in the North; the beginnings of a 'market revolution,' including specialization in agriculture and dependency on wider markets in even rural areas; changes in print technology; the decline of the artisan workshop; increasing class stratification; and universal white manhood suffrage, All these transformations shaped the ideology and practices of womanhood and manhood, and the meaning of Manifest Destiny, as well." Id. at 6. "This study focuses on what by 1848 had become two preeminent and dueling mid-century masculinities: restrained manhood and martial manhood. Restrained manhood was practiced by men in the North and South who grounded their identities in their families, in the evangelical practice of their Protestant faith, and in success in the business world. Their masculine practices valued expertise. Restrained men were strong proponents of domesticity or 'true womanhood.' They believed that the domestic household was the moral center of the world, and the wife and mother its moral compass. Restrained men worked hard to follow the example of Jesus Christ and to avoid sin. They were generally repulsed by the violent blood sports that captivated many urban working men. They did not drink to excess, and were likely, after the passage of the 1851 Maine temperance law, to support legislation to prohibit the sale of alcohol in other states. [] Restrained men were manly, in the  nineteenth-century sense of the term. Their manhood derived from being morally upright, reliable, and brave." Id. at 11-12. "Martial manhood was something else entirely. Martial men rejected the moral standards that guided restrained men; they often drank to excess with pride, and they reveled in their physical strength and ability to dominate both men and women. In a period when economic transformation placed increasing value on expertise, their masculine practices still revolved around dominance. They were not, in general, supporters of the moral superiority of women and the values of domesticity. Martial men believed that the masculine qualities of strength, aggression, and even violence, better defined a true man than did the firm and upright manliness of restrained men. At time they embraced the 'chivalry' of knighthood or other masculine ideals from the past. Martial men could be found in all parties, but the aggressively expansionist discourse of the Democratic Party held a special appeal to these men." Id. at 12. "The gendered culture of Manifest Destiny in the 1850s [] encouraged Northerners and Southerners to turn to violence as a solution to personal and national problems." Id. at 272. "Aggressive expansionism was ultimately a colossal failure. Martial manhood helped turn sectional differences into cause for war. Not only did filibustering [see below for definition of "filibustering."] inflame sectional feelings by introducing the specter of new slave territories at a time when the status of older territories was increasingly contentious, but it also failed to mediate emerging class distinctions, as proponents promised. The men who traveled to Latin America, Cuba, and Mexico failed to locate the magical path to success that eluded them at home. And of course, neither filibustering nor the marital attitudes of travelers helped American interests in Latin America." Id. at 273. "Filibustering referred to private armies invading other countries without official sanction of the U.S. government. Filibusters were men who on their own initiative went to war against foreign nations, often in the face of open hostility from their own governments. The term also was used for the invasions themselves. Although the actions of these mercenaries were clearly illegal, they received the praise and even adulation of aggressive expansionists." Id. at 5.).

VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS AND MANHOOD

Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1998) (From the bookjacket: "Though central to the social, political, and cultural life of the nineteenth-century city, the urban volunteer fire department has nevertheless been largely ignored by historians. Redressing this neglect, Amy Greenberg reveals the meaning of this central institution by comparing the fire departments of Baltimore, St. Louis,and San Francisco from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Volunteer fire companies protected highly flammable cities from fire and provided men with friendship, brotherhood, and a way to prove their civic virtue. "While other scholars have claimed that fire companies were primarily working class, Greenberg shows that they were actually mixed social groups; merchants and working men, immigrants and native-born--all found a found a common identity as firemen. Cause for Alarm presents a new vision of urban culture, one defined not by class but by gender. Volunteer firefighting united men in a shared masculine celebration of strength and bravery, skill and appearance. In an otherwise alienating environment, fire companies provided men from all walks of life with status, community, and an outlet for competition, which sometimes even led to elaborate brawls." "While this culture was fully respected in the early nineteenth century, changing social norms eventually denounced the firemen's vision of masculinity. Greenberg assesses the legitimacy of accusation of violence and political corruption against the firemen in each city, and places the municipalization of firefighting in the context of urban social change, new ideals of citizenship, the rapid spread of fire insurance, and new firefighting technologies.).

'UMPERIAL' AMERICA?

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("The Western values that the United States was later sometimes accused of pushing onto an unwilling, culturally different world were, in fact, global ones that led to a new world order. The United States acted as an umperial power in this new order. Although empire is not a perfect metaphor, it describes the U.S. function in global affairs more accurately than the outdated but widely used term 'empire.' It also illumines the historical costs, consequences, and contradictions of such a role." Id. at 3. "In it, this book suggests, Washington sometimes exerts a unique, controversial, and (probably) temporary authority that arises from America's particular historical experience, but in defense of values that have become common. In other words, the United States does not merely impose on others what George Kennan once famously dismissed as America's provincial (and dangerously delusional) 'moralistic-legalistic' view of the international life." Id. at 6. "In recounting the tale of foreign relations from 176 to the present, this book teases out three goals or practices that gradually transcended ancient differences and pushed both the United States and the rest of the world in the direction of democratic capitalism. These are access to opportunity, arbitration of disputes, and transparency in government and business. Such terms do not have the emotive appeal (or historical baggage) of 'life, liberty, and ... happiness,' but perhaps partly for that reason they may help us better understand how these broad trends worked in a variety of cultural contexts." Id. at 6. "Few principles apply all the time. But it is nonetheless helpful to identify general forces underlying modern history, so long as they can be concretely documented and we accept that they do not account for all that happened in the past or guarantee what happens next. [] Each generation confronts its own dangers. To observe that democratic capitalism prevailed is not to say that it is the final or best system, as others may yet emerge. There is not triumphal or comforting 'end of history'." Id. at 5. "The United States is no paragon of virtue and has almost invariably fallen short of its rhetoric and aspirations. American citizens are sometimes embarrassingly boastful and ambitious, calling their country 'the greatest nation in the world.' as if all others do not have the same pride or cannot overhear. Like other great powers, Washington has sometimes acted like a bully as well. The U.S. government can be callous, foolish, and self-serving in the extreme--all of which should be unsurprising given human nature. This does not make it an empire, nor does it mean that America's highest ideals are hollow illusions. It is naive to assume that ideals are incompletely realized because people do not genuinely believe in them. Ideals are like laws: behavioral codes that are violated constantly but still important, influential, and indicative. Without them, we have no compass." Id. at 19-20. "Methods affected outcomes. Britain chose physical violence in China, and the local government chose to ignore what it could learn from the West. China became less stable and prosperous in subsequent decades. The Americans used persuasion in Japan, and the local government adopted new practices for its own purposes. Japan became a world power within forty years. Japanese and American methods more closely anticipated the patterns of the future than did those of the other two countries. All of them, however, were headed toward a more accessible, less controllable world." Id. at 117. "Calling the United States an  empire has yielded not practicable solutions because the nation and the world system in which it its are simply not structured in that way. The nation cannot stop being something it is not. [] A more realistic, evidence-based diagnosis is that the United States is the enforcer of what is, most of the time, the collective will: the maintenance of a world system with relatively open trade borders, in which arbitration and economic sanctions are the preferred methods of keeping the peace and greater and greater numbers of people have at least some political rights. When sanctions and incentives fail, the United States is (generally speaking) expected to step up. It easily and too often exceeds its authority in doing so because it has none, under the present system." The Truman Doctrine: "The president then delivered the crucial line. 'I believe that it must be the poicy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting atempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures,' Truman asserted. The United States would spend the next six decdes attempting to reach thais bar." Id. at 288. "Nonetheless, domestic and international expectations create real tensions. Other nations demand a response to economic and physical threats, and Americans do so as well. [] The United States must financially and militarily defend those 'resisting attempted subjugation,. This burdens America's army, economy, and psyche. In 2010, the percentage of U.S. GDP devoted to defense was double, triple, even quadruple that spent by its allies in Europe and the Americas. In Ireland and Iceland, students went to university for free, while young Americans accumulated enormous college debts simply to qualify for work. The Truman Doctrine lives on." "It does not have to. If the American public wishes to reevaluate this national commitment, the logical questions to ask are: What would happen if the United States ceased to fulfill this role in the world? Can the role be eliminated? If not, who else might perform it? How can the United States persuade another nation, group of nations, or supranational body to undertake the responsibility, with minimal loss of global amity and stability? Can America exercise the best kind of leadership by creating a new leader?" "Alternatively, the United States might choose to continue playing umpire. If no other entity is willing to do so, and the United States still is, yet other questions cry for attention. What should be the quid pro quo? To what extent, if any, should it receive exemptions from rules it expects others to follow, because of the vulnerability to which this role exposes the nation--or do such exemptions breed arrogance? What is the significance of the fact that the U.S. Congress, a democratic assembly, does not always ratify schemes of international cooperation championed by the president (from the Versailles Treaty, for example, to the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming)? What, specifically, should the United States seek to 'get' from playing umpire--financially, strategically, or psychologically? These are difficult questions, but at least they have answers." Id. at 336-337. This is a must read for anyone who wants to think seriously about the United States's role in the world.).

[BAD] ECONOMIC POLICIES CAN CARRY NEGATIVE GLOBAL REPERCUSSIONS

Michael Pettis, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road Ahead for the World Economy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "China's economic growth is sputtering, the Euro is under threat, and the United States is combating serious trade disadvantages. Another Great Depression? Not quite. Noted economist and China expert Michael Pettis argues instead that we are undergoing a critical rebalancing of the world economies. Debunking popular misconceptions, Pettis shows that severe trade imbalances spurred on the recent financial crisis and were the result of unfortunate policies that distorted the savings and consumption patterns of certain nations. Pettis examines the reasons behind these destabilizing policies, and he predicts severe economic dislocation--a lost decade for China, the breaking of the Euro, and a receding of the U.S. dollar--that will have long-lasting effects." "Pettis explains how China has maintained massive--but unsustainable--investment growth by artificially lowering the cost of capital. He discuses how Germany is endangering the Euro by favoring its own development at the expense of its neighbors. And he looks at how the U.S. dollar's role as the world's reserve currency burdens America's economy. Although various imbalances may seen unrelated, Pettis shows that all of them--including the U.S. consumption binge, surging debt in Europe, China's investment orgy, Japan's long stagnation, and the commodity boom in Latin America--are closely tied together, and that it will be impossible to resolve any issue without forcing resolution for all." "Demonstrating how economic policies can carry negative repercussions the world over, The Great Rebalancing sheds urgent light on our globally linked economic future." From the text: "Mature, rich, diversified countries ... have never needed foreign funding." "But when these countries did receive large capital inflows that were not associated with burgeoning productive investment at home--the obvious examples being the United States and peripheral Europe in the past decade--the nearly automatic result was that the recipient country was forced to choose between rising unemployment or an unsustainable increase in debt. Without some automatic adjustment mechanism preventing the strategic accumulation of dollar reserves or local assets by other countries, large imbalances could persist in ways that would have been impossible earlier." 'The breakdown of Bretton Woods eliminated one of the classic adjustment mechanisms--the need to back money creation with gold--that prevented countries from accumulating unlimited amounts of foreign reserves, and it was only afterward that it became possible for countries that normally should have been net capital importers to reverse positions with countries that normally should have been net capital exporters." "This is certainly not to say that we were better off under the gold standard, but it does suggest that some of the automatic adjustment mechanisms under the gold standard were extremely useful and should somehow be replicated." Id. 169.).

THE AMERICAN DOLLAR AS THE INTERNATIONAL RESERVE CURRENCY: BRETTON WOODS, HARRY DEXTER WHITE, AND THE TRIFFLIN DILEMMA

Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("Keynes would apply his insight in the design of a new global monetary architecture, built around a new international reserve currency--one that would be a threat to the global supremacy of the U.S. dollar and which White was determined to keep from seeing the light of day." Id. at 3. "However, we will see that the primary reason White did not become the institution's [the IMF's] head--an no American has ever since become its head--was emerging revelations of White's activities on behalf of the Soviets." "This is the story of the rise and all of Harry White's blueprint for a new world order, and the vestiges of that fall that we wrestle with today." Id. at 7. "Lend-Lease was greeted with enormous relief in London. [] What Churchill had certainly not understood at the time was how costly Lend-Lease assistance would turn out to be after the war. The Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, as its official name made clear, was not intended as an act of generosity. Roosevelt, who had promised the electorate in 1940 that American 'boys [would not] be sent into any foreign wars,' contrived it as a stopgap means of keeping Germany and Japan at bay; that it happened also to be essential to Britain's survival was largely incidental." Id. at 107. "Morgenthau saw the financiers of the City of London, like those of Wall Street, as a force hostile to the aims of the New Deal. Knowing that the British saw in Lend-Lease not just a means of securing vital wartime supplies, but also a means of conserving precious gold and dollar balances that would prove essential to preserving their empire and influence after the war, the Secretary was determined not too let these balances grow beyond the minimum necessary for Britain to survive the war." "In gauging and monitoring these balances, he was wholly dependent on White, who in Blum's words was 'an ardent nationalist in his monetary thinking,' and sought openly, with the Secretary's approval, to make the dollar the dominant currency in the postwar world.' White therefore also resisted, even 'more vigorously than Morganthau, any deliberate expansion of England's gold and dollar holdings.'" Id. at 108. "The main stated purpose of White's Stabilization Fund would be to reduce, dramatically and perpetually, barriers to international trade and the associated capital flows. The pre-1914 gold standard had achieved both of these aims to an historically unprecedented degree, without any complex, formal international agreement of the sort White was proposing. But the gold standard had been made the bogeyman for all the errors of monetary policy in the 1920s." "The most important of White's aims, however--the one that would obsess him in the coming years--was very deliberately left unstated: to elevate the status of the dollar to that of the world's sole surrogate for gold, such that cross-border gold movements would no longer have the power to dictate changes in U.S. monetary policy. This would be set entirely at the discretion of American experts, and would be transmitted to the rest of the world by way of fixed exchange rates." Id. at 128. "The key problem Treasury faced in influencing public opinion was that the Bretton Woods agreements were simply too abstruse and complicated to engage it. 'There is virtually no public opinion about the Bretton Woods conference,' concluded a report submitted by the Office of War Information to the Treasury.'There is no general discussion of it because there is no interest; and there is no interest because there in no comprehension of the issues involved and the plans proposed, or their importance.' Congressmen did not get it either. As Luxford related to Morgenthau, 'one sympathetic Congressman (Voorhis) had told me that "Congress had no opinion on subject because Congress did not understand it."' Even Fed board chairman Marriner Eccles, a delegate at Bretton Woods, found it all a haze. 'Harry, your plan is so darned complicated,' he complained to White. 'I asked our people to put [it]down briefly in layman's language so I could understand the darned thing, just what it means.'" Id. at 254-255.  "Harry White, simply stated, had been wrong. The United States could not simultaneously keep the world adequately supplied with dollars and sustain the large gold reserves required by its gold-convertibility commitment. In fact, no country could perform such a feat with its national currency. The logic was laid bare by Belgian-born American economist Robert Trifflin in his now-famous 1959 congressional testimony. There were, he explained, 'absurdities associates with the use of national currencies as international reserves.' It constituted a 'built-in de-stablizer' in the world monetary system. The December 1958 European convertibility pledges, far from representing the final critical step into a new monetary era, 'merely return[ed] the world to the unorganized and nationalist gold exchange standard of the late 1920s.'" "When the world accumulates dollars as reserves, rather than gold, it puts the United States in an impossible position. Foreigners lend the excess dollars back to the United States. This increases U.S. short-term liabilities, which implies that the Unites States should boost its gold reserves to maintain its convertibility pledge. But there's the rub: if it does so, the global dollars 'shortage' persists; if it doesn't, the United States ultimately winds up hopelessly trying to guarantee more and more dollars with less and less gold. There is no stable, durable circumstance in which the United States can emit enough dollars to satisfy the world's trading needs and few enough to ensure that they can always be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold. The United States is ultimately damned if it meets the world's liquidity requirements and damned if it doesn't--as is the rest of the world. This became known as 'the Trifflin dilemma." If concerted international action wee not taken to change the system, Trifflin explained, a deadly dynamic would set in. The United States would need to deflate, devalue, or impose trade and exchange restrictions to prevent the loss of all its gold reserves. This could cause a global financial panic and trigger protectionist measures around the world. Harry White's creation, in Trifflin's rendering, was an economic apocalypse in the making." Id. at 333-334. From the bookjacket: "A remarkable deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn. The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history." Most definitely!!).

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN DREAM

Carl E. Van Horn, Working Scared (Or Not at All): The Lost Decade, Great Recession, and Restoring the Shattered American Dream (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "At the end of the twentieth century,with the economy booming and unemployment at historic lows, the American economy was a job-producing marvel. The first decade of the twenty-first century was entirely different as the worst economy in seventy years, the Great Recession, crushed the lives of tens of millions of workers and their families, forestalled careers, scrapped hopes for college educations, delayed retirements, and foreclosed family homes. American workers experienced the best and worst of times and have endured an entire 'lost decade' of high unemployment, stagnant or declining incomes, and anxiety. Working Scared draws on nearly twenty-five thousand interviews with employed and unemployed Americans conduced from 1998 to 2012. These voices of American workers tell a compelling story about wrenching structural changes and recessions during one of the most volatile periods in U.S. economic history. This book represents one of the most comprehensive social science research portraits of the views of American workers about their jobs, the workplace, and government's role in the labor market. Working Scared will help citizens, policy makers, educators, businesses, unions, and community leaders better understand what is happening to the U.S. workforce. It also describes the essential national priorities and policies that will assist frustrated, angry, and scared American workers and the reforms that will help restore the American dream of secure employment and intergenerational progress." In the game of Musical Chairs, each time the music stops someone is left without a seat. At the end, only one person has a seat. America's economy is prolonged game of Musical Chairs. The 1 percent will have their chairs, and the 99 percent will just have to dance to a barely audible, oldies tune called The American Dream.).

HOW AMERICA ALMOST TOOK DOWN THE WORLD

Alan S. Blinder, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("'When the music stops ... things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing.' Those were the immortal words on July 8, 2007, of Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citigroup. It may be the most famous, or infamous, quotation of the entire financial crisis. Almost exactly a month later, the music stopped abruptly--and so did the dancing." Id. at xv. "THE TEN FINANCIAL COMMANDMENTS: So, what are some of the key principles for finance going forward? According to an old joke, there are three secrets to designing a safe and sound financial system---the problem is that nobody knows what they are. Let me instead try to encapsulate the major financial lessons form the crisis into ten commandments for the future of finance. 1. Thous shalt Remember That People Forget.... 2. Thou Shalt Not Rely on Self-Regulation.... 3. Thou Shalt Honor Thy Shareholders..... 4. Thou Shalt Elevate the Importance of Risk Management.... 5. Thou Shalt Use Less Leverage.... 6. Thous Shall Keep It Simple, Stupid.... 7. Thou Shalt Standardize Derivatives and Trade Then on Organized Markets.... 8. Thou Shalt Keep Things on the Balance Sheet..... 9. Thou Shalt Fix Perverse Compensation Systems.... 10. Thou Shalt Watch Out for Ordinary Consumer-Citizens...." Id. at 433-437. From the bookjacket: "With bracing clarity, Blinder shows us how the U.S. financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good--and too unregulated for the public good--experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. Things started unraveling when the much-chronicled housing bubble burst, but the ensuing implosion of what Blinder calls the bond bubble was larger and more devastating. Some people think of the financial industry as a sideshow with little relevance to the real economy--where the jobs factories, and shops are. But finance is more like the circulatory system of the economic body: If the blood stops flowing, the body goes into cardiac arrest. When America's financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover just how truly interconnected--and fragile--the global financial system is."  "Some observers argue that large global forces were the major culprits of the crisis. Blinder disagrees, arguing that the problem started in the United States and spread abroad, as complex, opaque, and overrated investment products were exported to a hungry world, which was nearly poisoned by them. The second part of the story explains how American and international government intervention kept us form a total meltdown, Many of the U.S. government's action, particularly the Fed's, were previously unimaginable. And to an amazing--and certainly misunderstood--extent, they worked. The worst did not happen." Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable. After the Music Stopped is an essential history that we cannot afford to forget because history teaches that it could happen again.".).

BUGBEARS AND BANKING REFORM

Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig, The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("Banking experts, including many academics, seemed to believe that banks are so different from all other businesses that basic principles of economics and finance do not apply to them." Id. at x. "People like convenient narratives, particularly if those narratives disguise their own responsibility for failed policies." Id. at x. "Do not believe those who tell you that things are better now than they had been prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and that we have a safer system that is getting better as reforms are put in place. Today's banking system, even with proposed reforms, is as dangerous and fragile as the system that brought us the recent crisis." Id. at xi-xii. "The English classical scholar Francis Cornford wrote in 1908, 'There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do. Then, of course, comes the difficulty of making sure that it is right.' He goes on to explain how 'bugbears,' sources of dread or false alarms, are used to raise doubts or scare. If Cornford was writing today, he would surely talk about the bugbear of 'unintended consequences.'" Id. at 3. "[W]hat we refer to ask the bankers' new clothes, flawed and misleading claims that are made in discussions about banking regulation. Many of the claims resonate with basic feelings, yet they have no more substance than the emperor's fictitious clothes in Andersen's story." Id. at 9. "Borrowing is not the only topic of the book. Many more flawed claims are made in the debate on banking regulation. Most of these bankers' new clothes are also bugbears, warnings of unintended consequences meant to scare policymakers out of doing something without focusing properly on the issues or proposing how the actual problems should be solved." Id. at 9-10.).

BERNANKE'S 2008 LECTURES ON THE FEDERAL RESERVE

Ben S. Bernanke, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis: Lectures by Ben. S. Bernanke (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "In 2012, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, gave a series of lectures about the Federal Reserve and the 2008 financial crisis, as part of a course at George Washington University on the role of the Federal Reserve in the economy. In this unusual event, Bernanke revealed important background and insights into the central bank's crucial action during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Taken directly from these historic talks, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis offers insights into the guiding principles behind the Fed's activities and the lessons to be learned from its handling of recent economic challenges." " Bernanke tracks the origins of the Federal Reserve, from its inception in 1914 through the Second World War, and he looks at the Fed post-1945, when it began operating independently from other governmental departments such as the Treasury. During this time the Fed grappled with episodes of high inflation, finally tamed by then-chairman Paul Volcker. Bernanke also explores the period under his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, known as the Great Moderation. Bernanke then delves into the Fed's reaction to the recent financial crisis, focusing on the central bank's role as the lender of last resort and discussing efforts that injected liquidity into the banking system. Bernanke points out that monetary policies alone cannot revive the economy, and he describes ongoing structural and regulatory problems that need to be addressed." "Providing first-hand knowledge of how problems in the financial system were handled, The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis will long be studied by those interested this critical moment in history.).

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GUERRILLA/TERRORIST WARFARE

Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (New York & London: Liveright, 2013) ("What follows might be called Twelve Articles. It sums up the lessons of Invisible Armies. 1.  Guerrilla warfare has been ubiquitous and important throughout history." "2. Guerrilla warfare is not an 'Eastern Way of War'; it is the universal war of the weak." "3. Guerrilla warfare has been both underestimated and overestimated." "4. Insurgencies have been getting more successful since 1945 but still lose most of the time." "5. The most important development in guerrilla warfare in the last two hundred years has been the rise of public opinion." "6. Conventional tactics don't work against an unconventional threat." "7. Few counterinsurgents have ever succeeded by inflicting mass terror--at least in foreign lands." "8. Population-centric counterinsurgency is often successful, but it's not as touchy-feely as commonly supposed." "9. Establishing legitimacy is vital for any successful insurgency or counterinsurgency--and, in modern times, that is hard to achieve for a foreign group or government." "10. Most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire." "11. Guerrillas are most effective wen able to operate with outside support--especially with conventional army units." And "12. Technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war--but that may be changing." Id. at 557-567. "From the bookjacket: "Narrating over thirty centuries of 'unconventional' military conflict, ... Max Boot has created a work that traces guerrilla warfare and terrorism from antiquity to the present. Challenging the conventional wisdom that irregular warfare is the historical exception, Boot demonstrates that loosely organized partisan or guerrilla warfare is the norm, and that it is the clash of conventional, uniformed military forces that is the historical anomaly." "Beginning with the first insurgencies in the ancient world, great powers--from Alexander the Great to Imperial Rome--discovered that guerrilla armies were much harder to defeat than regular troops. This was a lesson taught by the nomadic raiders from the Persian highlands, who brought down the first empire on record, in Mesopotamia, and by the relentless Hun raiders who helped bring down the Roman Empire." "In the modern era, Boot deftly shows that, despite the proliferation of powerful national armies, guerrilla and terrorist campaigns not only persisted but also reached new heights. A dramatic chapter on the militiamen dubbed the "American hornets' illustrates how the American revolutionaries were the quintessential 'unseen enemy,' striking and the disappearing into the general population. It was also the Americans who pioneered the use of propaganda to defeat a stronger enemy--a strategy that future insurgents would emulate to fight the United States itself. Boot expands his analysis of liberal revolts to include the Haitian slave uprising led by the 'Black Spartacus' Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Greek War of Independence, and the campaign for Italian unification spearheaded by the charismatic Giuseppe Garibaldi. Terrorist campaigns waged in areas like Belle Epoque Paris, tsarist Russia, and the Reconstruction South carry the narrative into the late nineteenth century." "Perhaps nowhere is the Invisible Armies narrative more dramatic than in the calamitous twentieth century, when the power of public opinion and the transformation of guerrillas into celebrities and almost superhuman figures changed the calculus of warfare for both insurgents and their enemies. Men such as the archaeologist-turned-military adviser T. E. Lawrence; Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap, a self-taught soldier who routed the French and the later the Americans form Indochina; and the 'Quiet American,' Edward Lansdale, form a diverse tapestry of characters,whose personalities and ability to harness public opinion came to define these conflicts." "Effortlessly waving back and forth through history in a way that contextualizes the guerrilla and terrorist challenges of the twenty-first century, Invisible Armies is a definitive work on unconventional warfare, 'a must-read for scholars, military and government professionals and a fascinating journey for the general public' (General Jack Keane).").

JOHN BROWN & HARPERS FERRY RAID

John Stauffer & Zoe Trodd, ed., The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("Immediately after his raid and death, Brown became one of the most contentious figures in American culture, a national symbol embodying contradictions: A Christ-like and satanic demon, a martyr and madman, a meteor of peace and of war. In the 150 years since his raid, Americans have continued to view Brown's legacy and his relation to American values, with deep ambivalence. For some he has been the nation's archetypal freedom fighter; for most, a dangerous fanatic, to be relegated to the historical dustbin with a corps of other easily forgotten quixotic madmen." Id. at xix-xx. "In fact, each generation since 1859 has asked and answered for itself the questions phrased by Du Bois on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown's raid: 'Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth today?' From Brown's own generation forward, through secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the long civil rights movement of antilynching, desegregation, and labor reform in the twentieth century, to activists on the left and right who claim his mantle today, the tribunal that he himself envisaged has sat in judgment and pronounced--in Brown's own words--that the world was different for his 'living and dying in it.'" Id. at xlix. One of my most favorite piece of writing, one I first read in high school, is Henry David Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown," October 30, 1859. Here are the two passages which stirred me then ... and stir me still. "I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted our of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. When a man stands up serenely against condemnation and vengeance of making, rising above them literally by a whole body--even though he were of late the vilest murderer, who has settled that matter with himself--the spectacle is a sublime one--didn't ye know it, ye Liberators, ye Tribunes, ye Republicans?--and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect." Id. at 107. "It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoot me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jails! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp's rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp's rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them." Id. at 108. From Henry David Thoreau, "The Last Days of John Brown," July 4, 1860: "We seem to have forgotten that the expression 'a liberal education' originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. In a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the State;  and those scholars of Austria and France who, however learned they may be, are contented under their tyrannies, have received only a servile education." Id. at 111.).

FOUNDATION MYTHS AND REALITIES IN THE BORDERLAND THAT BECAME CHICAGO

Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) ("The Potawatomis and their allies who fought against the United States at Chicago in August 1812 had their own motivations that were related to, but not the same as, those of the United States or Great Britain. They were fighting to reduce the influence of the United States in their country by driving the United States out entirely--or at least those settlers intent on destroying Indian Country. The Potawatomis and their allies did not see the arrival of American settlers and institutions as progress, but a catastrophe." "From this perspective, Chicago did not develop first from a resource-rich agricultural hinterland that 'called forth' a great city. There were no railroads or stockyards or steel mills. Instead, Chicago emerged from the imperial rivalries of the trans-Appalachian West--at the crossroads of multi-racial and multi-ethnic communities. It is not a story of the heartland, but of a time when Chicago was part of the borderland between competing colonial and tribal claims. The Chicago that emerges from this story results from a uniquely American mix of people and shifting circumstances, whose advantages only came into focus when American sovereignty successfully overcame alternatives like a permanent Indian Country or an extended period of British colonial rule. Chicago developed because of American conquest. It is as much a part of the narrative of manifest destiny as the vast expanses of the Great West." "Id. at 5."[Jean] Lalime knew as well as anyone that there was no monolithic U.S. presence at Chicago. The garrison was an insult to many local Potawatomis and their neighbors, who rejected the Greenville Treaty and subsequent land cessions. With a force well under a hundred, Captain Whistler's outpost remained ever vulnerable to attack. The work of Indian Agent Charles Jouett provided a counterpoint to military action. He cultivated good relations with area Potawatomis through the distribution of annuities and other gifts. At the same time, the U.S. factor, Matthew Irwin, offered goods at the government trading house at competitive prices to Potawatomis willing to come to Fort Dearborn to trade. The United States sent out mixed signals to Chicago to area Indians: offering friendship and building a fort; promoting peace and threatening war; offering gifts and taking land. These contradictions were inherent in the official policies of the Jefferson administration and made Chicago a place of opportunity and danger." Id. at 65. "While the militias in Illinois and Indiana mainly attacked empty Indian villages during the fall of 1812, they also threatened metis trading villages. For the militiamen, the French and metis traders were as much a part of the Indian Country that they sought to destroy as the Indians themselves. As well, many suspected that the traders were in league with Great Britain." Id. at 180.  "Foundation myths tell us as much about contemporary affairs as they do about what took place in the earliest days of a place, a people, or a nation. They shape our views on politics and society today. In light of their crucial importance to the present and the future, I would encourage Chicagoans to adopt a more inclusive foundation story that encompasses the whole of the American era, one in which Chicago was part of the Indian Country of the Western Great Lakes." Id. at 245.).

ORGANIZED RACISM AND POLITICAL EXTREMIS

David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and in the midst of the growing Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when the KKK boasted over 4 million members. Most surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership--more than the rest of the South combined--was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism." "Klansville, U.S.A. is the first substantial history of the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Why the UKA flourished in the Tar Hell state presents a fascinating puzzle and a window into the complex appeal of the Klan as a whole. Drawing on a range of new archival sources and interviews with Klan members, including state and national leaders, the book uncovers the complex logic of KKK activity. David Cunningham demonstrates that the Klan organized most successfully where whites perceived civil rights reforms to be a significant threat to their status, where mainstream outlets for segregationist resistance were lacking, and where the policing of the Klan's activities was lax." "Moreover, connecting the Klan to the more mainstream segregationists and anti-communist groups across the South, Cunningham provides valuable insights into southern conservatism, its resistance to civil rights, and the regions subsequent dramatic shift to the Republican Party." "Klansville, U.S.A. illuminates a period of Klan history that has been largely ignored, shedding new light on organized racism and on how political extremism can intersect with mainstream institutions and ideals.").

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF 1775

Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good year for Revolution (New York: Viking, 2012) ("The 'financialization' of America--an ill omen I had written about since 1993--helped bring about a crash in 2008, but postcrash politics did not yield the needed far-reaching reform. Finance continued to sit in the catbird seat. Between 2008 and 2012, the relative economic decline of the United States and the shift of influence to Asia moved from theory to reality." Id. at xi. "Taken together, religion and ethnicity offer the best yardsticks of how Americans chose sides in the political and military clashes that became the Revolution. That is true from the Carolina backcountry through the middle colonies to the white-steepled towns of New England. Not that adequate detail can always be found." "Besides which, it's often difficult to disentangle which identity was the motivating factor." Id. at 67. "The ethnic makeup of British North America in 1775 also complicated Patriot enlistment and mobilization. Over one third of the colonists taking up arms for 'the rights of Englishmen' were German, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, or Scot-Irish. Some never assumed that they enjoyed the 'rights of Englishmen,' cherishing instead Old World ties and relationships to Dutch or German state churches (which often made them Loyalists). Ethnic and religious identification were usually central to colonists' views and loyalties, and they cut in many ways." Id. at 69. "[T]he principal wartime yardsticks and decision-making factors for Germans, as for most other colonials, reflected more religion than ethnicity. The latter was frequently interwoven but secondary." Id. at 72. "[W]e can fairly say, based on the patterns of political faction, that religion--though only a collateral cause of the Revolution--played a major role in guiding its political alignments and loyalties." Id. at 73. "[R]oughly a dozen economic circumstances and resentments played a significant role in 1774-1775 and the run up to revolution. [T]he dozen elements cannot be neatly disentangled, and they also frame two of the Revolution's principal regional motivations. In addition ... a catalogue of the war's economic interest groups and constituencies--mercantile, maritime, plantation, professional, speculative, and debt-ridden--puts further emphasis on the Revolution's commercial ingredients." Id. at 92. "Economic constituencies in the American Revolution must weigh in any practical analysis. The very different responses to mercantilism between whale oil producers and irate pig and bar iron makers, for example, suggest less interest in imperial theory than attention to industry-by-industry economics. As for the role of economics in constituency formation, degrees of proof can be found in each of the dozen economic issues that stirred pre-Revolutionary unhappiness. The legal acrimony surrounding 'taxation without representation' fell away quickly enough when nonimportation and nonexportation moved to the forefront in 1774; and whether these measures were constitutional seem to matter hardly at all." Id. at 131. "Let us conclude with the thesis raised earlier: that by taking control of local government, militia structures, and police power across most of the thirteen-colony landscape in 1774-1775, insurgents established the framework that eventually brought success in the War for Independence. In contrast to the naivete that citizen-soldiers must prevail through virtue, this policy represented a steely realpolitik." "The American rebels of 1775, unlike most other popular revolutionaries before or since, enjoyed the rare benefit of beginning their war in control of the local armed forces, the colonial militias. To be sure, during the years or so before April 19, that achievement required foresight, purging, and strong-arming. 'The colonial militia did not simply slide into the Revolution,' according to military historian John Shy. 'Military officers, even where they were elected, held royal commissions, and a significant number of them were not enthusiastic about rebellion. Purging and restructuring the militia was an important step toward revolution, one that deserves more attention than it has received.'" Id. at 160-161. "But any plausible definition of ideology must include an emerging sense of economic frustration." "Another very relevant underlying theme is simply this: The American Revolution was as much a civil war as a revolution. It did not represent one whole people rising against the overlordship of another. Hundreds of thousands in the thirteen colonies sympathized more with Britain than with Congress, and at least as many in Britain wished the rebels well. Here the Revolution resembled the other two major English-speaking civil wars--the English Civil War of the 1640s and the American Civil War of the 1860s. None reflected a nationwide or popular consensus; to the extent, they pitted region against region; and in places, people of one church opposed those of another. But as internecine conflicts, these wars also pitted brother against brother, and neighbor against neighbor. In divided border areas, many people tried to stay neutral. Ideology was not a day-to-day point of reference." Id. at 197. From the bookjacket: "What if the year we have long commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact misleading? What if the real events that signaled the historic shift from colony to country took place earlier, and that the true story of our nation's emergence reveals a more complicated--and divisive--birth process?" "In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by puncturing the myth that 1776 was the struggle's watershed year. Mythology and omission have elevated 1776, but the most important year, rarely recognized, was 1775: the critical launching point of the war and Britain's imperial outrage and counterattack and the year during which America's commitment to revolution took bloody and irreversible shape." "Phillips focuses on the great battlefields and events of 1775--Congress's warlike economic ultimatums to king and parliament, New England's rage militaire, the panicked concentration of British troops in militant by untenable Boston, the stunning expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and many hundreds of local committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands. These onrushing events delivered a sweeping control of territory and local government to the Patriots, one that Britain was never able to overcome. Seventeen seventy-five was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian frontier to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder in machinations that reached from the Baltic to West Africa and the Caribbean, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a secrecy-shrouded Congress. As Phillips writes, 'The political realignment achieved amid revolution was unique--no other has come with simultaneous ballots and bullets.'" "Surveying the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class, Phillips tackles the eighteenth century with the same skill and perception he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics. He mines rich materials as he surveys different regions and different colonies and probes how the varying agendas and expectations at the grassroots level had a huge effect on how the country shaped itself. He details often overlooked facts about the global munitions trade; about the roles of Indians, slaves, and mercenaries; and about the ideological and religious factors that played into the revolutionary fervor." "The result is a dramatic account brimming with original insights about the country we eventually became. Kevin Phillips' 1775 revolutionizes our understanding of America's origins." Often, when we think about the American revolution, we emphasis the role of law and lawyers. A focus on 1776 permits us to do this because the "defining" event of that year is, at best, a quasi-legal document: The Declaration of Independence. A focus on the events of the long year of 1775 takes law and lawyers from the center of the stage. In a real sense, there is no "center" stage, numerous factors motivated, spurred, sustained, etc., the American Revolution.).

THE BITTERLY CONTESTED PEOPLING OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Knopf, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "Bernard Bailyn gives us a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to  British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard." "They were a mixed multitude--from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances. Even the majority that came for England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came form all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism." "They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded." "Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn show that it was a brutal encounter--brutal not only between Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives--some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts--Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years.").

THE IMPACT OF RELIGION IN AMERICAN 'FOREIGN 'POLICY AND THE PURSUIT OF EMPIRE

Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012) (MUCH FOOD FOR THOUGHT!!! "Angered by their Northern members' hostility to slavery, Southern Baptists and Methodists anticipated the sectional split of 1860-61 by breaking away from their national organizations in the 1830s and '40s; Southern Presbyterians followed suit in 1861. Both halves of these once-national bodies could now pursue what one historian has aptly called 'the foreign policy of slavery' in states of ideological purity. Presciently, John C. Calhoun feared that after the church schisms 'nothibg will be left to hold the States together except force.' Each side saw itself as the true heir to the American republican tradition. But for all sides of the dispute, the foreign policy of slavery was fundamentally about territorial expansion, which in turn posed fundamental problems of war and empire. For Southerners like John Rice, a contributor to the Southern Presbyterian Review, the opening of the westward settlement at precisely the moment the invention of the cotton gin rejuvenated the stagnating institution of slavery was  nothing short of providential. Simply put, God favored slavery because he had made it possible. Thus the South must 'never to consent that her social system . . . be confined and restrained by any other limits than such as the God of nature interposes.'" "Likewise, many religious Americans supported Indian Removal as a way to gain territory as well as an extension of Christian benevolence without necessarily seeing a clash between the two." Id. at 137. "By reopening the link between expansion and slavery, the Mexican War was actually the first skirmish in the Civil War." Id. at 146. "Based partly on Lincoln's rechristening of America's civil religion and partly on the moral absolutism of preachers in the victorious North, Civil War faith helped form the ideological core of U.S. foreign policy into the twentieth century. Comprised of two key ideas, this ideology of universal redemption was not always exclusively religious in character, but religion provided its most important source. Nor were either of these ideas necessarily new, though their testing in the Civil War changed them significantly. The first of these ideas was humanitarian intervention, the second America's role as God's chosen nation. When blended with the culture of progressive benevolence, missionaries, and the dictates of the national interest, the ideology of universal redemption enabled American leaders to follow a more interventionist, activist, and ultimately global foreign policy." Id. at 163. "The Spanish-American and Philippine-American conflicts were not America's first holy wars; they would certainly not be the least." Id. at 232. "As internationalists, mainline Protestants envisioned a world in which nations were fundamentally interconnected and mutually dependent; contrary to its mythic tradition of isolationism, the United States was no exception. However, as nationalists, they also assigned the leading role in managing this interconnected world system to the United States. Without America's political, economic, moral, and spiritual guidance, the world system would collapse in a fury of competing petty interests and jealousies. Liberal, mainline internationalists were thus among the first to recognize a complex phenomenon that, after the interruption of two world wars and the Great Depression, would reorder the world and its inhabitants: globalization." "It was no coincidence that religious Americans were among the first to recognize the emergence of a new global community." Id. at 249." But what had changed for Niebuhr? What had led him to abandon his commitment to a universal peace through Christian love? Based on his experiences in America and his reading of the international scene, Niebuhr saw, earlier than many others, that one could only be a true Christian pacifist if one lived beyond the margins of modern society. In the real world. it was sometimes necessary to use coercive means to achieve just end. Christan ethics remained central to politics because they would help determine the acceptable limits of coercion and distinguish between just and unjust causes. Though Niebuhr was not its creator, this essentially Niebuhrian vision of politics quickly became known as Christian realism. With it, Niebuhr also criticized American exceptionalism and national self-righteousness. In the depths of the world crisis of the 1930s, he maintained that Americans were no more free of guilt and responsibility than others. Sin was universal and nobody, certainly not Americans, was free of it. But crucially, Christian realism did not prevent Niebuhr from identifying those who bore more culpability than others. There were no heroes in the Niebuhrian world, but their were definitely villains." Id. at 304-305. "Less well known are McNamara's religious and moral views. ... [H]e had a strong moralistic sense of right and wrong which, in turn, had a firm grounding in Christian ethics. [] Nothing bothered him as much as Norman Morrison. On November 2, 1965, Morrison, a young, clean-cut Quaker pacifist, set fire to himself in a protest against the Vietnam War. He did it in a Pentagon parking lot which, not coincidentally, had a clear view of McNamara's office window. His final words to his wife, who did not know his intentions that morning, were: 'What can I do to make them stop the war?' From his window, McNamara saw the twelve-foot high flames engulf Morrison's body, and then the ambulances converge. It was too terrible to bear contemplating, but McNamara could not push the episode out of his mind...." Id. at 531.).

ARMED EXTREMIST GROUPS ON THE RISE!!

Letter from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"

Help Fight Hate Dear , Our annual count of extremist groups, released just this week, shows that the number of armed militias and other antigovernment groups surged to 1,360 in 2012 – an all-time high and an 813% rise since President Obama took office. At the same time, hate groups – neo-Nazis, white nationalists, racist skinheads, and others – remained at near-record highs. Please send an additional gift and help us fight the hate and extremism that threatens to divide our nation. This week, we sent a letter to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security warning them of the growing threat of domestic terrorism from far-right antigovernment extremist groups. These organizations are growing more militant by the day as Congress debates gun control. With your support, we will continue to press for action and to expose the activities of the radical right. And, we'll provide key intelligence and resources to law enforcement officials to help them fight violent extremists. We'll also continue to send free tolerance education materials to classrooms across the nation. Please send a special gift today: https://secure.splcenter.org/donations/donate/overview Sincerely, Morris Dees Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center P.S. Please speak out against all forms of bigotry and be an advocate for justice in your community. Together, we can make a difference. We welcome your feedback. Contact us online. 400 Washington Ave. Montgomery, AL 36104 "