An Interview with Harris Gaylord Warren: From the Borderlands to Paraguay

1989 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-460

Harris Gaylord Warren was, by common consent, the father of Paraguayan studies in the United States. His broad-ranging activities —from diplomatic undertakings in South America to military service in Italy to administrative and scholarly work at various North American universities—marked him as an historian of rare depth and insight. Not commonly known is that Dr. Warren began his career as a historian in the 1930s as a borderlands specialist. The Sword was their Passport: A History of American Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1943) is yet recognized as the definitive work on North American adventurers in that turbulent era. As an officer in the United States Army in World War II he was selected for various military history projects. After the war Dr. Warren returned to teaching and then administration. At that time his publications ranged from texts to Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, (New York, 1959).

Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson

Since 1900, United States troops have fought in more foreign conflicts than any other nation on Earth. Most Americans supported those actions, believing that they would keep the scourge of war far from our homes. But the strategy seems to have failed—it certainly did not prevent terror attacks against the U.S. mainland. The savage Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. were not the first to inflict war damage in America’s 48 contiguous states, however—nor were they the first warlike actions to harm innocent citizens since the Civil War. Paradoxically, making war abroad has always required practicing warfare in our own back yards. Today’s large, mechanized military training exercises have degraded U.S. soils, water supplies, and wildlife habitats in the same ways that the real wars affected war-torn lands far away. The saddest fact of all is that the deadly components of some weapons in the U.S. arsenal never found use in foreign wars but have attacked U.S. citizens in their own homes and communities. The relatively egalitarian universal service of World War II left a whole generation of Americans with nostalgia and reverence for military service. Many of us, perhaps the majority, might argue that human and environmental sacrifices are the price we must be willing to pay to protect our interests and future security. A current political philosophy proposes that the United States must even start foreign wars to protect Americans and their homes. But Americans are not fully aware of all the past sacrifices—and what we don’t know can hurt us. Even decades-old impacts from military training still degrade land and contaminate air and water, particularly in the arid western states, and will continue to do so far into the future. Exploded and unexploded bombs, mines, and shells (“ordnance,” in military terms) and haphazard disposal sites still litter former training lands in western states. And large portions of the western United States remain playgrounds for war games, subject to large-scale, highly mechanized military operations for maintaining combat readiness and projecting American power abroad.


2004 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Thompson ◽  
Gregory N. Stull

Abstract The use of instream structures to modify aquatic habitat has a long history in the United States. Pioneering work by wealthy landowners in the Catskills region of New York produced a range of designs in the decades preceding the Great Depression in an effort to replenish fish populations depleted from overfishing. The scientific evaluation of structures began in 1930. Within two years, a Michigan research team claimed improved fish populations. Cheap labor and government-sponsored conservation projects spearheaded by the Civilian Conservation Corps allowed the widespread adoption of the techniques in the 1930s, before adequate testing of the long-term impact of the devices. The start of World War II temporarily ended the government conservation efforts and prevented the continued evaluation of structures. During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, designs of instream structures remained essentially unchanged. Meanwhile, the small number of evaluations of the impact of the structures often were flawed. The continued use of early designs of instream structures helped instill a false belief that instream structures were proven to be a benefit to fish. Even modern use of instream structures continues to rely on the basic blueprints developed in the Catskills, despite documented problems with the use of these designs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 527-560
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

Having finished our history of prohibitionism, Chapter 18 asks: Where did our historical understandings go wrong? The chapter begins with the autumn years of Pussyfoot Johnson during the Great Depression, when prohibitionists had been thoroughly discredited. With the rise of Hayekian neoliberalism after World War II in the United States, any infringement on individual economic rights became understood as a necessary infringement on political rights too—which has made it difficult for contemporary historians to understand prohibitionism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield cast prohibition as solely a moral, religious issue, rather than a political or economic one, motivated by equal parts of “Marx, Jefferson and Jesus.” Ultimately, prohibitionism was a transnational normative shift about the inappropriateness of benefiting from addiction and misery of the masses, and an attempt to put the welfare of society ahead of the needs of the state.


Author(s):  
Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso ◽  
Mark Overmeyer-Velazquez

This book provides an overview of the story of Mexican migration to the United States and the astonishing forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of people to Mexico during the worldwide economic crisis of the Great Depression. While Mexicans were hopeful for economic reform following the Mexican revolution, by the 1930s, large numbers of Mexican nationals had already moved north and were living in the United States in one of the twentieth century’s most massive movements of migratory workers. Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso provides an illuminating backstory that demonstrates how fluid and controversial the immigration and labor situation between Mexico and the United States was in the twentieth century and continues to be in the twenty-first. This book details how, at the Great Depression’s advent, the United States stepped up its enforcement of immigration laws and forced more than 350,000 Mexicans, including their U.S.-born children, to return to their home country. While the Mexican government was fearful of the resulting economic implications, President Lázaro Cárdenas fostered the repatriation effort for mostly symbolic reasons relating to domestic politics. In clarifying the repatriation episode through the larger history of Mexican domestic and foreign policy, this book connects the dots between the aftermath of the Mexican revolution and the relentless political tumult surrounding today’s borderlands immigration issues.


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia S. Falk

Summary Leonard Bloomfield was the major force in the initial dissemination of Saussurean concepts in North America (Joseph 1989a, Koerner 1989), but his role was limited to his middle years from 1922 to 1933, and for some time thereafter American linguists paid little attention to Saussure’s Cours. In fact, studies on Saussure tend to move directly from Bloomfield to Noam Chomsky (e.g., Gadet 1989, Joseph 1990), with little discussion of the intervening quarter century in American linguistics. However, when Roman Jakobson arrived in New York in 1941, he brought with him a long record of commentary and criticism on Saussure’s ideas, and through his American teaching and publications, Jakobson became the next major source of attention to Saussure’s work. In this paper, I examine Jakobson’s complex positions on Saussure, with special attention to his first two decades in the United States. I then briefly consider Jakobson’s role in a third period of Saussurean concepts in the history of American linguistics, a period of revived interest that began in the late 1950s, engaging linguists from a diversity of theories and coinciding in the next decade with the republication of Jakobson’s European writings and with the rise of North American interest in the history of linguistics.


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