bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Tormented Alliance
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, leaders in China and the United States had high hopes of a lasting partnership between the two countries. More than 120,000 US servicemen deployed to China, where Chiang Kai-shek’s government carried out massive programs to provide them with housing, food, and interpreters. But, as Zach Fredman uncovers in The Tormented Alliance, a military alliance with the United States means a military occupation by the United States. The first book to draw on archives from all the areas in China where US forces deployed during the 1940s, it examines the formation, evolution, and undoing of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of China during World War II and the Chinese Civil War. Fredman reveals how each side brought to the alliance expectations that the other side was simply unable to meet, resulting in a tormented relationship across all levels of Sino-American engagement. Entangled in larger struggles over race, gender, and nation, the US military in China transformed itself into a widely loathed occupation force: an aggressive, resentful, emasculating source of physical danger and compromised sovereignty. After Japan's surrender and the spring 1946 withdrawal of Soviet forces from Manchuria, the US occupation became the chief obstacle to consigning foreign imperialism in China irrevocably to the past. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek lost his country in 1949, and the US military presence contributed to his defeat. The occupation of China also cast a long shadow, establishing patterns that have followed the US military elsewhere in Asia.
Introduction
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

In 1942, Chinese welcomed American soldiers as mengyou, meaning “allied friends.” President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make China a pillar of a new, non-imperialist world order, while senior American military commanders believed in their unique capacity to mentor China’s armies and impart effectiveness. But by mid-1945, these lofty ambitions had crashed and burned. Chinese who encountered GIs now felt angered and alienated. Most American personnel, for their part, openly dismissed Chinese as unworthy of American tutelage. The tormented alliance staggered on after Japan’s surrender with the arrival of 53,000 American marines and sailors, hailed as liberators in formerly Japanese-occupied coastal cities. But wartime patterns of mutually damaging Sino-American engagement continued, only now occurring in an entirely new geopolitical context, allowing Mao Zedong’s Communists to harness resentment against the U.S. military and deploy it as a powerful tool in their struggle to seize power. By examining day-to-day interactions between American personnel and an entire spectrum of Chinese, the book offers a new story about the formation, evolution, and undoing of the alliance between the United States and the Republic of China (ROC).
Making Our Friends at Home
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the Chinese Nationalist government’s hostel program for US forces. It argues that Chiang Kai-shek sought to prove his commitment to the alliance by housing, feeding, and providing cultural outreach to all American servicemen in China. Equally important, the Chinese Nationalists envisioned the program as a nation-building initiative. By insulating American soldiers from China’s poverty, demonstrating their capacity for adhering to American dietary, hygienic, and comfort norms while also showcasing China’s cultural achievements, the Nationalists believed they could reshape American perceptions of China and convince their allies to treat them as equals. The program succeeded operationally by keeping US forces housed and feed at the Chinese government’s expense, but it fell short at the alliance- and state-building levels. Hostels failed to insulate American personnel from China’s offenses and affronts to the five senses. Americans interpreted these sensory encounters and other hostel program shortcomings as evidence of Chinese incapacity, corruption, and untrustworthiness. The hostel program thus became grounds for the Americans to deny the Chinese the equal relationship they wanted.
Communicating without Understanding
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

This chapter shows that China’s effort to operate Western-style hostels was succeeded by another Chinese government initiative that facilitated military success against Japan but failed in its deeper alliance and nation-building aims: a wartime interpreting program. The Chinese Nationalists enabled American soldiers to communicate with other Chinese by cooperating with Chinese intellectuals and Chinese-speaking American missionaries to train more than 3,300 college students and recent graduates to work as military interpreters alongside US forces. But for both Chinese elites and senior US military commanders, these interpreters were more than simply a means to facilitate communication; they were also central figures in realizing their respective visions of how the alliance could and should make China into a modern nation. Both visions stressed the Chinese interpreter’s special role in uplifting the country and introducing American work habits and technology to the Chinese Army. But administering the program proved more difficult than the Chinese government expected, which eroded interpreter morale and heightened tensions with the US Army. By the time of Japan’s surrender, the interpreter program had helped turn China’s educated youth against the US military and the Chinese Nationalists.
Unequal Partners
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

The third chapter narrates the story of the US military’s efforts to improve the fighting efficiency of Chinese armed forces and carry out joint operations against Japan. It shows how the alliance created a system of military and political vassalage, with the Chinese serving as junior partners, even in outfits like the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO)—a secret intelligence partnership that operated under Chinese command. This produced constant tensions and contradictions, culminating in Chiang Kai-shek’s fall 1944 showdown with General Joseph Stilwell, commander of US forces in the China-Burma-India Theater. Senior-level military relations improved after Roosevelt relieved Stilwell, but ties among the men in the ranks continued to worsen as Chinese soldiers gained combat experience and became less inclined to play second fiddle to American troops. Violent confrontations between Chinese and American servicemen increased sharply over the war’s final months, even as US Army training programs for Chinese forces convinced both Chiang and Stilwell’s replacement, General Albert Wedemeyer, that Sino-American military cooperation had reached new heights.
GIs and Jeep Girls
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines sexual relations between American servicemen and Chinese women. In early 1945, two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged in the wake of Japan’s Ichigo campaign. Beginning in March, Chinese government-backed newspapers began publishing articles and other features criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the increasing number of women who consorted with American troops. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, making Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military intersected and converged. Chinese secret police turned a blind eye as Chinese men began attacking GIs and their female companions. Though General Albert Wedemeyer blamed American misconduct for the crisis, he strong-armed Chiang Kai-shek into cracking down on Chinese demonstrators. The way the crisis brought tensions surrounding race, gender, and nation to the fore was a harbinger of struggles to come after Japan’s surrender.
Passion Plays
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten.
To Everything a Season
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

Why is it that so many Americans are passionate about team sports? The soaring popularity of sports radio in recent decades together with sports cable networks suggests that devotion to sports has far eclipsed traditional allegiance to religion. The introduction provides an overview of the origins of the major team sports in North America – baseball, football, hockey, and basketball – and demonstrates that they were all developed in a geographical arc extending from Princeton, New Jersey, to Montréal, Québec.
It Breaks Your Heart
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

This chapter opens with the Cooperstown myth, the fiction that baseball was invented in Cooperstown, New York. The myth, however, tells us something about the origins and the enduring ideas of baseball. Despite its development during the Industrial Revolution, baseball is the one major team sport that rejected the icon of industrialism – the clock. A baserunner, in fact, circles the bases counterclockwise, as though to subvert the passage of time. Baseball is also the quintessential immigrant game because it replicates the long odds facing immigrants. It’s the only game where the defense controls the ball, and it’s the object of the offensive player to disrupt the defense’s control of the ball. He’s outnumbered nine to one in that effort; there are only three islands of safety in that alien environment, and the greatest triumph is to return home.
A Great Moral Force
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

Football, the quintessential military game, was developed in the years following the Civil War, and it was played initially by the sons, brothers, and nephews of Union Army generals in elite Northeastern schools. The game itself centers around the conquest and the defense of territory, and the language of war and militarism – training camps, scouting, long bombs, trench warfare – dominates the conversations about football in its early decades. In order for football to attain its near-universal popularity, however, it had to address the three Rs: region, religion, and race.
Soul of a Nation
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

Ice hockey, which evolved from lacrosse, has become Canada’s game. A dentist in Montréal, George Beers, argued at the time of Canada’s confederation in 1867 that Canada needed its own game; cricket, he argued was too British. Instead, Canada needed a rough-and-tumble game that reflected the wild Canadian landscape. He argued that lacrosse was that game, played initially by First Nations people but adopted by Canadians. Beers, a Presbyterian who believed that everything should be done “decently and in order,” codified rules for lacrosse and established boundaries for the field, thereby “domesticating” the Indigenous game. Although great controversy still surrounds the precise origins of ice hockey, it developed from lacrosse and continues to reflect the rugged, frontier-justice Canadian society.
Shut Up and Dribble
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: January 2024

The passion for team sports in North America has several paradoxes. Sports, like religion, has rituals, sacred space, even sainthood (in sports, it’s the hall of fame). In a region where religious affiliation has historically been strong, more Americans are devoting their passion toward sports. The demographic skews overwhelmingly toward white males, and here you have the oddity of white fans cheering for players of color on the field, but if those same players step “out of their lane,” they face condemnation from their fans. Colin Kaepernick provides the best example in recent years, but Fox personality Laura Ingraham also exhibited that bias when she instructed LeBron James and other Black players to forego political commentary and “Shut up and dribble.” Part of the allure of sports is that it offers an alternative universe, a proverbial level playing field defined overwhelmingly by right angles, where the rules are clear and impartially enforced. This contrasts with the perception on the part of many fans that the larger world is unfair.
With the New Abolitionists
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

This chapter reconstructs NLG lawyers’ engagement in the South of the USA, starting from the early 1960s. Facing a lack of lawyers and persistent discrimination in the judicial system, civil rights organizations launched a cry for help. Almost alone, the NLG responded by providing the first large-scale legal aid structure to the civil rights movement. The chapter sheds light on the tight relationship that Guild lawyers wove with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the role they played during the Freedom Summer of 1964 by representing COFO workers, and the assistance they afforded to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. While uncovering the ostracism and anti-communism these lawyers endured, the chapter also demonstrates the confidence they infused into activists through legal protection and complicit advice. The chapter closes by analyzing the lessons lawyers drew from this experience, including the need to perform non-legal tasks for the movement and to abandon professional neutrality.
Revolution in the Courtroom
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

As a result of the above-described transformations, politics burst into courtrooms as never before in American history. After reviewing the innovations introduced by numerous trials, such as the Oakland Seven, the Chicago Eight, the Harrisburg Seven, and the Panther 21, this chapter conceptualizes the new model of “militant litigation” that took shape––an elaborate strategy deployed by defendants and lawyers to manipulate and subvert legal proceedings to further a political agenda. Its main features include: turning the accused into the accuser, shifting responsibility from the individual to the social context, emphasizing the contingency of legal and moral standards, ensuring that defendants are judged by a jury of peers through special jury selection methods, confronting directly and even provocatively the courts, involving defendants into strategy-making, and informing the public while attracting external support. Lawyers such as Charles Garry, William Kunstler, and Kenneth Cockrel were among the most creative pioneers of this litigation strategy.
Alternative Law
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

This chapter delves into the multifaceted transformation of legal practice and education advanced by radical lawyers since the 1960s. First, the research demonstrates how law firms’ organization was revolutionized by establishing law communes and collectives based on egalitarian principles and geared towards the movements’ needs. While upending professional and gender hierarchies, these experimental settings offered free legal services to activists. The chapter also surveys NLG lawyers’ attempts at creating alternative law schools, such as the Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles, where admission standards favored diversity and political engagement and teaching subjects covered unconventional areas of law. The influence of these alternative models also reached established law schools, for instance at Rutgers University and UC Berkeley. The chapter closes by examining the leftist internationalism that characterized these lawyers, who participated in transnational missions and solidarity campaigns, especially in Cuba, Vietnam, and Puerto Rico.
In the D Yard and Beyond
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

This chapter scrutinizes the role of NLG lawyers during and after the Attica prison rebellion of 1971. Initiated by William Kunstler, lawyers’ engagement grew with the participation of hundreds of volunteers who founded the Attica Defense Committee and later animated the Attica Brothers Legal Defense. As the research highlights, contrary to other attorneys who flocked to Attica, Guild lawyers treated inmates as political prisoners, identified with them, and ensured absolute commitment. Guild lawyers not only filed suits denouncing abuses and retaliation but also countered disinformation, mobilized the public, and closely assisted inmates. The challenge to ensure a legal-political defense often appeared overwhelming, yet these lawyers won important cases. The chapter also excavates subsequent prison legal battles, e.g., against punitive segregation, and explains why mutual trust between radical lawyers and political prisoners declined by the end of the 1970s. The problematic defense of the Symbionese Liberation Army and the tragic fate of Fay Stender are illustrative of that shift.
With Militant Labor and Minorities
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

This chapter explores lawyers’ activism on behalf of militant labor and minority groups. First, NLG lawyers joined forces with rank-and-file unionists to challenge both companies and mainstream unions for bargaining and breach of internal democracy. As the book reveals, lawyers’ cooperation with the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez, was particularly fruitful. But even more impactful was the NLG engagement on the side of Native American activists, notably the American Indian Movement, fighting for self-determination and treaty rights. Of particular interest is the role of lawyers during and after the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation: it led to a characteristic legal-political mobilization and ensured substantial trial victories. The chapter finally investigates Guild lawyers’ initiatives to affirm and expand women’s and gay rights, including the participation in the lawsuit Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz against NY state abortion law and the earliest battles for gay custody.
Against Political Repression
Authors: Falciola Luca
Published: January 2024

This chapter condenses the enormous outpouring of energy that radical lawyers allocated to curb political repression against radical movements and, at the same time, to protect themselves from similar attacks. The chapter addresses the efforts made on behalf of the Black Panther Party and the New Left to neutralize harsh policing and intimidation. In particular, the institution of “legal observers” to check on police abuses emerges as a groundbreaking contribution of the NLG. The chapter also elucidates the crucial role of Guild lawyers in counseling witnesses subpoenaed by federal grand juries when the Nixon administration weaponized them against domestic dissent. Likewise, NLG lawyers were at the forefront of the struggle against illegal surveillance and contributed to the Supreme Court decision Us v. US Dist. Ct.. The chapter finally grapples with the range of repressive tactics deployed against radical lawyers, from blacklisting to surveillance and infiltration. As the book reveals, the NLG was a COINTELPRO target, and the FBI stubbornly––albeit unsuccessfully––attempted to prove links with the Communist Party.
On Our Own Terms
Authors: Foss Sarah
Published: January 2024

During the Cold War, US intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.
Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyses the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War.
Shoot the Sheep-Killing Dogs
Authors: Trotti Michael Ayers
Published: January 2024

Stories are how we understand our world, and while built from the same realities, the stories that whites and blacks spun from those selectively-chosen facts to explain race, religion, violence, and crime, were virtually incompatible. Whites made the laws and practiced the punishments, and while African Americans tried in every way to tell their story in ways that might be heard, whites north and south chose to heed and publicize the stories whites were telling – absolving them of responsibility.
Epilogue
Authors: Rogers Thomas D.
Published: January 2024

The seventh chapter addresses recent developments. Starting in 2003, most new cars in Brazil had flex-fuel engines that allow drivers to buy ethanol or gasoline at their whim. With more efficient production driving prices down, ethanol production boomed again. Its fortunes rose further in 2017, with a new law that prioritized decarbonizing the ethanol production process. For every ton of carbon producers save, they receive financial securities and traders buy and sell the value of carbon not emitted. Ethanol producers claim they will open a new era of low-carbon agriculture, helping in the global struggle with climate change. They also tout ethanol’s role in improving air quality in Brazilian cities. Their fuel, they say, will serve as a bridge between fossil fuels and electrification. And perhaps biofuel-powered fuel-cell vehicles will help drivers skip the power cord altogether by creating electricity within the car itself.
Conclusion
Authors: Mas Catherine
Published: January 2024

The concluding chapter turns to León Medical Centers, a lucrative managed care company in 2022 whose origins were as a family-run clínica in 1960s Miami. As its success warrants praise among some and pause among others, León’s place in the contemporary landscape of health care offers an opportunity to reflect on the multifaceted transformations of medicine, society, and structures of health that this book has traced. Moreover, its promise to offer health care plus something else—be it cultural sensitivity or concierge services—offers a lens onto what that “plus” has meant over time, or what biomedicine has lacked, neglected, or bracketed as excess in its efforts to expand health care to broader populations.
Introduction
Authors: Kretz Dale
Published: January 2024

Prevailing scholarship on the history of ordinary freedpeople’s relationship with the federal government ends with the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872. Yet the relationship did not end in 1872; rather, it transformed in ways that laid the foundation for the modern liberal welfare state. Tens of thousands of formerly enslaved men and women lodged claims for military benefits, confronting considerable obstacles in the process. Funneling freedpeople’s energies towards individual claims, however, also displaced radical, collective demands for land redistribution in the wake of emancipation, in turn delimiting the boundaries of citizenship for the newly freed. Firmly grounded in archival research, this book makes novel use of administrative law to understand freedpeople’s claims-making politics through several federal agencies, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to the Pension Bureau. It shows how freedpeople were not only determined to exercise their newly-won rights, but also to expand those rights in the face of bureaucratic constriction from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal.
What Is Left of the Bureau
Authors: Kretz Dale
Published: January 2024

Over 140,000 formerly enslaved men served in the US Colored Troops (USCT), granting them and their families conditional pay and benefits such as enlistment bounties and pensions. As thousands of freedpeople made their way to refugee camps during the Civil War, pressing their claims to land and protection in exchange for service to the US Army, thousands of formerly enslaved men and women also pursued claims to bounties and pensions through the Claims Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau. As land reform efforts failed, freedpeople used their unfinished claims to maintain a foothold in the federal government, insisting that the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau itself in 1872 would not terminate their citizenship rights or claims on the nation-state they helped to save and remake.
The Unfinished Freedmen’s Branch
Authors: Kretz Dale
Published: January 2024

Though the Freedmen’s Bureau closed in 1872, its Claims Division lived on in a new federal agency, the Freedmen’s Branch, detailed in this chapter for the first time. Thousands of US Colored Troops did not receive enlistment bounties. Congress and the Executive Branch not only underfunded and understaffed the new agency, thereby undermining its effectiveness, but also issued a slew of laws and rulings that limited the size of payments to Black claimants as well as the accessibility of attaining those benefits. For their part, Black claimants mobilized collectively, confronting in the process new technologies of identification for the previously undocumented.
Reconstructing the Pension Bureau
Authors: Kretz Dale
Published: January 2024

The US Pension Bureau grew rapidly after the Civil War to offer eligible Union veterans and dependents monthly stipends graded by degree of disability. Although Black claimants were included in this early system of federal welfare, presumably on equal footing with white applicants, they encountered serious challenges to their claims for pensions. Freedwomen became especially important political actors as they pursued their claims to survivor’s pensions through the Southern Division of the Pension Bureau. Proving the necessary status of dependency on their deceased husbands and sons, often outside the bonds of official marriage, conjured up significant and unresolvable contradictions in popular understandings of slavery, particularly as it related to the Black family.
Some Measure of Justice
Authors: Kretz Dale
Published: January 2024

The much-heralded Disability Act of 1890 created a new, parallel pension system in the US Pension Bureau, dropping the service origin requirement of the general law system. It therefore opened the door for tens of thousands of claimants. For Black claimants, however, providing disability before the bureau’s medical examining boards invited a host of unforeseen challenges to their claims—challenges now regarded as forms of institutional racism. The medical examination process was partly decentralized and privatized, with civilian physicians deputized to perform evaluations on federal applicants to determine disability ratings. In the post-Confederate South, this meant that thousands of formerly enslaved men confronted former slave doctors, even former enslavers, acting in a new federal capacity of determining the ability of a Black claimants to perform labor. Though the Pension Bureau itself presented a singular opportunity for Black employment and professional advancement, even for formerly enslaved men such as Henry Clay Bruce, most Black Southerners who encountered the bureau did so via its gatekeepers on the examining boards.
The Urgency to Escape
Authors: Müller Viola Franziska
Published: January 2024

In the antebellum US South, a number of major developments precipitated slave flight, including diminishing opportunities to legally exit bondage, the expansion of slavery, and the intensification of the domestic slave trade. These factors indicate that the slave system was getting stronger rather than weaker. Manumission schemes were curtailed, an end to slavery was out of sight, and people were increasingly sold away from their families. This chapter discusses how these events gave enslaved men and women little hope to be released and the realization that if they wanted out, they had to free themselves. Running away certainly was neither the only nor the best way out, yet for thousands of enslaved people, it became a tangible option.
Receiving Communities, Illegality, and the Absence of Freedom
Authors: Müller Viola Franziska
Published: January 2024

What kinds of solidarities and institutional resources had to be mobilized to turn cities into hospitable places for fugitives? Southern cities housed thousands of Black residents, and because fugitive slaves joined them, this chapter places these receiving communities squarely at the center of the discussion. It highlights how the ‘free’ Black population was not neatly divided into enslaved and free but distinguished along many different axes, including a variety of legal statuses. With illegality not limited to men and women who fled slavery, but affecting the southern Black population more broadly, fugitive slaves and their host communities were closely linked through shared discrimination and vulnerability. They were all exposed to discretionary policing, extralegal violence, and civil disability before the law.
Navigating the City
Authors: Müller Viola Franziska
Published: January 2024

The physical layout and residential geographies of Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond varied. Yet in all places, particular racial and ethnic demographics marked off certain spaces as more congenial for fugitives than others. This chapter explores how they navigated the cityscape, contacted allies, found places to hide, and socialized. It shows that new modes of urban segregation worked favorably to create ‘Black spaces’ in the cities. Despite these opportunities, fugitives had to be alert, as surprise encounters could always happen. Smaller parts of the Black community were not on their side, and policing of the lower classes grew tighter over time. Cities were not perfect places of refuge, even as they were natural beacons for fugitives and other illegals.
The Ambiguities of Illegality
Authors: Müller Viola Franziska
Published: January 2024

The Conclusion recaps that runaways were able to find spaces of refuge in southern cities through the interplay of different factors: fugitives, their allies, and their receiving societies crafted them deliberately; slaveholders were unable to prevent flight; state legislators produced a large population of illegal people that camouflaged fugitives; local authorities did not attribute sufficient importance to the issue; and urban employers benefitted from it. The paradox of the time was that many of the developments that enabled fugitive slaves to go unnoticed were not nearly as beneficial for free people of color—plenty of them indeed curtailed their freedom. All Black Americans were illegal in some way or another, always in violation of some law, always presumed criminal. As a result, the urban fugitive fit right in.
Made in Britain
Authors: Lockhart Greg
Published: January 2024

In 1941–42, the Japanese destroyed the Western, particularly British, imperial order in Southeast Asia. In white Australia post-1945, the shocked response was to support the reestablishment of that order in a new form. This largely meant government opposition to the post-1945 process of decolonization going on in the countries to the north, opposition that was set in a sense of the menacing “downward thrust” of Asian geography and that was also race based. In a period of decolonization, however, the government could not say that. While Prime Minister Robert Menzies drew on an early British form of the “domino theory”, which was a clear fiction and fantasy, imposition of the Cold War on the process of decolonization then facilitated his policy. Indeed, anti-communist rhetoric disguised a race-based “forward defense” strategy that was designed to support the neo-imperial order in Asia.
The War of Southeast Asia
Authors: Westcott A. Gabrielle
Published: January 2024

This chapter discusses the Johnson administration’s attempt to foster public support for the war in Vietnam in the summer of 1967 and thus secure congressional approval for additional troops and a tax increase. Focusing on Clark Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor’s trip to troop-contributing countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific in July 1967, it argues the Johnson administration strategically framed the Vietnam War as a regional conflict to defend the legitimacy of American involvement and rally domestic support. It also explores the emotional dimensions of Clifford’s turn against the war as secretary of defense in 1968. For Clifford, the Clifford-Taylor mission would come to represent two things: the illegitimacy of the domino theory, which held that if South Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of the region would quickly follow; and the futility of continued US involvement in Vietnam.
GI Resistance and Transpacific Activism in Iwakuni during the Vietnam War
Authors: Shiratori Noriko
Published: January 2024

This chapter presents an early example of transpacific activism encompassing five events that played out within and around the US Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan, during the Vietnam War. Due to the widespread presence of US bases throughout the Japanese archipelago since 1945, Japan became a launching pad of America’s war in Vietnam. In response, Japanese postwar intellectuals founded the Beheiren movement in 1965 with the sole purpose of bringing peace in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of war-weary ordinary citizens of postwar Japan actively joined this anti-Vietnam War movement. When GI uprisings erupted in every major US base worldwide as the war in Southeast Asia bogged down, American activists and Japanese activists/students flooded to Iwakuni to support the vigorous GI resistance happening there, where transpacific activism flourished. Their collaboration included publishing Semper Fi, a widely distributed underground GI paper chronicling the daily happenings on US bases within the context of the unprecedented antiwar protests in Japan and elsewhere in the global 1960s, which gradually weakened in the early 1970s with America’s apparent defeat in Vietnam.
The U.S. Military’s R&R Program in Taipei, 1965–1972
Authors: Fredman Zach
Published: January 2024

This chapter examines the US military’s overseas rest and recreation (R&R) program in Taipei, Taiwan during the Vietnam War. Drawing on Chinese and English-language sources, it argues that R&R was a central component of the “comfort-for-morale-formula” that underpinned the US war effort in Indochina and state-building in the US-allied western Pacific. R&R destination Taipei aimed to provide American personnel with hygienic, supposedly morale-boosting access to local women’s bodies through carefully regulated prostitution while promoting capitalist economic development and assuaging historically charged sensitivities about national sovereignty. By the time US forces withdrew from South Vietnam the R&R program had laid the foundation for the sex tourism industries that have flourished in much of the western Pacific region ever since. R&R normalized a conception of militarized masculinity that still endures in Asia.
Taiwanese Economic Assistance to South Vietnam, 1955–1975
Authors: Lim Jason
Published: January 2024

This chapter gives an overview of the economic assistance Taiwan gave South Vietnam between the founding of the Republic of Vietnam in 1955 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. With anticommunism as the ideological motivation, the Taiwanese government organized technical and economic aid to Saigon and regularly kept abreast of economic changes and needs in South Vietnam through nine Sino-Vietnamese Economic Conferences organized during this 20-year period. The chapter shows Taiwanese interests about the industrialization programs in South Vietnam and its main concern over regime changes in Saigon was that South Vietnam remained anticommunist. In doing so, Taiwan was not a pariah state in East Asia as it was actively involved in South Vietnamese affairs.
The American-Led Military Coalition in Vietnam
Authors: Anderson David L.
Published: January 2024

To internationalize the American military effort in the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson sought a military coalition of third-country forces, which he termed “more flags,” to join the United States and South Vietnam in fighting the Vietnamese communists. The existing SEATO defense structure—a diplomatic deterrent without military obligation—did not meet the challenge. At Johnson’s urging, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines decided to deploy military personnel to the war against North Vietnam. Indicative of the diverse interests and strengths of the Asia-Pacific nations, they all acted on an ad hoc basis in pursuit of their own goals and, in some cases, with economic incentives from Washington.
Vietnamese Refugee Status, Habeas Corpus, and Hong Kong, 1988–1997
Authors: Lipman Jana K.
Published: January 2024

The presence of Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong raised legal debates over habeas corpus and human rights, which intersected with anxieties about Hong Kong’s shift to Chinese sovereignty in the 1990s. The United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Chinese governments all hoped to shutter the camps and either resettle or repatriate Vietnamese asylum seekers before 1997. However, human rights lawyers pointed to the inherent contradictions of holding Vietnamese indefinitely at the very moment Hong Kong politicians hoped to safeguard human rights norms, and specifically the practice of habeas corpus. As a result, Vietnamese legal campaigns provoked questions about detention, habeas corpus, and the rule of law for both the Vietnamese and Hong Kong’s general population.
Introduction
Authors: Horowitz Daniel
Published: January 2024

After briefly surveying the range of residential choices historically, there comes a discussion of how over the long course of American history (but especially since the New Deal), public policies and private interests have influenced where and how people live. I pay special attention to how the actions of public and private institutions have favored homeowners over renters, whites over people of color, those in the middle class and above over those below, people living on farms and in suburbs over urban dwellers, and lenders over borrowers.
Housing Central
Authors: Horowitz Daniel
Published: January 2024

This chapter focuses on three HGTV shows—Property Brothers featuring the twins Drew and Jonathan Scott, Flip or Flop with Christine and Tarek El Moussa as its stars, and the Fixer Upper hosted by Chip and Joanna Gaines.Attention to this corner of reality television’s extensive real estate programming tracks a series of entangled narratives: shifts in HGTV’s programming, the ways these three shows emerged and then later their stars turned their attention elsewhere, and the onset of the Great Recession followed by the waning of its impact. An examination of HGTV shows, especially these three, makes it possible to understand some dimensions of the impact of the Great Recession on media depictions of housing choices and perhaps real choices as well.
The Power of Positive Real Estate Workshops
Authors: Horowitz Daniel
Published: January 2024

Relying on materials available in many media and on my role as a participant observer, this chapter concentrates on two real estate workshops that tens of thousands of Americans have enrolled it and that I have attended—Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad and Than Merrill’s Fortune Builders. Starting with free, two-hour meetings and then escalating to a point of working with a personal coach for $50,000 or more, the sprawling enterprises Kiyosaki and Merrill promise riches, financial freedom, and achievement of the American dream to investors adversely affected by the Great Recession. As modern-day versions of the storied tradition of positive thinking that goes back to Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Hill, and Norman Vincent Peale, they emphasize self-governance in a neoliberal world even as they market reliance on the expertise and assistance of others, especially those involved in their own operations.
Coda
Authors: Horowitz Daniel
Published: January 2024

This conclusion focuses on discussions during and soon after the pandemic about its impact on residential real estate. Though still too early to tell for sure, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to accentuate previous fault lines in the worlds of residential real estate and introduce new ones. I pay particular attention to observations and predictions relevant to what the book has focused on—such as how real estate workshop companies refigured what they do when they can no longer hold public meetings; how if at all the three HGTV programs shifted their coverage; and how the pandemic influenced where the enterprises that profited from people lived, travelled to, and worked. Among the topics are the intensification of the home as haven and workplace; the threats working and shopping at home posed to commercial real estate; how people reconfigured where they lived or decided to live elsewhere; and how the pandemic exacerbated gendered, racial, and class divisions. I discuss some of the first books, published in late 2020, to explore observations and speculations about COVID-19’s consequences, especially Fareed Zakaria’s Ten Lessons For A Post-Pandemic World.
Bioethics Reenvisioned
Authors: King Nancy M. P. , Henderson Gail E. , Churchill Larry R.
Published: January 2024

Bioethics needs an expanded moral vision. Born in the ferment of the 1970s, the field responded to rapid developments in biomedical technology and injustices in clinical care and research. Since then, bioethics has predominantly focused on respect for autonomy, beneficence and nonmaleficence, and the zero-sum "lifeboat" ethics of distributive justice, applying these principles almost exclusively to clinical ethics and research ethics within the walls of medical institutions. It is now time for bioethics to take full account of the problems of health disparities and structural injustice that are made newly urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change. This book shows why and how the field must embrace a broader and more meaningful view of justice, principally by incorporating the tools and insights of the social sciences, social epidemiology, and public health. It makes the case for a more social understanding and application of justice, a deeper humility in assessing expertise in ethics consultation, a broader and more relevant research agenda, and greater appreciation of the profound health implications of global warming.
It Shouldn’t Take a Pandemic
Authors: King Nancy M. P. , Henderson Gail E. , Churchill Larry R.
Published: January 2024

The goal of this chapter is to situate thinking about social determinants of health in the history of changing ideas about disease causation. Among many scholars who have contributed to this body of work, the authors include Rudolph Virchow, Edwin Chadwick, George Rosen, Nancy Krieger, Geoffrey Rose, Bruce Link, Jo Phelan, and Paul Farmer. The chapter considers how the collection of relevant data has evolved, how changing analytical methods have been applied to these data, and how innovative measurement perspectives demonstrate the associations between social factors and health outcomes. It discusses how race and racism fit into our understanding of social determinants, citing work by David Williams, among others. It describes the multidisciplinary, multimethod research employed by infectious disease expert Adaora Adimora to define factors related to HIV, race, and health disparities. Her twenty-year research trajectory illustrates implications for a social justice agenda. The chapter concludes with consideration of the social determinants of COVID-19, and the urgent need for sophisticated application of theory to emerging data. Taken together, the 150-year history of social epidemiology and social medicine provides empirical as well as normative perspectives to assist bioethicists in their journey to incorporate and apply a broader understanding of justice and health.
Lifeboat Ethics, Social Selves, and Health Justice
Authors: King Nancy M. P. , Henderson Gail E. , Churchill Larry R.
Published: January 2024

This chapter argues that the idea of lifeboat ethics has dominated bioethics and thereby distorted the moral significance of the problems bioethics routinely examines. Lifeboat ethics is the fixation on discrete choices, in slice-of-life, contextless scenarios of forced choices about scarce resources. Who should receive scarce Covid vaccines, or the last bed in an Intensive Care Unit? This preoccupation with such choices is largely shaped by the clinical context of much bioethics work and the need to be serviceable to medical decision-making. A short history of lifeboat ethics is traced, from the writings of Garret Hardin, the legal case US v Holmes, and the Swedish Hospital Ethics Committee decisions about the allocation of scarce renal dialysis in the late 1960s. A rationale for why lifeboat ethics is so appealing and so persistent in its dominance is offered, along with examples of how lifeboat framing shaped the moral understanding of the Covid pandemic. It is argued that a more socially embedded notion of moral personhood is needed. The work of Charles Taylor is presented as a corrective to the justice theories of John Locke, John Rawls, and others. Recognizing the powerful social determinants of health and illness also underlines the need for a socially nuanced understanding of justice, and the work of Madison Powers and Ruth Faden is presented as a paradigm for understanding justice in medicine and public health.
Making Our Future
Authors: Hilliard Emily
Published: January 2024

Drawing from her work as state folklorist, Emily Hilliard explores contemporary folklife in West Virginia and challenges the common perception of both folklore and Appalachian culture as static, antiquated forms, offering instead the concept of "visionary folklore" as a future-focused, materialist, and collaborative approach to cultural work.With chapters on the expressive culture of the West Virginia teachers' strike, the cultural significance of the West Virginia hot dog, the tradition of independent pro wrestling in Appalachia, the practice of nonprofessional women songwriters, the collective counternarrative of a multiracial coal camp community, the invisible landscape of writer Breece D'J Pancake's hometown, the foodways of an Appalachian Swiss community, the postapocalyptic vision presented in the video game Fallout 76, and more, the book centers the collective nature of folklife and examines the role of the public folklorist in collaborative engagements with communities and culture. Hilliard argues that folklore is a unifying concept that puts diverse cultural forms in conversation, as well as a framework that helps us reckon with the past, understand the present, and collectively shape the future.