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| 1 |
ID:
186634
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| Summary/Abstract |
I am an accidental environmental historian. Let me explain. I have always been attuned to where my stories take place—setting, after all, is one of the key elements of narrative. It is difficult to write about engineers in the Great Plains or diplomats in the Sahara without placing them there. Especially when your subjects are constantly scribbling notes about the peculiarities of where they find themselves.
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| 2 |
ID:
186639
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| Summary/Abstract |
On November 17, 1981 John Keller was brought before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law to provide the first testimony in support of H.R. 808—a new bill that would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to extend preferential immigration rights to individuals in Asia illegitimately fathered by U.S. citizens. “I was born in Korea,” he began.1 “From pictures I could tell my father was an older man, dressed in a U.S. Army uniform.”2 Keller would go on to describe his abandonment at the age of four, his experiences of abuse in a South Korean orphanage, his recruitment into a gang of juvenile delinquents, and his dramatic escape to the streets of Itaewon. There, he lived inside a wooden box and begged Americans stationed nearby for money, clothes, and food until one day he was taken in by U.S. missionaries. After his rehabilitation at St. Vincent’s Home for Amerasians, where he learned English, converted to Christianity, and was given a formal education, Keller was adopted by an American family in Georgia and immigrated to the United States. “My life is really happy now,” he testified, “but I am here today to tell my own story because I don’t want my brothers and sisters who I had to leave behind to be forgotten and to live with people always pointing their fingers and calling them names. Please, please help us.”
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| 3 |
ID:
186637
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| Summary/Abstract |
In trying to understand the post-9/11 historical moment, historians such as Beverly Gage and Melani McAlister have argued that despite the popular notion that “everything changed” on September 11, 2001, historical continuities shaped the way Americans understood, debated, and responded to this event.1 Historical actors integrate their interpretations of terrorism intro pre-existing ideas, identities, and political goals, fashioning narratives that transform terrorism into a resource for advancing other priorities. Gage describes this dynamic as the “external story” of terrorism, or “the response of the state and society to such challenges, whether in cultural, political, or social terms.”
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| 4 |
ID:
186635
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1941 and 1942, a committee of scholars, policy experts, and missionaries met in New York City to discuss the United States’ foreign policy toward Africa. This committee was convened by Anson Phelps Stokes, the founding director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization focused on African American and African education.1 Stokes wanted the United States to play a major role in shaping the politics of the African continent once the Second World War ended. Further, he believed his fund—with its experience in missionary education, close ties to leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and connections to the State Department—was the ideal body to sway policymakers and “influenc[e] public opinion on wise lines” regarding an eventual postwar settlement in Africa.2 The group Stokes convened came to be called the Committee on Africa, the War, and Peace Aims (CAWPA).
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| 5 |
ID:
186636
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| Summary/Abstract |
When U.S. evangelicals went to church in the winter of 1993, many of them opened their service bulletins to find an advertisement that offered them the chance to “change the course of history” in a place that evangelicals had long imagined as a global religious and political threat—the Soviet Union (USSR). “After 70 years of Communism,” the promotional leaflet declared, “300 million Soviet hearts finally opened. And now, they’re inviting you to introduce them to the life-changing power of God’s Word.” Offering evidence for that momentous invitation, the pamphlet explained that ministries of education throughout the former Soviet Union had opened their public schools to “the teaching of Biblical principles and values” by U.S. organizations. In response, U.S. missionary organizations were deploying their volunteers rapidly across Eastern Europe and Russia to place a Bible-based curriculum in those public schools and thus “reach an atheistic empire with the healing touch of God’s Word.” This campaign, the flyer promised, would be the “opportunity of a lifetime for you.” “Will you go,” the pamphlet asked. “Can the people of the former Soviet Union count on you?”
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| 6 |
ID:
186638
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| Summary/Abstract |
How dangerous could a single U.S. high performance computer in Soviet hands be? In the 1970s, this became a crucial and highly controversial question of U.S. national security export control policy. In the détente years, U.S. companies sold some of the most powerful civilian high performance computers (HPCs) in the world to the Soviet Union. These computers played an outsized role in the U.S.-Soviet relations of the 1970s. There was hardly a summit, or even a plain working meeting between U.S. and Soviet diplomats, which did not touch on HPCs. Indeed, they were a crucial strand in the story of the rise and fall of détente that historical research has so far largely overlooked.
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