Young American Foreign Service officers are accustomed to being
teased by friends and relatives as to what they do in the "Foreign
Legion" or the "Forest Service." In the United States, unlike in
...many countries, the role of a professional diplomat is little known
or understood. In A Professional Foreigner Edward Marks
describes his life as an American diplomat who served during the
last four decades of the twentieth century, from 1959 to 2001.
Serving primarily in Africa and Asia, Marks was present during the
era of decolonization in Africa (but always seemed to be at the
opposite end of the continent from the hottest developments), was
intimately involved in the early days of the U.S. government's
antiterrorism programs, observed the unfolding of a nasty and
tragic ethnic conflict in one of the most charming countries in the
world, and saw the end of the Cold War at UN headquarters in New
York. Along the way Marks served as the U.S. ambassador to two
African nations. In this memoir Marks depicts a Foreign Service
officer's daily life, providing insight into the profession itself
and what it was like to play a role in the steady stream of
history, in a world of quotidian events often out of the view of
the media and the attention of the world. Marks's stories-such as
rescuing an American citizen from a house of ill repute in Mexico
and the attempt to recruit mongooses for drug intervention in Sri
Lanka-are both entertaining and instructive on the work of
diplomats and their contributions to the American story.
Walking the Gendered Tightrope analyzes the gendered expectations for women in high offices through the examples of British Prime Minister Theresa May and U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Even ...at their highest positions, and while completing their greatest achievements, both May and Pelosi faced gendered critiques and intraparty challenges to their leadership. While other books have analyzed the barriers to higher office that women face, this book reveals how women in positions of power are still forced to balance feminine stereotypes with the perception of power as masculine in order to prove their legitimacy. By examining intraparty dynamics, this book offers a unique comparison between a majoritarian presidential and Westminster parliamentary system. While their parties promoted Pelosi and May to highlight their progressive values, both women faced continually gendered critiques about their abilities to lead their caucuses on difficult policy issues, such as the Affordable Care Act and two Trump impeachment votes for Nancy Pelosi, or finishing Brexit for Theresa May. Grounded in the legislative literature from the United States and Britain, as well as historical accounts and personal interviews, Walking the Gendered Tightrope contributes to the fields of gender and politics, legislative studies, American politics, and British politics.
Gaylord Jackson Perry was born in 1938 as the younger son of a tobacco sharecropper in Martin County, North Carolina. He and his older brother Jim grew up against a background of backbreaking work ...six days a week in a community that boasted not a single paved road until the 1950s. Their only relaxation was playing baseball, first with their father and later at school. While both brothers would go on to succeed as pitchers in major league baseball, for Gaylord, success would require a lot of perseverance and an almost equal amount of subterfuge. After a couple of lackluster seasons with the San Francisco Giants, he learned from bullpen-mate Bob Shaw how to throw the illegal spitball. More importantly, he learned to control the tricky pitch and to conceal it from suspicious umpires, opposing managers, and baffled batters. When he finally broke out the spitter in a victory by attrition in a marathon, 32-inning, nine-hour doubleheader against the Mets in May 1964, his destiny was set. The Hall of Famer would go on to a 314–265 win-loss record, with a 3.11 earned-run average and 3,534 career strikeouts, becoming the first pitcher in major league history to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues. Sports historian David Vaught has mined archival and public records, game statistics, media accounts, and previously published works—including Perry’s 1974 autobiography—to compile the first critical biography of a player as famous for his wry humor and downhome banter as for his trademark illegal pitch. Written for baseball fans and American sports historians, Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry  provides new insights and genuine enjoyment of the game for a wide range of readers.
An intellectual history of American conservativism since the New Deal.The New Deal fundamentally changed the institutions of American constitutional government and, in turn, the relationship of ...Americans to their government. Johnathan O'Neill's Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal examines how various types of conservative thinkers responded to this significant turning point in the second half of the twentieth century.O'Neill identifies four fundamental transformations engendered by the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how various schools of conservative thought (traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, Straussians) responded to these major changes in American politics and culture. Conservatives frequently argued among themselves, and their responses to the New Deal ranged from adaptation to condemnation to political mobilization. Ultimately, the New Deal pulled American governance and society permanently leftward. Although some of the New Deal's liberal gains have been eroded, a true conservative counterrevolution was never, O'Neill argues, a realistic possibility. He concludes with a plea for conservative thinkers to seriously reconsider the role of Congress—a body that is relatively ignored by conservative intellectuals in favor of the courts and the presidency—in America's constitutional order. Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal explores the scope and significance of conservative constitutional analysis amid the broader field of American political thought.
Drawing Liberalism is the first book-length critical
examination of the political and social impact of the political
cartoonist Herbert Block-popularly known as Herblock. Working for
the Washington ...Post , Herblock played a central role in
shaping, propagandizing, and defending the ideals of postwar
liberalism, a normative set of values and assumptions that
dominated American politics and culture after World War II.
Best remembered for his unrelenting opposition to and skewering
cartoons of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, Herblock introduced
the term "McCarthyism" into the American political lexicon. With
its unstinting and unapologetic support for the liberal agenda,
across a career spanning over fifty years at the Post ,
Herblock's work affords a unique lens through which to interpret
and understand the shifts and contours of twentieth-century
American political culture, from the postwar period through the
civil rights era into the Nixon presidency.
What does a culture of evidence really look like in higher education?The use of big data and the rapid acceleration of storage and analytics tools have led to a revolution of data use in higher ...education. Institutions have moved from relying largely on historical trends and descriptive data to the more widespread adoption of predictive and prescriptive analytics. Despite this rapid evolution of data technology and analytics tools, universities and colleges still face a number of obstacles in their data use. In How Colleges Use Data, Jonathan S. Gagliardi presents college and university leaders with an important resource to help cultivate, implement, and sustain a culture of evidence through the ethical and responsible use and adoption of data and analytics. Gagliardi provides a broad context for data use among colleges, including key concepts and use cases related to data and analytics. He also addresses the different dimensions of data use and highlights the promise and perils of the widespread adoption of data and analytics, in addition to important elements of implementing and scaling a culture of evidence.Demystifying data and analytics, the book helps faculty and administrators understand important topics, including:• How to define institutional aspirations using data• Equity and student success• Strategic finance and resource optimization• Academic quality and integrity• Data governance and utility• Implicit and explicit bias in data• Implementation and planning• How data will be used in the futureHow Colleges Use Data helps college and university leaders understand what a culture of evidence in higher education truly looks like.
The formation of a group identity has always been a major preoccupation of Mexican American political organizations, whether they seek to assimilate into the dominant Anglo society or to remain ...separate from it. Yet organizations that sought to represent a broad cross section of the Mexican American population, such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum, have dwindled in membership and influence, while newer, more targeted political organizations are prospering—clearly suggesting that successful political organizing requires more than shared ethnicity and the experience of discrimination. This book sheds new light on the process of political identity formation through a study of the identity politics practiced by four major Mexican American political organizations—the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation, the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, and the Mexican American Women’s National Association (now known as MANA—A National Latina Organization). Through interviews with activists in each organization and research into their records, Benjamin Marquez clarifies the racial, class-based, and cultural factors that have caused these organizations to create widely differing political identities. He likewise demonstrates why their specific goals resonate only with particular segments of the Mexican American community.
How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical—and harmful—power.In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary ...culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being well means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present.Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling—and harmful—concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
Growing political radicalization and polarization in American government has created a scarcity of civilian leadership, knowledge, expertise, and power. Political rivals and adversaries, too busy ...combating each other, have abandoned the helm of the ship of state, setting reason, compromise, intellectual curiosity, and effective governing adrift. A faction of exceptionally capable and influential guardians—America’s military elites—increasingly fill roles in civil society and government intended for competent, democratically elected or political appointed civilian leadership accountable to the American electorate.
Todd Schmidt demonstrates that US military elites play an exceptionally powerful role due to their extraordinary powerful role due to their extraordinary influence over policy process, outcome, and implementation. Through personal interviews with high-ranking national security experts across six presidential administrations, Schmidt concludes that nuanced relationships between military elites, the president, and Congress; decision-making in national security and foreign policy; and the balance of power in civil-military relations suggest a potential trend of praetorian behavior among military elites. A silent coup of the guardians has occurred, and professionals and citizens need to ask what should be done rebalance US civil-military relations.
A historical look at how activists influenced the adoption of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical views of disability.Disability activism has fundamentally changed American society for the ...better—and along with it, the views and practices of many clinical professionals. After 1945, disability self-advocates and family advocates pushed for the inclusion of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical perspectives on disability in clinical research, training, and practice. In Disability Dialogues, Andrew J. Hogan highlights the contributions of disabled people—along with their family members and other allies—in changing clinical understandings and approaches to disability.Hogan examines the evolving medical, social, and political engagement of three postwar professions—clinical psychology, pediatrics, and genetic counseling—with disability and disability-related advocacy. Professionals in these fields historically resisted adopting a more inclusive and accepting perspective on people with disabilities primarily due to concerns about professional role, identity, and prestige. In response to the work of disability activists, however, these attitudes gradually began to change. Disability Dialogues provides an important contribution to historical, sociological, and bioethical accounts of disability and clinical professionalization. Moving beyond advocacy alone, Hogan makes the case for why present-day clinical professional fields need to better recruit and support disabled practitioners. Disabled clinicians are uniquely positioned to combine biomedical expertise with their lived experiences of disability and encourage greater tolerance for disabilities among their colleagues, students, and institutions.
