Our American Ethos

What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of parochial identities has breathed new life into old worries about the vulnerability of the American Creed. This book tells a different story, one in which creedal values remain hard at work in shaping ordinary Americans' judgements about immigration. Levy and Wright show that perceptions of civic fairness - based on multiple, often competing values deeply rooted in the country's political culture - are the dominant guideposts by which most Americans navigate immigration controversies most of the time and explain why so many Americans simultaneously hold a mix of pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant positions. The authors test the relevance and force of the theory over time and across issue domains.

For more than two hundred years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images--Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island as they have persisted and changed since the early nineteenth century. Drawing on texts and visual images produced by Americans ranging from government officials, policy makers, and journalists to travelers, tourists, poets, and lyricists, Perez argues that these charged and coded images of persuasion and mediation were in service to America's imperial impulses over Cuba.

American Ethos is the idea that the achievement of mutually beneficial goals is the best way to grow our national unity and ensure our future as a free and democratic America. It is the prospect that we can establish basic ideals we all share as Americans - not based on a particular social value, special interest, partisan or local concern, but rather by looking at our country and our people as a whole group, not a collection of competing minorities. We must unify and move forward.

Rhetoric, Embodiment, and the Ethos of Surveillance: Student Bodies in the American High School investigates the rhetorical tension between controlling student bodies and educating student minds. The book is a rhetorical analysis of the policies and procedures that govern life in contemporary American high schools; it also discusses the rhetorical effects of high-security, high-surveillance school buildings. It uncovers various metaphors that emerge from a close reading of the system, such as students’ claims that “school is a prison.” Jennifer Young concludes that many of the policies governing contemporary American high schools have come to rhetorically operate as a “discourse of default” that works against the highest aims of education, and she offers a method of effecting a cultural shift for going forward. Specifically, Young calls for an explicit application of intentional rhetoric to match discourse to audience and suggests that the development of empathy as a core value within the high school might be more effective in keeping students safe than the architectural and technological approaches we currently employ.

The Ethos of Black Motherhood in America: Only White Women Get Pregnant examines the ethos of Black and white mothers in America's racialized society. Kimberly C. Harper argues that the current Black maternal health crisis is not a new one, but an existing one rooted in the disregard for Black wombs dating back to America's history with chattel slavery. Examining the reproductive laws that controlled the reproductive experiences of black women, Harper provides a fresh insight into the “bad black mother” trope that Black feminist scholars have theorized and argues that the controlling images of black motherhood are a creation of the American nation-state. In addition to a discussion of black motherhood, Harper also explores the image of white motherhood as the center of the landscape of motherhood. Scholars of communication, gender studies, women’s studies, history, and race studies will find this book particularly useful.

WARS CHANGE, WARRIORS DON'T We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives? The Warrior Ethos is intended not only for men and women in uniform, but artists, entrepreneurs and other warriors in other walks of life. The book examines the evolution of the warrior code of honor and "mental toughness." It goes back to the ancient Spartans and Athenians, to Caesar's Romans, Alexander's Macedonians and the Persians of Cyrus the Great (not excluding the Garden of Eden and the primitive hunting band). Sources include Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Vegetius, Arrian and Curtius--and on down to Gen. George Patton, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan.

The concept and utility of strategic defense should be evaluated in an embracing cultural context defined by the values, attitudes, and worldview of society—its ethos. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) responds both to changes in the American ethos and to shifts in the balance of power. Together, these changes have undermined the basis of U.S.