1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 ...than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy, and the violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His responses to the crises were sometimes effective but often tragic, and LBJ's refusal to seek re-election underscores his recognition of the challenges facing the country in 1968. As much a biography of a single year as it is of LBJ, LBJ's 1968 vividly captures the tumult that dominated the headlines on a local and global level.
With Nixon's historic reconciliation with China in 1972, Sino-American relations were restored, and China moved from being regarded as America's most implacable enemy to a friend and tacit ally. ...Existing accounts of the rapprochement focus on the shifting balance of power between the USA, China and the Soviet Union, but in this book Goh argues that they cannot adequately explain the timing and policy choices related to Washington's decisions for reconciliation with Beijing. Instead, she applies a more historically sensitive approach that privileges contending official American constructions of China's identity and character. This book demonstrates that ideas of reconciliation with China were already being propagated and debated within official circles in the USA during the 1960s. It traces the related policy discourse and imagery, and examines their continuities and evolution into the early 1970s that facilitated Nixon's new policy.
In Cold War historiography, the 1960s are often described as a decade of mounting diplomatic tensions and international social unrest. At the same time, they were a period of global media revolution: ...communication satellites compressed time and space, television spread around the world, and images circulated through print media in expanding ways. Examining how U.S. policymakers exploited these changes, this book offers groundbreaking international research which shows that U.S. power came to depend more and more not on military superiority or economic strength alone, but also on America's ability to create appealing pictures that assured recognition of its global leadership.
In 1961, as President John F. Kennedy proclaimed the beginning of a “Decade of Development,” the United States embarked on its first coherent “Africa” policy. Guided by the precepts of modernization ...theory, American policymakers, diplomats, academics, and Peace Corps volunteers were dispatched to promote economic growth and nationbuilding among the newly independent countries of subSaharan Africa. At the outset, Larry Grubbs shows, many of these“ secular missionaries” were no less sanguine about their prospects for success than were their Christian predecessors a century earlier. But before long their optimism gave way to disillusionment, as rosy forecasts of sustained development collided with African political realities and colonial economies based on singlecommodity exports subject to global price fluctuations. In this book, Grubbs presents a cultural history of this illfated American campaign to modernize Africa during its first decade of independence. Drawing on government documents and contemporary press accounts as well as an extensive body of scholarship on U.S.Africa relations, he exposes the contradictions at the core of a selfserving idealism that promised to “win” the continent of Africa for the West in the context of the Cold War. While many Americans working in Africa considered themselves opponents of ethnocentrism, the modernization goals they served carried an ingrained, if unacknowledged, cultural and ideological sense of superiority and faith in American exceptionalism. Similarly, persistent myths about African backwardness and primitiveness continued to afflict U.S. policy, despite official pronouncements of confidence in the transformative power of Western expertise and cando pragmatism in bringing African societies into the modern world. If the assumptions underlying U.S. policy toward Africa during the 1960s were simply relics of outmoded Cold War orthodoxies, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, Grubbs concludes, many of the same ideas imbue contemporary discussions of the ongoing “crisis” in Africa, from the campaigns to “Save Darfur” and stop the spread of AIDS to efforts to eliminate “blood diamonds” and forgive African debts.
Social movements have wrought dramatic changes upon American society. This raises the question: Why do some movements succeed in their endeavors while others fail? Luders answers this question by ...introducing an analytical framework that begins with a shift in emphasis away from the characteristics of movements toward the targets of protests and affected bystanders and why they respond as they do. This shift brings into focus how targets and other interests assess both their exposure to movement disruptions as well as the costs of conceding to movement demands. From this point, diverse outcomes stem not only from a movement's capabilities for protest but also from differences among targets and others in their vulnerability to disruption and the substance of movement goals. Applied to the civil rights movement, this approach recasts conventional accounts of the movement's outcome in local struggles and national politics and clarifies the broader logic of social change.
Reframing 1968 Martin Halliwell, Nick Witham
03/2018
eBook
Reframing 1968 explores the historical, political and social legacy of 1968 in modern protest movements. 14 interdisciplinary essays look at how protest has changed in the US, from Students for a ...Democratic Society and the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, to the Women's Movement in the 1970s, through to the Tea Party and Occupy.
This book will offer a fresh, up-to-date, balanced overview of Johnson's policies across a range of theatres and issues with the aim of generating a proper understanding of his successes and failures ...in foreign policy.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy initiated a bold new policy of engaging states that had chosen to remain nonaligned in the Cold War. In a narrative ranging from the White House to the western ...coast of Africa and the shores of New Guinea, Robert B. Rakove examines the brief but eventful life of this policy during the presidencies of Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Engagement initially met with real success, but it faltered in the face of serious obstacles, including colonial and regional conflicts, disputes over foreign aid and the Vietnam War. Its failure paved the way for a lasting hostility between the United States and much of the nonaligned world, with consequences extending to the present. This book offers a sweeping account of a critical period in the relationship between the United States and the Third World.
In the vast literature on the Vietnam War, much has been written about the antiwar movement and its influence on U.S. policy and politics. In this book, Sandra Scanlon shifts attention to those ...Americans who supported the war and explores the war’s impact on the burgeoning conservative political movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Believing the Vietnam War to be a just and necessary cause, the pro-war movement pushed for more direct American military intervention in Southeast Asia throughout the Kennedy administration, lobbied for intensified bombing during the Johnson years, and offered coherent, if divided, endorsements of Nixon’s policies of phased withdrawal. Although its political wing was dominated by individuals and organizations associated with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bids, the movement incorporated a broad range of interests and groups united by a shared antipathy to the New Deal order and liberal Cold War ideology.
Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders initially rallied popular support in favor of total victory and later endorsed Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” Yet as the war dragged on with no clear end in sight, internal divisions eroded the confidence of pro-war conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Conservatives still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement. Yet in so doing, Scanlon concludes, they altered the nature and direction of the conservative agenda in both foreign and domestic policy for years to come.
