David Warsh compares Wilson to Bush

Hello,
I just discovered this site and since it quotes my recent book AND gets it right I feel I must share it.

David Warsh writes:

For years now, persons close to Bush have been advertising him as resembling Harry Truman (1884-1972), thirty-third president of the United States, meaning that however unpopular he might be upon leaving office, they expect Bush to be viewed in historical perspective as having been a pretty good leader.

A more apt comparison is to Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) twenty-eighth president, about whom ambivalence remains great even after ninety years. Bush may be remembered with the same tincture of admiration and regret.

The full text can be found on the site Economic Principles

Review of Christian Smith "American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving"

Posted on H-AmRel reviews 1999

Resurgent Evangelicalism

Christian Smith, working with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy and David Sikkink, has produced an exceptionally insightful analysis of the current state of American evangelicalism. Basing his findings on a three year study of evangelicals and other religious (and non-religious) respondents, Smith provides evidence that evangelicalism is thriving as it interacts with modern American society. Far from weakening and fading away in the face of modernity, as some have theorized, evangelicalism has derived its strength directly from its interaction with modern society. Modern society has strengthened evangelical groups, yet this has not been the result of uncritical adaptation by evangelicals to modern social norms. Indeed, evangelicals have responded to modern challenges by constructing strong sub- (and in some cases, counter-) cultural communities as a means of differentiating themselves from modernity. . .

Text of entire review is at: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2912

Citation: Malcolm Magee. Review of Smith, Christian, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. H-AmRel, H-Net Reviews. March, 1999.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.

Talk, Richard Gamble, ISCC Conference, October 15, 2005

The following is a short talk given at the ISCC Conference in Lansing, MI, October 2005.

Details can be found on the ISCC site.

The Americanization of the World: William T. Stead's Vision of Empire
Conference Paper by Richard M. Gamble

If you had been alive in 1901, would you have greeted the new century with hope or fear? Philosophical optimists and pessimists would have competed for you attention. Ideologies of presumption and despair would have vied for your allegiance. Was Western humanity on the threshold of a secular millennium of enlightenment and civilization, or on the brink of spiritual and cultural catastrophe? By measures of material wealth, power, and technological innovation, there was every reason for optimism. The sparkling Paris Exposition of 1900 had displayed the technological wonders of the age, especially the marvelous applications of electricity. But the mood was also somber. Queen Victoria had died on January 22, 1901, after a remarkable reign of nearly sixty-four years. An unpredictable Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled a rising Germany unified only thirty years before. The elderly Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria since 1848, grieved over his wife's assassination in 1898 by an Italian anarchist. Nicholas II was Czar of Russia; his grandfather Alexander II had been killed by a terrorist's bomb. American president William McKinley died on September 14, struck down by an anarchist's bullet in Buffalo, New York. The whirlwind Teddy Roosevelt now occupied the White House. Just three years ago, the United States had startled the world by gobbling up the last bits of Spain's once vast global empire, and British poet Rudyard Kipling had invited America to "take up the White Man's Burden" - to his mind a thankless task of humanitarian service and liberation of the world's captives. America's bloody war to subdue the Philippines was still underway. Europe pondered why the American republic has taken the plunge. Just what did this departure and transformation portend for Europe's precarious balance of power? Did America grasp an overseas empire for resources, for security, for power, for prestige? Europe buzzed about the menace at home of militarism and armaments. A whole literary genre future wars filled the bookstalls, sensationalist fiction and non-fiction titles predicting likely war between Britain and France, or more presciently between Germany and France.
Into this nervous world, British celebrity journalist and editor William T. Stead launched his best-selling book, The Americanization of the World, subtitled "The Trend of the Twentieth Century" - his prediction of America's inevitable, indeed Providential, military, economic, cultural, and ideological domination of the world. Stead, a tireless champion of Anglo-Saxon expansion, offered his prediction not in fear but in hope. Together, the United States and Britain would rule the world. . . .

(Full Text of Richard Gamble's Remarks and My response)

What the World Should Be - first reviews

What the World Should Be, Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith Based Foreign Policy was released by Baylor University Press in July, 2008.

Here is the first review of the book, a comparative review by Paul Harvey from "Religion in American History" and excellent site for current trends in American Religious History.

Another Review by Fred at Library Thing librarything.com

Robert W. Tucker - Woodrow Wilson and the Great War

Following is a reprint of my recent Review of Robert W. Tucker's Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917

The Irony of American Neutrality

American foreign policy at the time of the First World War is largely overshadowed by the events of the century that followed it. The Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the collapse of the Soviet Union capture the attention of historians. Yet, important threads of U.S. policy for the century that has just past, as well as the one that we are now beginning, are rooted in the policies of Woodrow Wilson's administration. Wilson's vision of what the world should be has persisted in American foreign policy. The changes brought about in international law during his administration have continuing implications in international affairs. Robert W. Tucker's Woodrow Wilson and the Great War is a vital study for those interested in the changes in U.S. policy and the international system during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Tucker has written a solid scholarly book examining the neutrality policy of the Wilson administration from 1914 to 1917. That policy, conceived by the president, stimulated unintended change in the international system. Tucker writes, "it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the law of neutrality--or rather Woodrow Wilson's version of this law--constituted almost the whole of his foreign policy toward the war during the fateful years 1914-17" (p. x). The Great War brought substantial changes to the policy of neutrality as it had been practiced since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Wilson's failure to enforce American neutrality rights equally between the Allied and the Central powers hastened those changes. Tucker explains that failure from the vantage point of the president and his advisors.

Even though this period is important to historians of American foreign relations, this subject has been largely overlooked. Apart from John W. Coogan's The End of Neutrality, published in 1981, few historians in the last generation have spent much, if any, time on the subject. Tucker has corrected this oversight. It is a timely study for historians given the state of the current international system. The growing multipolarity of the present world invites comparisons to the international system as it existed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The persistence of the thread of Wilson's idealism in American foreign policy makes understanding this period of added importance. . . .

Full Text can be found on H-SHGAPE Reviews

The Review is re-posted from H-SHGAPE Reviews.
Citation: Malcolm Magee. Review of Tucker, Robert W., Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America's Neutrality, 1914-1917. H-SHGAPE, H-Net Reviews. November, 2008.