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| 1 |
ID:
158508
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| Summary/Abstract |
While the Early American Republic continues to be largely neglected by diplomatic historians, it has been attracting vibrant new historiography taking the “global turn.” This forum showcases studies by Nancy Shoemaker, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Rachel Tamar Van, and Courtney Fullilove. Each examines Americans venturing overseas at a time when their secondhand knowledge and firsthand experience of the world was woefully limited. The Early American Republic indicates that we must interrogate a fraught process of globalizing before we can presume any existence of global interconnection. By the 1830s the outcome of American ventures was a world with increasingly more Americans in it.
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| 2 |
ID:
158511
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| Summary/Abstract |
American merchants of the early republic shaped global sensibilities of trade, but from the margins. If to some foreign observers early American merchants seemed to be “free traders,” the question arises of what enabled these constructions of “free.” This article focuses on two debates: first, “free traders” in Parliamentary hearings on the British East India Company’s monopoly in China, and, second, American involvement in the opium trade in China within a global context of smuggling practice. In the latter case, “free trade” came to connote trade in opposition not to the British Company, but in opposition to a closed China.
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| 3 |
ID:
158509
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| Summary/Abstract |
A tourist in Asia in the 1840s, Doctor B. L. Ball of Northborough, Massachusetts, felt the greatest pleasure in company with people like himself. He went often to American missionaries’ houses, U.S. consulates, and Canton’s “new American hotel” for evenings of “New England singing,” Fourth of July bacchanals, and talk of “home and home affairs.” From Manila, Ball sent a daguerreotype of himself to his mother, taken “by an American, and done as well as in America.” In Canton, he visited historic sites with college friend Elijah Bridgman, the first American missionary to China and a resident since 1830, and met for the first time a former schoolmate’s father, David Geisinger, commander of the U.S. sloop-of-war Plymouth. In Hong Kong, Ball conversed at length about home with another American naval officer from Northborough. And at Shanghai, when the U.S. consul introduced Ball to an American doctor, they were both startled to recognize each other from medical school in Boston. Early in his travels, after returning from supper at the Canton home of missionary Peter Parker, also a doctor from Massachusetts, Ball reported having “retired within my mosquito-net, my mind being full of the strange things of this strange country.” Months later in Shanghai, the jaded traveler remarked after a dinner at the U.S. consul’s, “I begin to think Americans are to be found in every part of the world. If I should go to Pekin or Kamtschatka, I should expect to find Americans already at each place.”
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| 4 |
ID:
158512
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| Summary/Abstract |
If as anthropologists have emphasized, gifts are never free, the freighted quality of their exchange was explicit in the U.S. Japan Expedition of 1853-4 led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the object of which to compel commodity exchange. This essay explores diplomatic gift exchange during the expedition as a theater in which disputes over value were performed. Gift exchange supported licit and illicit commerce, each reflecting varied imaginations of the global: as a patchwork of militarized nation states, a hierarchy of civilizations, an grid of marketplaces, and a zone of common nature.
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| 5 |
ID:
158510
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1810, American evangelicals formed the first American foreign mission organization, and began the work of deciding where their missionaries ought to go. Motivated by a global vision of the biblical call to preach to “all the world,” American missionaries were constrained in where they could actually go by political, economic, and cultural factors. This paper explores the ways that American missionaries selected and prioritized particular locations over others as a way of thinking about how Americans mapped the world in the era of the early republic. Central to this process was the construction of a “hierarchy of heathenism” that allowed missionaries to combine practical concerns with assumptions about culture and race to determine where they might be most effective.
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| 6 |
ID:
158513
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| Summary/Abstract |
Alan Sterling, a teenage radioman in the U.S. Navy, sailed into Tokyo Bay on September 15, 1945, just thirteen days after Japanese delegates had signed the Allied instrument of surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri. Like many of his peers, Sterling regularly sent home accounts of the peculiar places and people encountered in the course of his military service, arriving in Japan by way of the Philippines and Okinawa. Dissatisfied with verbal description, he shared a mania for photography widespread among U.S. occupation personnel. In a preliminary missive from Tokyo, Alan sought his sister’s help in realizing his ambitions as auteur. “Now that the war is over I would give anything to have a movie camera out here. Even though these islands are practically the same the scenery alone would make very good material for movies,” he announced. After this familiar plea for luxury items from home, Alan added a more unguarded appreciation of photography’s merits. “The things that your other senses make you aware of is what makes these islands seem so lousy. Pictures alone would be the thing so that you would only receive the good things about the place and not all the rest that goes with them when you are out here.” The camera, in Sterling’s view, represented the perfect medium through which to apprehend Asia. It could capture landscapes that would delight the eye without affront to the palette or nostrils. Elevating, and attempting to isolate, sight as the preeminent sense, Sterling hinted at vile smells, tastes, and sensations best left out of the picture.
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| 7 |
ID:
158514
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| Summary/Abstract |
My article discusses the tilt towards the white minority regimes of southern Africa, specifically Rhodesia that occurred during the Nixon era. The White House approach was shaped by anti-communism and economic interest combined with an apathy for the cause of black liberation. This led to a blatant disregard of the principle of majority rule and open violation of UN sanctions. Furthermore, as Nixon’s actions regarding southern Africa were reflective of core beliefs within the White House of how to approach international politics, Rhodesia provides an illuminative lens regarding the broader imperatives that guided the Nixonian approach to global relations.
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| 8 |
ID:
158507
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| Summary/Abstract |
They came just after dark,” American war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from London in December 1940, about a German bombing raid. “Somehow I could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.” From a balcony, he watched “a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.” With dark buildings illuminated by the glow of hundreds of fires, balloons visible against pink clouds, a star peeking between them, it was “the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.” Pyle thought of the day when he would be able “to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.”
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