Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years
Noam Chomsky, Laura Nader, Immanuel Wallerstein, Richard C. Lewontin, Richard Ohmann
The New Press - 1998
The years following 1945 witnessed a massive change in American intellectual thought and in the life of American universities. The effort to mobilize intellectual talent during the war established new links between the government and the academy. After the war, many of those who had worked with the military or the Office of Strategic Studies took jobs in the burgeoning postwar structure of university-based military research and intelligence agencies, bringing large infusions of government money into many fields.
The essays in this text explore what happened to the university in these years and why. They show the many ways existing disciplines, such as anthropology, were affected by the Cold War ethos, and discuss the rise of new fields, such as area studies, and the changing nature of dissent and academic freedom during and since the Cold War.
The Politics of Knowledge Area Studies and the Disciplines
David Szanton (Editor)
University of California Press - 2004
The usefulness and political implications of Area Studies programs are currently debated within the Academy and the Administration, where they are often treated as one homogenous and stagnant domain of scholarship. The essays in this volume document the various fields’ distinctive character and internal heterogeneity as well as the dynamism resulting from their evolving engagements with funders, US and international politics, and domestic constituencies. The authors were chosen for their long-standing interest in the intellectual evolution of their fields. They describe the origins and histories of US-based Area Studies programs, highlighting their complex, generative, and sometimes contentious relationships with the social science and humanities disciplines and their diverse contributions to the regions of the world with which they are concerned.
CONTENTS:
Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States, David L. Szanton
Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice, Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink
The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, Timothy Mitchell
Area Studies in Search of Africa, Pearl T. Robinson
Japanese Studies: The Intangible Act of Translation, Alan Tansman
Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies, Victoria E. Bonnell and George W. Breslauer
Eastern Europe or Central Europe? Exploring a Distinct Regional Identity, Ellen Comisso and Brad Gutierrez
The Transformation of Contemporary China Studies, 1977–2002, Andrew G. Walder
South Asian Studies: Futures Past, Nicholas B. Dirks
The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the UnitedStates, John Bowen
David Haney
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS - 2008
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.
American Empire Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
Neil Smith
University of California Press - 2004
An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "beyond geography." Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition. The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "Woodrow Wilson’s geographer," and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt’s, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy. A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt’s State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "architect of the United Nations." In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bowman’s career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith’s historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics—and the limits—of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.
Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford
Rebecca S. Lowen
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997
The "cold war university" is the academic component of the military-industrial-academic complex, and its archetype, according to Rebecca Lowen, is Stanford University. Her book challenges the conventional wisdom that the post-World War II "multiversity" was created by military patrons on the one hand and academic scientists on the other and points instead to the crucial role played by university administrators in making their universities dependent upon military, foundation, and industrial patronage.
ARTICLES:
- Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. The International Infrastructure of Area Studies Centers: Lessons for Current Practice From a Prior Wave of Internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education 2015, Vol. 19(1) 86–104
- David Engerman, “Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003)
- Neil Smith, The Politics of Space: Jigsaw Geographies After Area Studies.ABYSMAL IGNORANCE”: THE PRE-LIFE OF AREA STUDIES, 1917 - 1958
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