Foreign Missions and Strategy, Foreign Missions as Strategy

Author(s):  
Emily Conroy-Krutz

This chapter describes how thinking about American foreign missions provides an essential reminder of the sometimes hidden or overlooked role of religion in the history of foreign relations and policy. Accordingly, attention to foreign missions reveals the multiple ways that religious belief and priorities could shape political strategies. In foreign missionaries, one can see a group of early nineteenth-century Americans who had a grand plan for the role of the United States in the world. The United States was, in their view, one of the two seats of “true religion” in the world and accordingly it had a duty to lead the rest of the world toward a particular type of Christianity and “civilization.” This can be seen in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ (ABCFM) general process of location selection as well as their early efforts in China, which they saw as a key strategic location in the overall project of the conversion of the world. Similar dynamics were at work in all of the board’s mission stations, but the particular interest that missionaries, merchants, and diplomats had in relations with China make it a particularly apt location for considering missionary and grand strategy.

Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber

This chapter presents the historical and conceptual background to the book’s argument. It starts with a history of Ghana, followed by an analysis of the trends that have led to high levels of out-migration, and then to a description of Ghanaian populations in Chicago. Next, it addresses the concept of social trust in general and personal trust in particular, developing a theory of personal trust as an imaginative and symbolic activity, and analyzing interracial relations through the lens of racialized distrust. It concludes by describing the role of religion in the integration of immigrant groups into the United States and the particular religious frameworks that characterize Charismatic Evangelical Christianity in Ghana.


Author(s):  
Michael A. Krysko

Technology is ubiquitous in the history of US foreign relations. Throughout US history, technology has played an essential role in how a wide array of Americans have traveled to and from, learned about, understood, recorded and conveyed information about, and attempted to influence, benefit from, and exert power over other lands and peoples. The challenge for the historian is not to find where technology intersects with the history of US foreign relations, but how to place a focus on technology without falling prey to deterministic assumptions about the inevitability of the global power and influence—or lack thereof—the United States has exerted through the technology it has wielded. “Foreign relations” and “technology” are, in fact, two terms with extraordinarily broad connotations. “Foreign relations” is not synonymous with “diplomacy,” but encompasses all aspects and arenas of American engagement with the world. “Technology” is itself “an unusually slippery term,” notes prominent technology historian David Nye, and can refer to simple tools, more complex machines, and even more complicated and expansive systems on which the functionality of many other innovations depends. Furthermore, processes of technological innovation, proliferation, and patterns of use are shaped by a dizzying array of influences embedded within the larger surrounding context, including but by no means limited to politics, economics, laws, culture, international exchanges, and environment. While some of the variables that have shaped how the United States has deployed its technological capacities were indeed distinctly American, others arose outside the United States and lay beyond any American ability to control. A technology-focused rendering of US foreign relations and global ascendancy is not, therefore, a narrative of uninterrupted progress and achievement, but an accounting of both successes and failures that illuminate how surrounding contexts and decisions have variably shaped, encouraged, and limited the technology and power Americans have wielded.


Author(s):  
Sarah H Cleveland ◽  
Paul B. Stephan

This introductory chapter serves as a foreword for the volume. It sketches the history of past restatements and the evolution of the latest one. The first (confusingly called Second) Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States brought widespread attention to the term “foreign relations law.” It staunchly defended the proposition that foreign relations, no matter how imbued with discretion and prerogative, still must rest on law. The Third Restatement, prepared during a period of what to many seemed constitutional retrenchment and a loosening of judicial supervision over public life, offered a robust defense of the proposition that, “In conducting the foreign relations of the United States, Presidents, members of Congress, and public officials are not at large in a political process; they are under law.” Moreover, it insisted that the judiciary, as much as the executive and Congress, creates and enforces this law. To the extent that the Third Restatement rested its claims on its view of the state of customary international law, other influential actors pushed back. The Fourth Restatement revisits the Third’s claims, especially about the central role of the judiciary, in light of the evolution of both U.S. and international law and practice.


Author(s):  
Juan Javier Pescador

The history of the participation of Latinas in sports, leisure and recreational activities has been neglected by both historians of American women and researchers on the history of Latinas/os in the United States. The contribution of Latinas to soccer organizations, soccer leagues, soccer fields and soccer teams is a vastly unexplored territory mainly because of the resistance of historians of American women to incorporate Latinas in the national narrative and the negligence of Latino researchers in recognizing the presence and role of Latinas in the world of sports and recreation in the United States. This double inattention is not only rooted in the nativist shaping of the perspectives on the studies of American women and soccer, but also in the prevalent views inside Latino families, and sometimes Latino scholars, that soccer is a sport for men and, along with boxing, baseball and other sports, is a unique venue to display and assert Latino masculinity.


Author(s):  
Haia Shpayer-Makov

This exploratory essay outlines various pivotal trends in the professionalization of police detection in England, France, and the United States from the mid-eighteenth century to the Second World War. Key landmarks in the evolution of the role of the detective from criminal turned paid informant, or from nonspecialist law enforcer, to a professional member of a detective unit are traced. The essay draws upon the history of forensic science to highlight the interface between detection and forensic science and to point toward forensic science methodologies that made significant inroads in the world of police detection, thereby enhancing its professionalization.


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (05) ◽  
pp. 576-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariane Lewis

AbstractAlthough the concept of death by neurologic criteria is accepted throughout much of the world and death can legally be determined by neurologic criteria throughout the United States, the process is fraught with contentious ethical and legal controversies. I explore historic and contemporary ethical and legal disputes about determination of death by neurologic criteria including the need for consent from patients' surrogates prior to determination of death, the role of religion in determination of death, management of objections to determination of death by neurologic criteria, the approach to patients who are dead by neurologic criteria but are pregnant, and gamete retrieval after determination of death.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


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