The United States 1763 2001

This book takes a new approach to teaching and learning early US history from 1763 to 2001 at A level. It meets the needs of teachers and students studying for today's revised AS and A2 exams. In a unique style, The United States, 1763-2001 focuses on the key topics within the period. Each topic is then comprehensively explored to provide background, essay writing advice and examples, source work and historical skills exercises. The key topics featured include: * the struggle for the Constitution, 1763-1877 * the American Civil War * Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal * foreign policy, 1890-1991 * civil rights, 1863 - 1992. Using essay styles and source exercises from each of the exam boards - AQA, Edexcel and OCR - this book is an essential text for students and teachers.

This lively book recounts the story of the antagonism between the American colonists and the British armed forces prior to the Revolution. Douglas Leach reveals certain Anglo-American attitudes and stereotypes that evolved before 1763 and became an important factor leading to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Using research from both England and the United States, Leach provides a comprehensive study of this complex historical relationship. British professional armed forces first were stationed in significant numbers in the colonies during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. During early clashes in Virginia in the 1670s and in Boston and New York in the late 1680s, the colonists began to perceive the British standing army as a repressive force. The colonists rarely identified with the British military and naval personnel and often came to dislike them as individuals and groups. Not suprisingly, these hostile feelings were reciprocated by the British soldiers, who viewed the colonists as people who had failed to succeed at home and had chosen a crude existence in the wilderness. These attitudes hardened, and by the mid-eighteenth century an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion prevailed on both sides. With the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, greater numbers of British regulars came to America. Reaching uprecedented levels, the increased contact intensified the British military's difficulty in finding shelter and acquiring needed supplies and troops from the colonists. Aristocratic British officers considered the provincial officers crude amateurs -- incompetent, ineffective, and undisciplined -- leading slovenly, unreliable troops. Colonists, in general, hindered the British military by profiteering whenever possible, denouncing taxation for military purposes, and undermining recruiting efforts. Leach shows that these attitudes, formed over decades of tension-breeding contact, are an important development leading up to the American Revolution.

The Routledge Companion to World History since 1914 is an outstanding compendium of facts and figures on World History. Fully up-to-date, reliable and clear, this volume is the indispensable source of information on a thorough range of topics such as: the Arab-Israeli conflict anti-semitism and the Holocaust all the world's major famines and natural disasters since 1914 whether all countries of the world have a king, president, prime minister or other governance GNP of the world's major states, year by year biographies of key figures civil rights movements the Vietnam War the rise of terrorism globalization. Thematically presented, the book covers topics relevant from the First World War to the Iraq war of 2003, and from post-colonial Africa to conflicts and movements in Southeast Asia. With maps, chronologies and full bibliography, this user-friendly reference work is the essential companion for students of history, politics and international relations, and for all those with an interest in world history.

This book looks at the evolution of the role of Europe in US grand strategy, and unpacks how US administrations have instrumentalized this relationship in pursuit of extra-European objectives. The work considers geopolitical pressures in conjunction with leaders’ strategic ideas to provide an account of the evolution of the role of Europe in the context of US grand strategy. Observers generally agree on the vague notion that Europe has been de-prioritized in Washington’s external affairs. Against this background, the book makes the case that such de-prioritization of Europe in the context of US grand strategy also entails a reconceptualization of the transatlantic relationship, namely as a region featuring long-standing relationships that can at times be leveraged in pursuit of non-European goals. The United States has a long history of seeking European support or acquiescence for its role as the leader of the international system, but whereas during the Cold War Washington enlisted its European allies in a grand strategic struggle against a European power, more recently, it has sought to enlist European allies in extra-European struggles of different types. Thinking about the role of Europe in US grand strategy now requires new theoretical and empirical tools that allow for the recognition of this very fact. Accordingly, this book proposes that strategic ideas on the viability of international cooperation held within the White House crucially shape what – if any -- type of support the United States seeks from Europe on the global stage. In doing so, the book adds important nuance to other accounts proclaiming either the proverbial death of the transatlantic relationship or the eternal and unchanging nature thereof. This book will be of much interest to students of European security, US foreign policy, and International Relations.

From 1964 to 1980, the United States was buffeted by a variety of international crises, including the nation's defeat in Vietnam, the growing aggression of the Soviet Union, and Washington's inability to free the fifty two American hostages held by Islamic extremists in Iran. Through this period and in the decades that followed, Commentary, Human Events, and National Review magazines were critical in supporting the development of GOP conservative positions on key issues that shaped events at home and abroad. These publications and the politicians they influenced pursued a fundamental realignment of US foreign policy that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. Paving the Way for Reagan closely examines the ideas and opinions conveyed by the magazines in relationship to their critiques of the dominant liberal foreign policy events of the 1960s and 1970s. Revealed is how the journalists' key insights and assessments of the US strategies on Vietnam, China, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), the United Nations, the Panama Canal, Rhodesia, and the Middle East applied pressure to leaders on the Right within the GOP who they believed were not being faithful to conservative principles. Their views were ultimately adopted within the conservative movement, and subsequently, helped lay the foundation for Reagan's "peace through strength" foreign policy. Incorporating primary sources and firsthand accounts from writers and editors, Jurdem provides a comprehensive analysis of how these three publications played a fundamental role influencing elite opinion for a paradigm shift in US foreign policy during this crucial sixteen--year period.

This book questions the view of the current orthodoxy which argues that the Soviet Union and the United States were binary opposites in the 1930s. The Shaping of Popular Consent presents a comparative analysis of one specific facet of the USSR and the US, namely the manner in which their ruling elites sought to win popular consent. A key dimension in the analysis of any political order, this issue recommends itself precisely because the assumption that, in this the two were quite dissimilar, is the virtual point of departure for the current thinking. To sharpen the focus of the comparison, the book concentrates on the role of the visual arts and the manner and extent to which those in power employed them to attempt to win popular consent. Therefore, this book poses two questions. Firstly, to what extent did the ruling elites in both the USSR and the US believe they needed the people's faith/trust in the system? Secondly, different as the two societies were, to what extent might they have employed similar use of visual cultural media in their attempts to win "hearts and minds"? The study explores the interwar years, specifically 1929-1941. This was an era of great upheaval in both the USSR and the US and marks the beginning of the age of mass communication. The book examines if, how, and to what extent Soviet and American cultural producers, during the years 1929-1941, employed the visual arts, cinema in particular but also painting, the plastic arts, theatre and architecture, to promote, essentially, the establishments' rights and wrongs, heroes and villains. It does so exploring both the domestic and the international scene. It illustrates that, despite giant differences between the two countries, in the way the two establishments sought to win popular consent the binary view is simply inaccurate. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates the need for a plethora of wide-ranging comparative studies of the Soviet Union and the United States. Indeed, through recognizing the importance of comparing and contrasting the USSR and the US, and by attempting to do just that, we might learn to better understand how, in what ways and for what purposes these two countries, so central to our understanding of the modern world, were organized. Thus, this work is genuinely comparative, inter-disciplinary and cultural. Indeed, the study is part of a vanguard movement. It is of significant value to scholars of both the USSR, Stalinism and Soviet art and the US, the New Deal and Hollywood. Finally, building on work by Noam Chomsky, Anotonio Gramsci and others such as Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities, the book will be of tremendous interests to many (both students and interested parties alike) who have an interest in how identities are constructed, how propaganda is manufactured and just how the (ostensibly) divergent philosophies of modern governments are represented in popular culture.