Contesting The Last Frontier

Women of color, including Asian Pacific American (APA) women, have made considerable inroads into elective office in the United States in recent years; in fact, their numbers have grown more rapidly than those of white women. Nonetheless, focusing only on success stories gives the false impression that racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are not barriers for APA candidates to public office. It also detracts attention from the persistent and severe under-representation of all women and nonwhite men in elective office in the United States. In Contesting the Last Frontier, Pei-te Lien and Nicole Filler examine the scope and significance of the rise of Asian Pacific Americans in US elective office over the past half-century. To help interpret the complex experiences of these political women and men situated at the intersection of race, gender, and other dimensions of marginalization, Lien and Filler adopt an intersectionality framework that puts women of color at the center of their analysis. They also draw on their own original dataset of APA electoral participation over the past 70 years, as well as in-depth interviews with elected officials. They examine APA candidates' trajectories to office, their divergent patterns of political socialization, the barriers and opportunities they face on the campaign trail, and how these elected officials enact their roles as representatives at local, state, and federal levels of government. In turn, they counter various tropes, including the model minority myth that suggests that Asian Americans have attained a level of success in education, work, and politics that precludes attention to racial discrimination. Importantly, the book also provides a look into how APA elected officials of various origins strive to serve the interests of the rapidly expanding and majority-immigrant population, especially those disadvantaged by the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and nativity. Ambitious and comprehensive, Contesting the Last Frontier fills an important gap in American electoral history and uncovers the lived experiences of APA women and men on the campaign trail and in elective office.

Native American sports team mascots represent a contemporary problem for modern Native American people. The ideas embedded in the mascot representations, however, are as old as the ideas constructed about the Indian since contact between the peoples of Western and the Eastern hemispheres. Such ideas conceived about Native Americans go hand-in-hand with the machinations of colonialism and conquest of these people. This research looks at how such ideas inform the construction of identity of white males from historic experiences with Native Americans. Notions of “playing Indian” and of “going Native” are precipitated from these historic contexts such that in the contemporary sense of considering Native Americans, popular culture ideas dress Native Americans in feathers and buckskin in order to satisfy stereotypic expectations of Indian-ness.

The second edition of Distinct Identities continues to provide a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to the complexities of the politics, social structures, and cultural contexts that animate how women of color engage in and shape U.S. politics. Keeping the structure of the original volume, this text represents the diverse and innovative scholarship being conducted in this field while covering the core topics in gender politics. What’s New: Chapters on queer women of color and the role of women of color and social movements. Chapters on the strategies that women of color use to run for office, where they run, political newcomers (Asian and Indigenous women). Chapters on the experiences of women of color office holders. Chapters on policy analysis and the media’s role in shaping the political agenda of women of color political elites. Distinct Identities pushes the boundaries of traditional intersectional scholarship and responds to America’s rapidly diversifying demographics and political culture. It reflects cutting-edge scholarship and provides readers with insight into where the field of women of color politics will head in the coming years.

A truly continental history in both its geographic and political scope, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 investigates eighteenth-century diplomacy involving North America and links geographic ignorance about the American West to Europeans' grand geopolitical designs. Breaking from scholars' traditional focus on the Atlantic world, Paul W. Mapp demonstrates the centrality of hitherto understudied western regions to early American history and shows that a Pacific focus is crucial to understanding the causes, course, and consequences of the Seven Years' War.

Today messages are sent with the click of a mouse. Few of us have time anymore to sit down and hand write a letter. E-mail is in and with the press of a key the written words disappear as if they had never been. Sadly the handwritten letter is becoming a thing of the past. In 1955 when two young starry-eyed Americans left to take up their post in northeast Thailand with the United States Information Agency there was no such thing as E-mail. Had there been this memoir would not exist. In Korat, Thailand communication by means other than a letter required advance planning, practice and patience. An overseas call had to be reserved in advance. The call was made from a radio station via short wave. It was a frustrating exercise in speak, stop, over and listen, speak, stop, over and listen. Letters took two, sometimes three weeks to arrive; thus answers to questions came six weeks after the fact. Despite the time lapse our weekly letters home were treasured, passed around and saved. Today these letters tell the story of a different time, a distant place and a forgotten era.

First published in 1982. Wide-ranging and fully documented, this book is the first detailed study of the origins, contexts and consequences of the long-standing dispute between China, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines over the Paracel and Spratly Archipelagos in the South China Sea - one of the world's most strategically important inter-ocean basins and China's southern maritime frontier. Samuels' analysis: * Highlights the impact of the shifting balance of power in Asia and the growing competition for oceanic resources * Examines the implications of the dispute in terms of the historical and modern role of china as a maritime power in Asia.

Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.

This book is about the memoirs of a US Marine Veteran who was born in a small town in the hills of Asco, West Virginia to a coal mining family. The Bishop family was poor and went through the rations of World War II. After the war, he decided to join the US Marine Corps after his high school graduation and served in the Vietnam War. He retired after 20 years of military service and decided to help build the American Legion to further assist the veterans in Alaska. He continued to serve the veterans for 27 years all the way to the national level before he became a Presidential Appointment as a Liaison to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs in Washington DC. This is about the journey of Master Sergeant William M Bishop, USMC (Ret) which will take you through the lost generation when life was simple as he traversed his destiny with the purpose he was born to live. Experience being with him throughout the chapters of the book.