John Adams (1735–1826), the second President of United States, was a representative theorist of the British North American Colonies and is known as the American Revolution’s most famous leader. He had been the only president to not be reelected until his son, John Quincy Adams (1767–1845), the sixth president, lost to Andrew Jackson (1767–1845). Therefore, one can appropriately say that almost historians have studied why the elder Adams had been unpopularity.

In The Creation of American Republic 1776–1787 (1998), Gordon Wood memorably appraised Adams’s significance in the chapter “The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams.” He portrayed Adams as “relevant” based on his earliest writings and his role in establishing the essential forms of American Constitutionalism such as a bicameral legislature, with independent executive and judicial branches, to promote effective checks and balances. However, Wood believed that Adams’ theory of government was incapable of adapting to changes in the American society after the 1780s because his ideas had been based on the ancient concept of mixed government, therefore, his countrymen started considering him an anachronistic aristocrat, thus reflecting his “irrelevance” in American democracy.

The Three-volume A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published from 1787 to 1788, describes Adams’ constitutional theory. This publication had been initially accepted as a supreme achievement of American enlightenment because of Adams’ early fame and reputation. Nevertheless, several scholars eventually expressed their reservations with his thinking. For example, Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), in The Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), accused Adams of adopting corruptible European courts, therefore dismissing Republican principles. John Taylor (1753–1824), in An inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), criticized Adams’ theory, especially its aristocratic element. These insights on John Adams were echoed by pre-Wood historians such as Edward Handler, and John R. How Jr.. However, the difference between these historians and Wood is that formers believed that John Adams changed his stance after the American Revolution, while the latter thought that Adams’ political inclination had already been different from that of his colleagues and countrymen, and that this had already been revealed in the political and social processes of the 1780s.

On the basis of previous studies, this article illustrates that Adams’ political thought in Defence and its fourth volume, Discourses on Davila(1790–1791), had taken exception to the democratization of Republicanism in the American political society after the 1780s. It also shows how Adams’ “mixed government theory” was different nature from mixed government theory in the context of medieval Europe despite his use of old-fashioned terms, and this has been reflected in the American society since the colonial age. By describing the Americanistic nature of his “mixed government theory”, this article ascertains the changing process from the early modern to the modern age of American republic.

This paper aims to evaluate the German Forty-Eighters in the United States in the global perspective, who came to America during the revolution of 1848 and in the later years of the 1850s. They were reformers and revolutionists who tried to build up their ideal societies in America which they failed to make in their original countries. The conventional studies on them were not positively done, because they were conceived as failures of the revolution and political exiles. However, I wish to shed new light on them, by exploring their transatlantic networks between Europe and America, and by analyzing their daily activities in each hub of the networks.

The Forty-Eighters were basically intellectuals comprising of students, professors, journalists as well as political activists in their home lands. They introduced the advanced philosophical theory on politics and society to America and gave a theoretical flamework to the American ideology of popular sovereignty, which resulted in rallying public opinion, especially concerning the anti-slavery movements in the 1850s. I wish to point out that they acted a critical role, at least as a catalyst in the realigning process of political parties from the Free Soil to the Republicans.

In inquiring Watertown, Wisconsin as a hub or a terminal of the networks, I will indicate that they built up the Turner club in this German town, and encouraged the radical Turner movements which were transplanted from Europe, by inspiring the residents which included Americans as well as Germans, through making space of public sphere. For example, they tried to publish the newspapers and pamphlets, to open rental libraries, and to speak before popular meetings.

Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) is regarded as a quintessentially American writer, partly because she wrote Little Women (1868–69) which has become, according to Elaine Showalter, “the American female myth,” but principally because she produced a number of “domestic” novels. However, in light of the fact that she was an avid reader of such European authors as Brontë, Dickens, Goethe, Plutarch, and Schiller, it is not an exaggeration to say that Alcott’s “domestic” fiction was a product of both European and American cultures. In addition to her knowledge of Europe from books, Alcott travelled to Europe twice. Her first trip to Europe, as a ladies companion, lasted precisely a year (1865–66), and her second trip, with her sister May, lasted a year and two months (1870–71). It was between and after these two grand tours of Europe that Alcott finished such different types of novels as a sensational gothic thriller (A Long Fatal Love Chase 1866), a juvenile domestic novel (Little Women 1868–69) and a fictionalized travelogue (“Shawl-straps” 1878).

This paper examines how European culture and literature exerted influence upon Alcott’s work by analyzing the above three books. The paper also explores how she transformed her transatlantic knowledge and experience in her works. First, the paper examines “Shawl-straps” in order to show how different it is from other travel writings of the period. Travel writing was a very popular literary genre in America at that time. Written by such male authors as Henry James, their gaze produced an image of the innocent “international American girl.” Alcott’s international American girls, however, were depicted as spectators of European culture whose subjective gazes spared them from being absorbed in it. The paper points out Alcott’s use of military terms in “Shawl-straps,” which created the image of strong, independent, international American girls. At the end of the book, the heroines bring home “heads full of new and larger ideas” (“Shawl-straps” 307), which will make American women “the bravest, the happiest, and handsomest women in the world” (308). In other words, Alcott’s heroines domesticate European culture in order to create new and better American girls. The paper examines Alcott’s patriotic narrative in “Shawl-straps” and illustrates how she tried differentiating her book from contemporary travel writings.

Second, the paper analyzes the similarities between A Long Fatal Love Chase and Little Women by focusing on Alcott’s descriptions of European characters. Although the two novels belong to very different literary genres, they have very similar plots in which male characters’ European otherness “domesticated” by female characters. The paper further points out that the domestication of European otherness in these novels is achieved by the sacrifice of female characters’ freedom and independence.

In conclusion, the paper shows how Alcott re-shaped her knowledge and experience of European culture to create her novels and argues new light can be shed on Alcott’s literary achievement by reading her from/in transatlantic perspectives.

This paper explores the experience of the two prominent émigré International Relations (IR) scholars, Hans J. Morgenthau (1904–1980) and Stanley Hoffmann (1928–2015), both of whom fled from war-torn Europe to the United States, especially focusing on their views on the roles and ethics of the intellectuals in the society. Being “outsiders” in American academia and society, they both critically analyzed the status of American IR scholarship in a detached way.

Morgenthau criticized a “new scholasticism” widely found in American IR scholarship, which he defined as “an intellectual exercise executed with a high degree of acumen and sophistication, that tells us nothing we need to know about the real world.” Seeing scholars’ primary mission in “speaking truth to power,” even if power may try to discredit, silence, and corrupt them, Morgenthau insisted that a scholar should not be silent when great issues were before the public and the government. Though Morgenthau several times served the government as an adviser to the State Department and the Defense Department, he gradually became disillusioned with the government’s dogmatic cold war policy, and turned himself from a Washington Policy adviser into one of the harshest critics of American military involvement in Vietnam. During the 1960s, Morgenthau attended numerous anti-war teach-ins and protest events, where he severely criticized the so-called “best & brightest” who served the Kennedy and Johnson administration for spreading self-serving myths and deluding themselves and the nation.

In his seminal article “An American Social Science: International Relations” published in 1977, Hoffmann bitterly criticized the proximity of IR scholarship to the corridors of power, arguing that intellectuals should be independent from political and any other undue external influence, and seek knowledge for their own sake. Unlike his colleagues at Harvard, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hoffmann never felt tempted to serve the government as a policy adviser or become involved in policy-making in Washington D.C. He continuously warned of a risk that scholars’ activities would be shaped not by pursuit of truth but by their desire to be “relevant” to policy concerns. Hoffmann also criticized American scholars’ preference for abstract theorizing and their indifference to concrete lives of the people in the other countries. Hoffmann always put his emphasis on history and human agency. Being a French intellectual in the United States, Hoffmann continuously criticized American exceptionalism and emphasized how this hubristic concept made American people blind to new realities in world politics. Hoffmann was one of the most vocal opponents of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, which cast a dark shadow on the transatlantic relations.

Morgenthau and Hoffmann were never afraid of being an outsider in American society in their pursuit of fulfilling their duty as an intellectual. At the same time, from the experience that they could find a refuge in the United States after long suffering in Europe, they believed in America’s moral authority and its long tradition of democracy, which gave them courage to stand up for the truth. In their belief and behavior, they were more “American” than American intellectuals who yielded to power and betrayed American ideals.

This paper examines how the influence of genre-transcending Modernist artistic experiments in 1920s Paris hybridized Ernest Hemingway, locating him between the French and the American, and also between the popular and the avant-garde. The key to his popular success, and his famously simple style, was this avant-garde influence which enabled him to construct “spatial” prose—prose as architecture—by accumulating simple sentences with no decoration (adjectives), a style usually known as “hard-boiled.”

Hemingway stayed in Paris from 1921 to 1928 and his work through the 1920s was influenced by his exposure to the avant-garde Modernist art movement there, especially through his interaction with artists of the plastic/visual arts. For example, through his then-mentor Gertrude Stein, Hemingway met Picasso and Miro; and the influences of those meetings are inscribed in his works: Hemingway structured his first collected short stories In Our Time(1925) as a Cubist painting, and wrote the final interchapter of In Our Time, “L’Envoi,” in a dream-like style reminiscent of Miro’s surrealist painting. Hemingway was also acquainted with Man Ray, the former New York Dadaist, famous for his photographic portraits of artists and celebrities in Paris. Man Ray was also experimenting with movie works and created some surrealist classics such as Le Retour a la raison(1923). Hemingway not only wrote “A Divine Gesture”(1922) under the influence of New York Dada, but also invented “cinematic prose” in “My Old Man” in In Our Time. In some stories and interchapters, he also experimented with a unique narration that can be compared to the movie camera.

Of all the avant-garde experiments in his writing during the 1920s, Hemingway was most clear about the influence of Cezanne’s paintings. Crucially, Hemingway learned that Cezanne sought to paint what he “really” saw: that is, not an artificial representation following the Renaissance perspective method, but something that accorded with his own perceptions. Hemingway intuitively understood this intercorporeal viewpoint of Cezanne’s, and realized it himself in “Big Two-Hearted River” where he was “trying to do the country like Cezanne”(SL 12). This story depicts an American landscape in detail but wholly through the perceptions of the sole character, Nick.

Through Cezanne’s paintings, Hemingway learned both how to write spatial prose and an intercorporeal understanding of the world. He first realized this in “Big Two-Hearted River,” where he depicted the American country that had been inscribed in his own body. Cezanne’s French bodiliness is thus connected with Hemingway’s American bodiliness. In addition, this intercorporeality is consonant with the American philosophy of Pragmatism that values physical experiences, and also can be related to the “organic architecture” of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hemingway’s spatial/corporeal prose is a blending of the French and the American, and it came to be essential throughout his career, even in his later works, in particular For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. Thus, the foundation of this popular American writer is deeply related to his exposure to the Modernist avant-garde in 1920s Paris.

This article explains the making of birth registration systems in the United States. In the wake of the twentieth century, the U.S. government had few records on children, whether they were boys or girls, white or non-white, native or foreign-born. Not all local municipalities were collecting, keeping, indexing, and updating vital records such as birth and death certificates and marriage licenses. From 1901 to 1920, the thirty-five states adopted laws requiring the registration of births within their jurisdiction. By the mid-1930s, Americans became accustomed to reporting the birth of a child to a local agent of the state.

I emphasize the role of professionals—physicians, statisticians, and social workers—in the creation and standardization of birth registration systems in the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century, the American Medical Association (AMA) came first to organize a campaign for the introduction of state birth registration laws, followed by the American Public Health Association. The acquisition of vital statistics was the common goal of John Shaw Billings and other male professionals who promoted birth and death registration in the late nineteenth century. However, they encountered resistance from community-based physicians and many others who refused to collect and share vital records for statistical analysis. Vital statistics would not be obtainable without creating a centralized mechanism for civil registration. It would take longer to conform people to the custom of reporting their vital events to local municipalities.

With the rise of the child-saving movement during the 1890s, the predominantly male campaign for birth registration gained broader support. The high infant mortality rates of American cities attracted the attention of reform-minded men and women. In 1909, the AMA held its first national conference on infant health care, which resulted in the formation of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality (AASPIM). From the beginning, the AASPIM was an issue-centered forum of discussion open to men as well as women. Birth registration became increasingly considered as a critical component of child welfare and public health systems.

In 1912, William Howard Taft signed legislation establishing the Children’s Bureau, and appointed Julia C. Lathrop, a social worker and a Hull-House resident, to lead it. Under her direction, the Bureau immediately orchestrated a campaign for the universalization of birth registration, with the help of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Unlike physicians and statisticians, social workers of the Children’s Bureau did not just promote the development of birth registration laws at the state level but also successfully mobilized club women for the registration campaign across the country. By 1915, the idea of birth registration gained more support among women. Birth registration systems, though created under the lead of professionals, became operative only after they successfully convinced a wider public of its usefulness for keeping infants alive.

This study examines the ways in which the Middle East and the Israeli question were placed in debates over US Cold War foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period constituted a critical moment when alternatives to the Cold War seemed possible. A broad Cold War consensus, which had been dominant in American political culture for decades, began facing severe criticism because of the US quagmire in Vietnam, and Congressional activism grew in response to the war. Anti-Vietnam War Congressmen and women claimed that the war was not exceptional but a logical consequence of a Cold War foreign policy that supported any Third World ally including right-wing dictatorships that could contain Communist inroads in Third World regions. Reformist representatives in both houses designed a way to judge the legitimacy of foreign assistance on the grounds of the extent of the recipients’ democracy so that problematic governments that were unconcerned with the welfare of their people would not receive US aid. But they urged the Executive Branch to provide Israel with substantial military and economic aid. This congressional pressure played a major role in cultivating the tight US-Israeli relationship that grew dramatically after the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. This article investigates how these two, seemingly contradictory, moves—supporting both the increase of financial and military aid to Israel and the reduction of similar aid to the South Vietnamese government and several other US allies in the Third World—went together, by focusing senators and representatives who were dovish on Vietnam but hawkish in the Middle East.

Investigating this wing of lawmakers sheds new light on the significant impact that the events in the Middle East had on the political culture of 1970s America. Previous studies have shown that New Right intellectuals and politicians and military specialists mobilized militarized images of Israel, which were strengthened by Israel’s military strength and uncompromising anti-terrorist measures, in their effort to recover a “strong America,” using these images as a model for the United States to overcome a sense of public aversion to military interventionism. These studies, however, ignore that liberal critics of US Cold War foreign policy also referred to Israel to depict what they believed America should stand for. Reformist Congressmen and women depicted Israel as a modern and democratic nation deserving US military and economic aid to differentiate Israel from other Third World allies, counterposing “democracy” with “dictatorship.” This article demonstrates that for Cold War reformers in Congress, providing military and economic aid to Israel complemented their effort to recover US moral authority that they believed the US involvement of the war in Vietnam had undermined. It concludes that the mobilization of the binary world view and repetitive mentions of Communist-backed aggression in the Middle East for supporting Israel led to the discursive survival of the Cold War even among many anti-Cold War lawmakers at a time when shattering that consensus seemed possible.