The United States has often acted as an empire in Latin America. Nevertheless, there has been an obvious dissimilarity between U.S. actions in South America and U.S. actions in the rest of Latin America, which is illustrated by the fact that the United States never sent troops to invade a South American country. While geographic distance and strategic considerations may have played a role, they provide at best incomplete explanations for the U.S.’s relative absence south of Panama. The fact that the United States has had a distinct pattern of interactions with South America is thus not captured by the typical concept of Latin America. In Brazil, the United States, and the South American Subsystem: Regional Politics and the Absent Empire, Carlos Gustavo Poggio Teixeira recuperates the virtually neglected literature on regional subsystems. In so doing, Teixeira maintains that researchers of inter-American relations would greatly benefit from a characterization reflecting actual regional realities more than entrenched preconceptions. Such a characterization involves subdividing the Western Hemisphere in two regional subsystems: North and South America. This subdivision allows for uncovering regional dynamics that can help explain the U.S.’s limited interference in South American affairs compared to the rest of Latin America. This book argues that the role of Brazil as a status quo regional power in South America is the key to understanding this phenomenon. Through a historical analysis focusing on specific cases spanning three centuries, this research demonstrates that Brazil, regardless of particular domestic settings, has deliberately affected the calculations of costs and benefits of a more significant US involvement in South America. While in the past Brazil has taken actions that resulted in increasing the benefits of the U.S.’s limited involvement in South America, in more recent times it has sought to increase the costs of a more significant U.S. presence. Teixeira then considers some of the theoretical and political implications of the framework laid out by this research. Brazil, the United States, and the South American Subsystem is a groundbreaking investigation of U.S.-Latin American relations and the politics of imperialism.

This book sheds light on key issues in the Middle East. As the politics and society of the Middle East change, American foreign policy has become stagnant and stubborn. However, the changes occurring in the Middle East have brought into existence new, unfamiliar policies from regimes that reject old alliances and demand new solutions. Ongoing civil war in Syria, chaos in Yemen, and the recent conquests of ISIS have changed geopolitical calculations in the region for everyone concerned. However, American foreign policy lacks the vision to predict the consequences of such changes. The United States needs a major change in approach if it is to maintain both its leadership and credibility in the Muslim world. The political leadership in Washington naïvely and unrealistically assumes that it can impose its style of governance and way of thinking to make the Muslim world secular and democratic based on Western values. This work constructively criticizes and objectively analyzes the present American political strategy to make possible an honest national debate about American foreign policy toward the Muslim world. This book questions the judgment of American foreign policymakers and argues the United States has no coherent policy in place to address ongoing challenges. It highlights the need for creative thinking, flexibility, systematic understanding, cultural awareness, and effective strategy.

I thought I would be grafting and working on it. Pursuing it until I breathed my last breath. My ambition and drive was that concrete. But ambition will... Ambition will kill you. The spark is instant. Miles away from home they find each other. They were going to make it big, together. Fast forward years later, a world reset and changed forever they return to where they left it. One an award-winning writer, the other adopting a child and putting faith in crystals. The spark is still there, electric and dangerous. But how do you heal once you've been burned? Right Where We Left Us is a lyrical and witty three-hander and a heartfelt examination of what happens instead of “happy ever after”. A new Welsh play produced by Welsh theatre makers Chippy Lane Productions, this edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Chapter Arts Centre, in September 2022.

The Writing and Ratification of the U.S. Constitution: Practical Virtue in Action examines the events surrounding the development of the U.S. Constitution. Setting these events within the context of the colonial conflict with Britain and the experience with state constitutions under the Articles of Confederation, John R. Vile discusses the delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the major plans and proposals that delegates offered, and the arguments that delegates made both in the Convention and in subsequent state ratifying debates that ultimately led to the adoption of the U.S. Bill of Rights. Vile contends that the Convention and subsequent ratifying conventions were not mere exercises in political theory but practical attempts to formulate a workable government that all the states would ratify. Focusing chiefly on records of debates at the Convention, the book is a legal brief, identifying key facts, issues, arguments, and compromises, and providing a unique window into the contestation surrounding this keystone American political moment. This book is perfect for scholars and students in the field of American political history and development.

Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States is a collection of twelve essays by cultural critics that exposes how fraught relations of identity and race appear through imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, sculpture, photography, painting, music, theater, and, finally, the twenty-first century visual commentary of Kara Walker. Throughout these essays, the racial practices of the nineteenth century are juxtaposed with literary practices involving some of the most prominent writers about race and identity, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance including theater and music. Recent work in critical theories of vision, technology, and the production of ideas about racial discourse has emphasized the inextricability of photography with notions of race and American identity. The collected essays provide a vivid sense of how imagery about race appears in the formative period of the nineteenth-century United States.

Using the convergence of the impact of globalization and political turmoil in Ghana on Ghanaian women as a backdrop, this book examines the migration of the women to the US and their decisions to care for upper middle class white seniors who elected to stay in their homes to be cared for by private caregivers. The book explores the attraction of domestic care work, the women’s perceptions of their job, their relationships with their clients, and the dynamics of their relationships with their immediate families and families left behind in Ghana. It also analyzes the women’s interactions with the immigrant community from their remote work sites. The book examines widely-held beliefs about domestic work as undervalued, under-remunerated, and relegated to marginalized immigrant women of color. While admitting that these problems exist, the women whose stories are told in the book did not believe that their brand of care work, which they called private practice, was undervalued or underpaid. They also did not think that racism played a role in the concentration of immigrant women of color in domestic care work as widely believed, although, again, the women admitted that there was racism in American society. By doing so, the women symbolically placed themselves beyond the institutional barriers that constrain the lives of women of color in American society. And while it addresses common themes like exploitation, abuse, restriction of movement, etc. that other studies of immigrant live-in caregiving address, this book stands out in two major ways. First is its truly transnational character. It links the women’s background in Ghana to their immigration history and how these two influenced their choice as well as perceptions of care work and then loops their experience of care work back to expectations in Ghana. Second, the book validates the women’s voices as a product of their cultural background, thus making the case that the women’s choices and experiences were informed by conditions in the US and the cultural baggage the women brought with them. The book argues that private care work satisfied women’s financial expectations, and with that, leverage in their families.

The clothes we wear tell stories about us—and are often imbued with cultural meanings specific to our ethnic heritage. This concise A-to-Z encyclopedia explores 150 different and distinct items of ethnic dress, their history, and their cultural significance within the United States. The clothing artifacts documented here have been or are now regularly worn by Americans as everyday clothing, fashion, ethnic or religious identifiers, or style statements. They embody the cultural history of the United States and its peoples, from Native Americans, white Anglo colonists, and forcibly relocated black slaves to the influx of immigrants from around the world. Entries consider how dress items may serve as symbolic linkages to home country and family or worn as visible forms of opposition to dominant cultural norms. Taken together, they offer insight into the ethnic-based core ideologies, myths, and cultural codes that have played a role in the formation and continued story of the United States.

This volume provides an analysis of divine aseity in Karl Barth's thought and appreciates the vital role that this doctrine can play in contemporary theology. Brian D. Asbill begins by setting the general theological context, first through a broad sketch of the development of Barth's understanding of the relationship between the life of God pro nobis (pronobeity) and a se (aseity), and secondly through the examination of the basic theological convictions that guide his approach to the divine being in Church Dogmatics II/1. The second section, 'The Love and Freedom of God', turns to the dialectical pairings which guide Barth's accounts of the divine reality in his earliest dogmatic cycle (The Göttingen Dogmatics §§16-7) as well as in his most mature treatment (Church Dogmatics §§28-31). Particular attention is given to how these themes arise from revelation and relate to one another. In the final section, 'The Aseity of God', Asbill identifies this doctrine's basic features and primary functions. Divine aseity is characterized as the self-demonstration and self-movement of God's life, a trinitarian and entirely unique reality, a primarily positive and dynamic concept, and the manner and readiness of God's love for creatures. Divine aseity is said to indicate God's lordship in the act of self-binding, God's uniqueness in the act of self-revelation, and God's sufficiency in the act of self-giving.

This book frames the debates around the pressing desire for some form of unification that found expression in the pan-Africanist movement and formation of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963 following the advent of home-rule for many former colonies of the Western powers. Discussions in this volume address the following fundamental issues: nationalism and political integration and how the contradictions between both philosophies can be resolved; the amelioration of corruption in order to attract internal and external investments critical for developing the vast natural resources housed in the continent; the need for Africa’s adaptation to the ideology and practice of capitalism and liberal globalization to suit the character of African states in a projected federal United States of Africa; solutions to ethnic conflicts that are bound to happen over clashes of competing group interests; the indispensability and promotion of information communication technologies and urgent need to strengthen a network of regional electric power grids that would provide constant energy to the Union and lead to improvement in communication and economic growth; and recommendation of social democracy as the genre of democracy suitable for a proposed United States of Africa.

Although the F-4 Phantom II was the most important fighter-bomber to see action with all three American services during the Vietnam War, it was essentially a U.S. Navy design, and the carrier-borne squadron crews were its main operators in combat. The aircraft pioneered the use of long-range, radar-guided missiles in combat, although the majority of its Vietnam missions involved ground-attack with a variety of innovative ordnance. From 1968 to 1973 the Phantom II was the standard U.S. Navy fighter in Southeast Asia, having replaced several other types. Its performance and versatility enabled it to perform a variety of different missions, and switch roles as necessary, in the assault on some of the world's most heavily defended territory. Including detailed colour profiles and first-person commentary from active participants in the F-4's naval combat history, this is a detailed study of the U.S. armed services' most famous post-war fighter.