This book provides a new framework for examining and comprehending the varied historical experiences of ethnic groups in the United States. Thematically organized and comparative in outlook, it explores how historians have grappled with questions that bear upon a key aspect of the American experience: ethnicity. How did the United States come to have such an ethnically diverse population? What contribution, if any, has this ethnic diversity made to the shaping of American culture and institutions? How easily and at what levels have ethnic and racial minorities been incorporated, if at all, into the social and economic structures of the United States? Has incorporation been a uniform process or has it varied from group to group? As well as providing readers with an accessible yet authoritative introduction to the field of American ethnic history, the book serves as a valuable reference tool for more experienced researchers.Key Features:*Adopts a comparative and thematic approach that helps to demystify this complex and controversial subject.*Provides an orderly and readable introduction to the main issues and debates surrounding the topic.*Detailed and broad-ranging discussion of historiography enables readers to find more specialized works on topics in which they are interested.

The conventional wisdom is that small developing countries exert limited—if any—influence on the foreign policy of superpowers, in particular the United States. This book challenges that premise based on the experience of the small developing country of Jamaica and its relations with the United States. It raises the question: if the foreign policy of the United States can be influenced by even a small developing country, should Washington be worried?

For all its foundation on the principles of religious freedom and human equality, American history contains numerous examples of bigotry and persecution of minorities. Now, author Philip Perlmutter lays out the history of prejudice in America in a brief, compact, and readable volume. Perlmutter begins with the arrival of white Europeans, moves through the eighteenth and industrially expanding nineteenth centuries; the explosion of immigration and its attendant problems in the twentieth century; and a fifth chapter explores how prejudice (racial, religious, and ethnic) has been institutionalized in the educational systems and laws. His final chapter covers the future of minority progress.

Within recent years a new body of literature has emerged within international relations on transnationalism and foreign policy. This literature has thus far focused on the strategic relationship between home states and their ethnic lobbies abroad, often with regard to remittances to and politics in the home country. This book breaks new ground in that it develops a theory about when, how and for what reasons host states use diasporas and the ethnic lobbies they generate to advance foreign policy goals. Ask What You Can Do for Your (New) Country focuses on a previously unexamined phenomenon: how host governments utilize diasporas to advance their foreign policy agendas in mutually beneficial ways. As was demonstrated in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when Iraqi exiles testified that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, ethnic lobbies have been utilized strategically by the United States (and other countries) for the promotion of political objectives. Host states have even promoted the creation of such ethnic lobbies for this purpose. As Nadejda K Marinova shows, those who participate in such lobbies are of a particular subset of migr s who are politically active, express a sustained vision for homeland politics, and who often have existing ties to political institutions within the host state. These groups then act as a link between the public and officials in their home state, and other (generally less politically active) members of the diaspora via a coordinated effort by the host state. She develops a theoretical model for determining the conditions under which a host state will decide to promote and utilize an ethnic lobby, and she tests it against eight cases, including the Bush Administration's use of the American Lebanese Cultural Union and the World Council for the Cedars Revolution in developing policy towards Lebanon and Syria, the Iraqi National Congress in endorsing the US invasion of Iraq, the Cuban-American Committee's cooperation with the Carter administration in attempting to normalize relations with Cuba, and the International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA) launched by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011 to promote economic development in a number of countries.

This book discusses “culture” and the origins of the Anglo-American special relationship (the AASR). The bitter dispute between ethnic groups in the US from 1914–17—a period of time characterized as the “culture wars”—laid the groundwork both for US intervention in the European balance of power in 1917 and for the creation of what would eventually become a lasting Anglo-American alliance. Specifically, the vigorous assault on English “civilization” launched by two large ethnic groups in America (the Irish-Americans and the German-Americans) had the unintended effect of causing America’s demographic majority at the time (the English-descended Americans) to regard the prospect of an Anglo-American alliance in an entirely new manner. The author contemplates why the Anglo-American “great rapprochement” of 1898 failed to generate the desired “Anglo-Saxon” alliance in Britain, and in so doing features theoretically informed inquiries into debates surrounding both the origins of the war in 1914 and the origins of the American intervention decision nearly three years later.

"In this fourth volume, [the author] notes that the decline of religiousness in the second and third generations of American Jews was balanced by the development of an activist political culture based an elaborate organizational life, an effective fund-raising apparatus, and Zionism, with its notion of Jewish peoplehood. That reshaping of American Jewish individual and communal identity in some measure accounts for the insufficient response to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. American Jewry's remarkable achievement in the private sphere overshadowed its weakness in the public one"--Series Editor's forword.

Honorable Mention, Book Award in History of the Association for Asian American Studies. In this book, Richard S. Kim examines the central role played by immigrants in the independence movement that sought to liberate Korea from Japanese colonization. Regarding Japanese rule as illegitimate, Koreans in and out of the Korean peninsula viewed themselves as a stateless people. Their independence activities had to be carried out from abroad, creating conditions for the emergence of a diasporic nationalism. Using English and Korean language sources, Kim traces how Koreans in the United States articulated visions of national sovereignty, drawing particularly on American political rhetoric and symbolism, and increasingly relied on U.S. state power to mobilize international support for their cause. Their efforts to establish an independent homeland necessitated their participation in civic and political activities in the United States, engaging in organizational activity that led to the development of an ethnic consciousness and paradoxically established them as an American ethnic group. Ultimately, Kim argues, homeland nationalism was central to the assimilation of Korean immigrants as American ethnics, even as they were denied U.S. citizenship.

Three provocative exposés from a National Jewish Book Award–winning journalist address the CIA’s recruitment of Nazis and use of psychological warfare. The Splendid Blond Beast: This groundbreaking investigation into the CIA’s post–World War II liberation and recruitment of Nazi war criminals—including the pivotal role played by CIA director Allen Dulles—traces the roots not only of US government malfeasance, but of mass murder as an instrument of financial gain and state power, from the Armenian genocide during World War I to Hitler’s Holocaust through the practice of genocide today. “Revelatory and shocking.” —Kirkus Reviews Blowback: The true story of how US intelligence organizations employed Nazi war criminals in clandestine warfare and propaganda against the USSR, anticolonial revolutionaries, and progressive movements worldwide that were claimed to be Soviet pawns. “The story is one that needs to be told, and Blowback makes a major contribution to its telling, supplementing a thorough collation of known cases with ample new research.” —The New York Times Science of Coercion: Drawing on long-classified documents from the Pentagon, the CIA, and other national security agencies, Simpson exposes secret government-funded research into psychological warfare and reveals that many of the most respected pioneers in the field of communication science were knowingly complicit as their findings were employed for the purposes of propaganda, subversion, intimidation, and counterinsurgency during the Cold War era. “An intriguing picture of the relations between state power and the intellectual community.” —Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

First published in 1998. Explores the concept of "race" - The term "race," which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of "races" as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of "race" and "racial" hierarchies in law, literature, and culture. How "racial" categories facilitate social control - The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that "racial" categorization is a powerful social force that is often used to promote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on "race" have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups. A multidisciplinary resource- This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source.

Who speaks for America in world affairs? In exploring this question, Smith ranges over the history of ethnic group involvement in foreign affairs; he notes the openness of our political system to interest groups; and he investigates the relationship between multiculturalism and U.S. foreign policy.