Transnational Archives - Page 6 of 7

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

The Pacific is in vogue. After years of attracting little but scholarly attention, the Pacific Theater of the Second World War has captured the popular imagination in a string of books, feature films and an Emmy-award winning television series, aptly called “The Pacific” and written in part by University of Texas and Plan II graduate Robert Schenkkan. Now comes best-selling author Laura Hillenbrand with a new best seller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Unbroken tells the story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini’s ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war. Captured in 1943 when his B-24, The Green Hornet, crashed in the South Pacific, Zamperini spent a then-record 47 days on a battered rubber raft in storm-tossed, shark-infested waters with two comrades, only to be plucked from the edge of extinction by a Japanese patrol boat and sent to the infamous Omori POW camp on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Starved, beaten, and denied medical attention, Zamperini became the target of a sadistic guard nicknamed “The Bird.” The Bird was no tropical nestling but a vulture feeding off the pain of his helpless captives.

Miraculously, Zamperini survived. After months of recuperation, he returned to the embrace of his Italian-American family, married a debutante and, like many veterans, kept his story to himself. He devoted his days to regaining the athletic form that once made him a running prodigy but failed to win it back and spiraled into a well of depression and alcoholism. The saving grace of his faith, ignited by a fledgling evangelist named Billy Graham, sent him on a mission to spread the good news of the Christian Gospel and save others, among them young souls at risk of delinquency. That task suited Zamperini who had been something of a bad boy himself before the discipline of the track turned him from a would-be criminal into an Olympic competitor. Robust even in old age, draped in accolades, he rode skateboards, flew planes, carried an Olympic torch, and told of his ordeal in the Pacific to those in search of inspiration. In time, a reborn Zamperini returned to Japan and forgave his captors.

Hillenbrand has written a riveting tale of a terrible episode from a time when 132,000 Allied POWs, Americans but also British, Australian, Canadian and others, suffered unspeakable misery at the hands of the Japanese. More than one in four of them died. Their collective story has been told before, most notably in Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific and Michael and Elizabeth Norman’s Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Instead, Hillenbrand gives us a single life depicted with verve and complexity.

In Hillenbrand’s deft hands, Louis Zamperini is all too human and so are some of his captors. The Japanese emerge not as a single type, cut only from the predictable cloth of the sadist Bird, but as men who behave in ways that complicate and at times contradict the cliché. To be sure, most are merciless, but a few are respectful and one even compassionate. Frequent digressions—on the development of the Norden bombsight, the Japanese code of Bushido, the psychology of prison guards, the fate of former Pacific POWs (who lost an average of 61 pounds and later died at a rate four times faster than other men their age)—put historical meat on Zamperini’s bones. The bulk of Hillenbrand’s prodigious research in the salient secondary sources and some key archival ones rests on hours of interviews with Zamperini and others. The outcome is a popular history with weight and mass.

What is missing for historians is the larger context of the story and the historiographical framework within which Zamperini’s experience unfolds. What does his story or the story of any Pacific POW mean beyond being a narrative of “survival, resilience, and redemption”? How much do Zamperini’s experiences reflect change and continuity over time for cultures and captives in other wars? For Japan in this war? For the United States? To answer those and other historically minded questions, readers can turn to the growing body of literature that is shifting our attention from the war in Europe to the war in Asia and the Pacific (listed below in the recommended reading). To criticize Hillenbrand for these omissions is to pick apart a book she did not intend to write. She chose to tell a different tale and does so masterfully. Historians might learn a thing or two about storytelling from reading it.

The Pacific is very much in vogue as what some have called “The Greatest Generation” passes from our midst, and Asia and the Pacific Rim grow in contemporary importance. Such a vogue serves as a welcome corrective to the Eurocentric view of the Second World War too often seen in the West. With the best-selling Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand brings a small but important part of the Pacific War to a popular audience in the fascinating story of a man who rose to Olympic heights, fell beneath the contempt of his captors, and found his purpose in a life both human and heroic. More power to her, for any book that spreads the good news of history written as well as Hillenbrand’s is good news indeed.

Related Reading:

Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (English translation, 1978)

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1987)

Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific (1996)

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009)

Related Viewing:

Flags of Our Fathers (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Letters from Iwo Jima (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

City of Life and Death (d. Lu Chuan, 2009)

The Pacific (d. Tim Van Patten et al., 2010)

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

by Joseph Parrott

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet. In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa. The diverse peoples of these lands found ways to live alongside each other, yet the past decades have seen this relative peace come unglued. New Yorker reporter and poet Eliza Griswold traveled along this increasingly chaotic border, documenting the day-to-day realities of the growing conflicts between the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. She finds that more than mere ideology motivates these men and women; instead, “growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water.”

In Nigeria, Sudan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Griswold reveals that religious identity serves as a refuge from the constant challenges of the modern way of life. Climate change, the expansion of the nation state in search of natural resources, political conflict, and the globalization of the market economy all undermine traditional beliefs that rely heavily on local community and close association with the environment. Colonial legacies and ethnic differences have inspired deep political divides.

In these developing countries, state institutions and social organization often lag behind economic growth and fail to fill the place of ailing traditions. Here, religious community provides stability and scripture proves “a more practical rule of law than the government does.” Faith offers a support network, a form of advocacy, and a unifying identity where life is difficult and the control of valuable resources contentious. The transnational nature of both Christianity and Islam means that these parochial negotiations of power often invite foreign assistance from evangelical missionaries and radical Islamists with their own agendas, meaning that battles are “fought locally and exploited globally.” The ease of communication and common beliefs connect disparate peoples, but such interactions also work to inspire divisions among coreligionists who reject the perceived superficiality and wickedness of the more secularized spiritual practices of developed states. Griswold finds that both Christianity and Islam prove complicated beliefs, neither inherently contradictory nor monolithic, powerful stabilizing forces abused by self-interested leaders. Faith in this context becomes a coping mechanism for unfamiliar world; it “could mean whatever one wanted it to; it could hold a link to the past or forge a vision for the future.”

Displaced Persons camp in Sudan resulting from the conflict in Darfur.

Griswold offers a fascinating, poignant, and insightful account of global religious conflict. Part history, part travelogue, and part theological mediation, the work successfully dissects the “compound of multiple identities” that drives the mass conversion of whole populations and motivates pious believers to take up arms against their neighbors. The daughter of Episcopal bishop Frank Griswold, the author situates this discussion of devotional violence within the context of her own spirituality, offering a personal and accessible view of a highly charged subject. Her pithy, graceful writing clothes this complicated story in an understated elegance. The Tenth Parallel demands attention as an insightful piece of historically informed news reporting and a truly engrossing account of one woman’s theological journey across the globe.

Further reading:

Eliza Griswold discusses Christian-Muslim relations on NPR Books.

Darfur photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (2010)

By Lior Sternfeld

The era of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Levant, became known as the period of the ‘Nahda’- the Arab renaissance. New ideas flourished and the emergence of Arab nationalism is often attributed to this time and place. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has written an intellectual history of this period from an angle neglected so far, that of radical-leftist thought. Khuri-Makdisi focuses on three cities: Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo, which maintained special connections as cosmopolitan centers, and she links the roots of radical movements found in these cities with early globalization.

The narrative challenges previous perceptions that identified radical thought as a European product. As Makdisi shows, it started simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and the urban centers of Latin America. She chooses to focus on the Anarchist movement that both competed with Marxism as an international ideology and manifested itself in popular culture. More importantly, anarchism helped give rise to a new social order: the intellectual middle class. Under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (ruled 1876-1909), the Ottoman Empire witnessed major social and political changes. Makdisi breaks down these changes to smaller components: the international networks that developed under anarchist notions, the development of the press, and the construction of institutions to disseminate anarchist ideas. The contributions of the anarchist movements in this period included mass education, mutual aid societies, and intellectual centers. The theatre, for example, functioned as a “subversive institution” used by the movement to raise general awareness about its international networks. Makdisi points to a play about the anarchist movement in Spain that gained great success in Beirut. She also dedicates part of the story to diaspora communities and their place in the international movement, thanks to the connections they had in their homelands.

Anarchist movements are often regarded as the most radical form of political and social activity; this book, however, reminds readers how significant and mainstream the institutions that they established are. The successful use of interesting and varied sources, the prose, and the engaging story make this book to a worthy read.

The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (2008)

by Yana Skorobogatov

Any work of history that attributes the start of the Cold War to a single factor will surely invite criticism, but Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War makes a compelling case for running that risk.

Craig and Radchenko arguethat the specter of the atomic bomb shaped the ways in which the U.S. and U.S.S.R. designed their own and reacted to each other’s foreign policy agendas during the early years of the Cold War. The authors trace the first signs of an impending Anglo-American split with the Soviet Union to August 1943, when FDR and Winston Churchill decided to keep information about the building of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos a secret from the world, or from the Soviet Union in particular. Failure to establish a system of international control over atomic weaponry before FDR’s death further polarized American and Soviet relations during the Truman presidency, a period of haphazard atomic policy that coincided with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Secrecy and mistrust plagued Soviet-American relations from then on, sentiments that grew manifest in clandestine Soviet bomb construction projects and atomic espionage. News of Soviet espionage made cooperation with Stalin a matter of political suicide for Truman and left dismal chances for creating an international body to neutralize the threat of nuclear war.

Craig and Radchenko offer valuable insight into the practical concerns that plagued American and Soviet deliberations over atomic weapon development, use, and policy. Indeed, at certain points the book more closely resembles a work of diplomatic policy than diplomatic history. For instance, they outline in great detail precisely why the advent of atomic technology prevented Soviet-American cooperation from fomenting during the immediate postwar years. For cooperation to occur, both countries would have had to submit to a larger international body that would seize their atomic bombs, monitor their operations, and have the power to intervene in their internal affairs when necessary. Essentially, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would have had to relinquish claims to their own national sovereignty and positions of power and answer to an international body in semblance of an all-powerful state. The likelihood of this happening, as Craig and Radchenko state with hints of humor, was slim to none.

A nuclear test carried out at the Nevada Test Site on March 29, 1955 as part of Operation Teapot. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

One point where Craig and Radchenko’s analysis runs astray from the historical record is during their discussion of American scientists and their impact on early atomic diplomacy. The authors boldly assert that “when one is interested in assessing American policy about the bomb after 1944…one must recognize that the scientists’ actual effect on it had become inconsequential.” Surely this is a contentious point. As the historian Matthew Evangelista notes in his survey on the role of scientists in affecting Cold War nuclear policy, U.S. and Soviet scientists met at the Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in as early as 1955. Craig’s claim, however, is made less egregious by his astute discussion of Igor Kurchatov and other Soviet scientists lobbying the Politburo for the resources to build a Soviet atomic bomb before the Americans built their own. The battle between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for scientific prestige and innovation in the modern age resonates throughout this book, and infuses the authors’ historical intervention with a contemporary flavor that speaks to the present-day relevance of the subject.

Further reading:

Atom Days: the History of the Nuclear Age

Matthew Evangelista’s Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War

The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources courtesy of the National Security Archive

For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler (2008)

by Michelle Reeves

In this accessible and remarkably balanced synthesis, Melvyn Leffler, one of the most distinguished and prominent historians of American foreign relations, offers a refreshing interpretation of Cold War policymaking from the vantage points of both Washington and Moscow. Rejecting the oft-repeated assertion that U.S. foreign policymakers were ignorant or inattentive to the realities of power in the Soviet Union and the complexities of Third World nationalism, Leffler argues that cold warriors on both sides of the iron curtain were in fact keenly aware of the liabilities inherent in the zero-sum approach to international politics. Benefiting from access to multiple archives and a clear command of the secondary historical literature, Leffler has crafted a persuasive and thoroughly documented analysis that recasts the Cold War as not simply a political, economic, or military confrontation, but a battle “for the soul of mankind.” In doing so, he has transcended the scholarly debate over whether economic, structural, or ideological factors were more influential in determining the course of Cold War history.

Rather than adopting a standard narrative approach, Leffler focuses on both American and Soviet political leadership during five distinct intervals of potential détente—Truman and Stalin and the origins of the Cold War; Eisenhower and Malenkov during the power struggle within the Kremlin in the wake of Stalin’s death; Khrushchev, Kennedy, and LBJ in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis; Carter and Brezhnev and the erosion of détente; and finally, Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush, and the end of the Cold War. Leffler argues that, while the decisions of policymakers were clearly shaped by perceptions of both threat and opportunity, the constraints of the international system within which they operated also severely circumscribed their freedom of action.

U.S. President Harry Truman and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin alongside their advisors at the Potsdam Conference, July 18, 1945. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

This raises a conceptual problem with Leffler’s analysis, however. Although emphasizing contingency as a major factor in the arc of history, Leffler argues that Cold War leaders were trapped within ideological prisons of their own making, suggesting perhaps that the trajectory of the Cold War was more predetermined than he allows for. And viewing the time periods he has chosen for analysis here as moments of missed opportunity, he proceeds to prove that American and Soviet policymakers were so limited in their options that they had little choice other than to behave as they did. If that is in fact the case, the reader is left wondering whether there truly were opportunities for peace during these critical junctures.

These criticisms should not, however, obscure the fact that Leffler has written one of the most eloquent, balanced, and extensively researched books on the Cold War. “For the Soul of Mankind” certainly raises the bar for scholars of the Cold War, and in its nuanced complexity, elevates the scholarly debate over which factors were more salient in the development of Cold War policymaking. Although not definitive (and what monograph on such a huge topic possibly could be?), “For the Soul of Mankind” will likely grace both undergraduate and graduate level required reading lists for years to come.

The Wilsonian Moment by Erez Manela (2007)

by Lior Sternfeld

President Woodrow Wilson’s address in January 1918, later known as the “Fourteen Points,” outlined the principles for the post-war new world order. According to this speech, the U.S. would support the right of every people to “self-determination” and “consent of the governed.” Wilson also proclaimed that every nation, regardless of the size of its territory or population, should hold equal rights among the family of nations. Did Wilson honestly intend to grant every nation those rights? Can this message be considered universal? These vague questions are the basis for Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

Manela closely examines the events that followed Wilson’s address to Congress in a few distinct contexts. He identifies four nascent national movements that exemplify the profound impact Wilson had over the colonial world. These case studies — Egypt, India, China, and Korea – illustrate Wilson’s emergence, development, and downfall as the great liberator of the colonial world. Manela begins with the contradiction that was embedded in America’s new vision: as a small, but nevertheless active colonial power, how could America champion an anti-colonial order? That contradiction was expressed in the concept of “Benevolent Supremacy.” Americans viewed their project in the Philippines as a civilizing mission that would eventually enable the native people to take control over their fate. The success of previous endeavors, such as Cuba, gave them good reason to believe in this policy. The U.S. propaganda service (Committee on Public Information-CPI) supported this view by creating an inspiring, universalist message that became well known all over the world by the end of the First World War. The “dawn of a new era” that Wilson promised was well anticipated everywhere on the colonial world.

Manela’s book is enjoyable and readable. With his rare breadth of expertise, Manela writes effective and illuminating introductions to each section. His ability to examine the exact same moment in five different countries (including the US) shows the genre of International History at its finest. His use of such sources as diplomatic correspondence, newspapers, journals, memoirs, and biographies in four different languages make the story more comprehensive than anything that has been told so far about this period.

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 by J.H. Elliott (2007)

by Renata Keller

Empires of the Atlantic World is an engaging comparative history of the processes of conquest, colonization, and independence in the British and Spanish American empires. Elliot compares such factors as luck, race relations, and religion in the ways the two systems of colonization—and de-colonization—occurred in the Americas.

Elliot argues that luck, or timing, was one of the most important forces determining the fates of the Spanish and British empires. He claims that Spain’s role as pioneer in the colonization of the Americas was a mixed blessing. Spain had prime access to lands with mineral wealth and cheap labor, but it had to expend a massive amount of effort to consolidate its power over vast reaches of territory, with no useful models of empire to follow. Britain, meanwhile, had to settle for a relatively tiny chunk of land by the time it joined the imperial game nearly a century later, yet had the advantage of the lessons of the Spanish experience. Elliot also emphasizes the importance of timing in the two independence movements. The outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars helped the new United States expand its trade and solidify its political autonomy, while the Spanish American republics found themselves with few export options to rebuild their war-ravaged economies, thanks to the concurrent peace in Europe.

Another theme that Elliot frequently examines is that of race and its relationship to empire, characterizing the Spanish empire as racially inclusive and the British one as exclusive. The indigenous peoples of Spanish America composed a central part of society, initially as a justification for colonization, then as a source of labor, and finally as an impediment to independence. The British, on the other hand, consistently viewed the native peoples of North America as “others”—competitors for land and a threat to the moral and physical safety of the colonists. Elliot claims that the independence process was later, more prolonged, and more violent in Spanish America in part because the creoles there had more to fear and more to lose from upsetting the status quo with the indigenous population.

Another recurring theme in Elliot’s work is that of religion. He claims that the monopoly of the Catholic Church in Spanish America helped provide structure, stability, and economic investment, but also encouraged intellectual and cultural stagnation. Ironically, when Spain tried to centralize power over its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it pushed church leaders like Miguel Hidalgo into the forefront of the independence movement. Elliot credits the Protestant tradition and the religious pluralism in the British colonies, on the other hand, with promoting independent thinking, vitality, and a degree of toleration.

Empires of the Atlantic World is an engaging, informative read for anyone interested in Latin American, European, and U.S. history. Scholars and the general public alike will enjoy Elliot’s latest contribution to the study of the empires of the Americas.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (2009)

by Jonathan Hunt

On September 26, 1983, satellites notified a Soviet watch station south of Moscow of inbound U.S. missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the officer on duty, had ten minutes to determine whether to launch a counterattack. Mercifully, he chose to report the incident as a false alarm. His conscious disregard for standing protocol likely saved tens of millions of lives.

The Dead Hand, David Hoffman’s gripping history of the Cold War’s final years, teems with such hair-raising details. He uses eyewitness interviews and newly declassified papers to recapture the context in which Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan tried to halt the runaway U.S.-Soviet arms race. His exposure of the dark underbelly of the Soviet military-industrial complex is especially disturbing. The book’s title comes from a computer network, “a real-world doomsday machine,” built in the 1980s to retaliate in the event the Soviet leadership was killed by a U.S. preemptive strike. Meanwhile, secret facilities in the vast Soviet hinterlands churned out vats of such lethal bacteria and viruses as anthrax, Ebola, West Nile virus, smallpox, and plague. Soviet geneticists even tried to formulate a strain of super-plague fully resistant to antibiotics.

The focus of the book, however, is the evolving relationship between Gorbachev and Reagan. Despite their differences, these men shared an abhorrence of nuclear weapons. At the momentous 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, they conducted impromptu face-to-face negotiations to hammer out an agreement abolishing all nuclear weapons by 2000. Only Reagan’s commitment to building an anti-ballistic missile system blocked the agreement. Critics dismissively dubbed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) “Star Wars” because it resembled science fiction more than scientific fact. They warned that even if feasible, SDI threatened to amplify the arms race. Ironically, though, Reagan’s dedication to SDI and his administration’s negotiation of a treaty eliminating all intermediate-range ballistic missiles stemmed from the same root—Reagan’s dream of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

Ronald Reagan speaks to Mikhail Gorbachev — *U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev bid one another farewell at the close of the 1986 Reykjavik summit. (Source: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)*

Ultimately, Reagan and Gorbachev’s efforts to transcend the Cold War were overtaken by events in Eastern Europe. Hoffman presents the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl as the turning point. After the environmental disaster, Gorbachev made glasnost, a push for government transparency, a cornerstone of his domestic agenda along with perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet economic and political system. The states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were too moribund, however, to cope with the rising expectations set off by Gorbachev’s reforms. By 1991, communist Europe had disintegrated. The U.S. had the foresight to help post-Soviet societies eliminate their nuclear inheritance. More than twenty years after the Berlin Wall’s fall, however, the foul inventions of Soviet germ warriors are still hidden and the U.S. and Russia still account for 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Without continued efforts at disarmament and disclosure, Hoffman suggests these genocidal weapons will remain the Cold War’s deadly legacy.

Further reading:

The Reykjavik File: Previously Secret Documents from U.S. and Soviet Archives on the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Summit (via the National Security Archive of George Washington University).

The Cold War International History Project

The Cold War Museum: 1980s

African Americans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era by Kevin K. Gaines (2007)

by Joseph Parrott

In his response to the recent resignation of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Barack Obama situated the event within a longer history of popular freedom struggles. His references to Gandhi and the fall of the Berlin Wall evoked powerful images for most Americans, but Obama’s allusion to the small West African nation of Ghana may be less familiar. Yet in 1957, Ghana’s peaceful transition to independence heralded the end of European colonialism and served as an inspiration to oppressed peoples throughout the world. Kevin Gaines’ American Africans in Ghana recovers the symbolic role that the young nation played in the African American freedom struggle, and the reasons why it stirred Martin Luther King to proclaim “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.”

Gaines (who taught in the History Department at UT Austin, 1997-99) argues that postcolonial Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah offered a unique instance in the history of black identity. The country acted as a symbol of pride and a haven for critics of Western racial hierarchies. The author follows the lives and writings of a number of black intellectuals who left the Americas to take up residence in or visit Ghana, including George Padmore, Julian Mayfield, and Malcolm X. The socialist, Pan-African thought advanced by Nkrumah helped mobilize global activists and inspire stringent social and economic critiques of segregated societies in the western hemisphere. In Ghana, the expatriates discovered a new sense of racial pride, which they applied to their own struggles for equality at home: “the legitimacy and salience of black and African heritage” became “the basis for their full participation in American life.” These men and women asserted their identity as citizens of a global society.

Yet Gaines also recognizes that the realities of postcolonial governing challenged this idealism, leading some black intellectuals to cling to their American associations. Author Richard Wright and civil rights campaigner Pauli Murray viewed Nkrumah’s traditionally influenced autocratic leadership with trepidation, advocating for modern secularism and an American-style system of jurisprudence, respectively. Both rejected a sense of “natural” racial solidarity with the people of Ghana, and Murray specifically adhered to an idealized vision of color-blind American liberalism. The tensions between Nkrumah’s autocratic socialism and opposing visions of the postcolonial state eventually led to his ouster, but Gaines believes that Ghana remained a symbol of hope for oppressed peoples. Nkrumah’s idealism lived on in sympathetic African Americans, who continued to articulate a “vision of an expansive, interconnected black world… and their conception of being in the world as peoples of African descent.”

Gaines offers a densely nuanced intellectual history that returns Ghana to its position as both innovator and inspiration within the larger discussion of transnational civil rights. Those willing to engage his ambitious argument will find a thought-provoking investigation of African American identity and the global ideals of equality and freedom that continue to shape contemporary events.

Toyin Falola on Africa and the United States

By Toyin Falola

Often wrongly considered to be on the periphery of the history of the United States, Africa has played an important role politically, economically, and culturally from before American independence until the present day. The importance of slavery to early U.S. history was paramount, with lasting effects into the twentieth century and the contributions of African-Americans to life in the United States has often been celebrated, but Africa’s relevancy for the United States has been most appreciated and discussed in terms of the African roots of a broad spectrum of American culture. Following decolonization in Africa, the newly independent nations took on a new relevancy and significance for the United States, one that should be re-examined for the twenty-first century.

The entire history of the United States is deeply intertwined with the history of Africa. Slavery was practiced in America even prior to independence from Great Britain and was an integral part of its economy, particularly in the South. Agriculture depended on the labor of slaves sent from the West African coast, and was one of the key reasons the Southern states fought in the Civil War. When the fight against slavery as a moral issue gained momentum, slave owners in the South feared it would be outlawed on the national level. And it was outlawed at the conclusion of the Civil War, with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. However, despite the Thirteenth Amendment, and the citizenship and voting rights that came with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, racial discrimination was still a critical issue in American social life. Jim Crow laws in the South kept both public and private life in the southern United States segregated until the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement was fostered in part by international developments. Following the Second World War, the Cold War and its numerous manifestations were the primary concern of the United States government. With the Civil Rights Movement, however, foreign and domestic policy concerns were directly connected. Contemporaneous with the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union was the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia. As nations became independent from their former colonial powers, most often Great Britain and France, they faced a bipolar political situation in which they had to decide whether they wanted democratic or communist governance. The United States, in an attempt to ensure democracy for these sometimes geopolitically strategic nations, offered itself up as an ally to African nations. In such a situation, treatment of African Americans was an especially ugly scar on the face of the U.S., and America’s support for newly independent African nations proved to be an important impetus in accelerating Civil Rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Decolonization in Africa affected both United States domestic policy towards Civil Rights legislation, as well as foreign policy toward Africa. Previously, American foreign policy toward Africa did not exist, and any concerns over Africa were instead directed towards its European colonizers. The combination of the Cold War and decolonization quickly made the African continent relevant to the U.S. in a new way. The overextension of the United States’ foreign policy during this period, including the rebuilding of post-War Europe, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, meant that many African leaders of newly independent nations felt they were not given the audience that they deserved from the United States government. Yet it is clear that the U.S. involved itself where it felt Cold War concerns were most relevant, as when it supported Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire.

The United States’ foreign policy changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War and its policy towards Africa in the 1990s did as well. For the last decade of the twentieth century the main agenda for the United States seemed to be to ignore African nations, even in the face of severe crisis, such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet with the end of the twentieth century also came the beginning of a huge international public health battle against HIV/AIDS. Africa, and Southern Africa in particular, has been at the forefront of this struggle, one that quickly linked U.S. interests in Africa with both positive and negative effects. Many countries, such as Uganda, have seen AIDS deaths drop significantly because of American help, particularly during the administration of President George W. Bush. However, issues surrounding aid dependency, the cultural relevancy of some aid programs, and the often times controversial role of American pharmaceutical companies in Africa have complicated this relationship.

On September 11, 2001, Africa’s relevancy to the United States changed once again with the bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremist terrorists. While originally the focus of the U.S. was on the Islamic countries of the Middle East, political instability in Africa and a high percentage of Muslims in many African nations, has brought the American War on Terror to countries such as Somalia and against extremists in countries like Nigeria. It has become clear to policymakers that the political and economic stability of Africa is in fact relevant to the United States. However, the increasingly global nature of every aspect of life ensures that policies will have to broaden beyond a focus on public health and terrorism. Stability in Africa would not only help to ensure the safety and well-being of Americans, but also open opportunities for American companies to invest and create new networks in the global economy. Africa’s relevancy for the United States has changed significantly over the past 300 years; however, the relationship between the U.S. and Africa is crucial to understanding American history, and will continue to be an important element in the twenty-first century.

The United States and West Africa, edited by Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola

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