Faith-healer parents, child brides, and 12-year-old Tobacco pickers
The day before President Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration, the National Children’s campaign held a virtual children’s inauguration. Speakers included politicians, such as Massachusetts senator Ed Markey (D), and young activists themselves, several of whom called for the creation of a ‘White House office for kids’, arguing that the political establishment fails to consider and protect the rights of young Americans. This article briefly details three areas where children are not protected from harm: medical neglect law, child marriage, and child labour in agriculture. Based on the standards the US federal government applies to other countries, its failure to ratify international agreements on children’s rights, and aspects of the US Constitution, the United States must be considered a failing state when it comes to children’s rights. Children’s Medical and Fourteenth Amendment Rights With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and vaccination response, parental rights to refuse vaccinations for children has once again been […]
Continue ReadingNot Your Grandparents’ Grand Strategy: Rethinking Liberal Hegemony
Since the end of the Cold War, America’s commitment to a grand strategy of liberal hegemony has habitually set the parameters of foreign policy debate. The bipartisan consensus in Washington D.C. sees the United States as the indispensable nation whose leadership is required in perpetuity in the name of upholding the liberal international order. Liberal hegemony is liberal in the sense that it vows to use American power to defend and spread traditional liberal values such as individual freedoms, democratic governance and a market-based economy. The strategy is one of hegemony because it identifies America as the benevolent hegemon that is uniquely qualified to spread these principles abroad. This universalist logic sees the advancement of a liberal international order as not only essential for American security and prosperity, but as desirable for the rest of the world. As such, a moralistic fervour has become axiomatic in US foreign policy making […]
Continue ReadingAmerica Now
In this short series, a group of scholars consider important issues facing the United States as the Biden administration begins and the economic and health crises facing the country continue. Ellis Mallett considers the US position in foreign relations in her article, “Not Your Grandparents’ Grand Strategy: Rethinking Liberal Hegemony“. Jack Hodgson provides a succinct overview of the children’s rights and their status in the United States in his article, “Faith-healer parents, child brides, and 12-year-old Tobacco pickers“. Olga Theirbach-McLean contemplates the US’s relationship to capitalism in her article, “Reality Check or Business as Usual? COVID-19 and the future of US Capitalism“. Emma Woodhead investigates Civil War memory in the work of George Saunders and how it resonates in our current moment in her article, “(Re)Constructing the Past in George Saunders’ ‘CivilWarLand in Bad Decline‘”.
Continue ReadingHaunting History: Gordon Chang’s Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History
The building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) was a symbol and achievement of unification, of future imperial growth. In his USSO Book Hour Talk, Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History, Stanford historian of Sino-American relations Gordon Chang stated that so much of American history is railroad history. Most railroad history as American history is nationalistic, triumphalist, and technologically driven, focusing on ‘great white men’ and machines. In the name of Western expansion and “civilization,” technology changed Americans’ understanding of time, space, and distance. Paradoxically, the railroad simultaneously united and divided, connected and disconnected. A technologically advanced America in the late-nineteenth century was also the America of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Railroad history simultaneously involves the building of infrastructure and the ways in which a post-slavery America remained segregated after Reconstruction (Zoom 1:08:00-1:13:00). Moreover, it is also a […]
Continue ReadingMcCarthyism and Witch-Hunts: Sylvia Plath’s Perspective
Sylvia Plath was born in the time of the Great Depression, was a child during World War II, and became a young adult during the Cold War era, catalysing her own disapproval of this latter, turbulent period in American history. Her literary representation of McCarthyism and the Cold War is apparent in her only published novel, The Bell Jar (1963) and poems, such as “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103°” which mark her strong opposition to authoritarianism. In the US, the late 1940s and early 1950s were characterised by forceful fight against Communists of the Cold War and threats of a nuclear war. President Harry S. Truman and Senator Joseph McCarthy were the key figures associated with the suppression of political enemies and investigating people who were suspected of committing “un-American” activities. Joseph McCarthy gained larger political presence after his speech delivered in 1950 in West Virginia in which he […]
Continue ReadingGolf and Trump’s America
While America might seem tied up in that tiny white golf ball, it hasn’t always been this way. Golf is another of the New World’s ‘Old World’ borrowings. According to the OED the game is of “considerable antiquity in Scotland”. It lends power, lineage, and legitimacy, and so it lends presidency. Trump, despite his usual twitter-friendly lexicon, recently used the definition to his own ends at the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia, where he went to play after President-elect Joe Biden’s projected win.[1] It’s one thing for a President to play golf, but what does it mean for a President to turn to the sport in the immediate aftermath of his failure to regain office? The usual claims that golf offers respite from reality, a smooth deflection from abrupt decision-making, or a strategic space to strike up business deals all take a sinister twist. Was Trump trying to […]
Continue Reading“MATTER IS THE MINIMUM”: Reading Washington, DC’s BLM Memorial Fence
In the early evening of Monday, 1 June 2020, following a weekend of national protests against the extra-judicial killings of Black people by the police, US federal troops aggressively moved on demonstrators outside the White House in Washington, DC.[1] Using flashbangs and chemical weapons, the US military forced demonstrators from the grounds of Lafayette Square Park, clearing the way for President Donald J. Trump to walk through the park and cross the street, so that he could have his photograph taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church whilst holding a Bible upside-down. Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead (c) 2020 The following day, temporary non-scalable chain-link fencing was installed around the perimeter of the park—both physically and symbolically separating the populace from the President’s residence. The original fencing and concrete barricades were removed within weeks, only to be re-installed later that month, following protesters’ failed attempt to […]
Continue ReadingThe Toppling of Þorfinnur: Vandalism as Dialogue and Direct Action
Figure 1. Head of Þorfinnur Karlsefni, 2018 Source: CBS Philly In the early hours of Oct 2nd, 2018, unidentified parties beheaded a one-hundred-year-old bronze sculpture of the Norse explorer Þorfinnur Karlsefni and hurled it into the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Weighing thousands of pounds and standing more than seven feet tall, the statue of Þorfinnur was discovered the next day, completely submerged. The only evidence was a single crowbar located near the scene. Because the Philadelphia Eagles were scheduled to play the Minnesota Vikings that same week, some wondered if a zealous football fan had targeted the statue. But those well-versed in the history of the left-wing activist movement in Philadelphia inferred a deeper significance to the dramatic toppling of Þorfinnur. Since 2007, the white supremacist group the Keystone State Skinheads, or Keystone United, have held annual rallies in Fairmount Park on Leif Erikson Day (an obscure holiday […]
Continue ReadingSound, The Second-Line, and the Politics of Post-Katrina Memory
In January of 2006, thousands of displaced New Orleanians returned to their sunken city from a variety of locales. They came from as close as Baton Rouge and as far as Portland, Oregon. Following a strange diaspora, an extension of forced exile caused by inadequate and disorganized evacuation plans sponsored by the city following Hurricane Katrina, it was, for many, their first return to New Orleans following the storm[i]. This homecoming served as catalyst for what some considered to be the true beginning of the rebuilding effort: participation in a second line parade. The All-Star Second Line drew over eight thousand attendees, filling city blocks that had been more or less abandoned since the previous summer[ii]. For the sake of brevity, I won’t rehearse the long histories of the jazz funeral and the second line parade here. I am much less interested in developing an understanding of how they have […]
Continue Reading“Do Not Forget your Dying King”: Oliver Stone’s JFK and Popular Memory
John F. Kennedy Tribute Memorial, Fort-Worth, Texas “Do not forget your dying king,” District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) pleads to the jury at the end Oliver Stone’s JFK, reinforcing the Camelot aura long associated with President John F. Kennedy. Stone’s interpretation of Garrison’s efforts to convict a businessman with conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy remains as divisive now as when the film was released in 1991. Although the fierce debates over the historical accuracy of the film provide a fascinating glimpse into the power of movies to inform audiences of their history, JFK has rarely been interpreted as a memorial to President Kennedy. While Michael Hogan argued that books and thousands of statues, murals and roads deified Kennedy across the world[i], Oliver Stone’s JFK stands as perhaps the greatest reflection of how the post-Second World War generation of Americans remembered Kennedy, and offers a unique insight into how historical […]
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