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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Think tanks have grown in number and flourished as research and educational organizations as US society has become more complex. The educational components of the think tank address two main audiences: the general public and the public policymaking community, which includes federal government appointees and agencies, associations, lobbyists and Congress. The research looks at, among other areas, government regulation, healthcare and welfare reform, education, taxes, foreign policy, mass media, race and legal issues. Think tanks have weak to very strong political affiliations. One ideologically well-defined think tank is the Heritage Foundation, which assisted the Reagan administration in clearing people for political appointments. The primary think tank “products” are reports, books and magazines. Think tanks also hold conferences for public policy-makers and the press, often televised by the satellite cable company C-Span.
Think tanks may wish to limit their ideological affiliations to enhance the credibility of their research. Founded in 1916, the Brookings Institution maintains its political independence through its large endowment. Some think tanks’ research agendas are more strongly tied to the ideological objectives of their donors, including the government, corporations and philanthropic foundations. In its descriptive materials the American Enterprise Institute defines its ideological position as one that will work to preserve and strengthen “the foundations of freedom—limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense.” One would not expect to find AEI research that contradicted this statement of purpose.
Whereas AEI addresses many areas of public policy, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace studies only foreign policy. The Center for Strategic and International Studies also focuses on international affairs. CSIS’ research is non-partisan, but the overall goal of the organization is to improve the strategic planning and implementation of business, media and government operations in the international arena.
Some think tanks, like the libertarian Cato Institute, focus their efforts on reaching the general public with their ideas so that a grassroots change in American polity will take place. Unlike most think tanks, the Cato Institute accepts no government funding. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government set up dummy think tanks and funded established think tanks to conduct covert operations. The Rand Corporation was preeminently a Cold War think tank dedicated to studying national security issues.
Although it has since diversified, Rand still receives most of its funding from government contracts.
Think-tank scholars, most of whom hold advanced degrees, come from many professions but have all achieved recognition in their areas of expertise before being hired. Think tanks also hire scholars who will help entice donors to fund programs.
During a Democratic presidential administration, more conservative scholars may find homes at Heritage, AEI or the Hoover Institution. When political fortunes change, these scholars frequently receive political appointments in the new administration. News organizations turn to think-tank scholars with established areas of expertise. When scholars appear repeatedly on news shows, they may be nicknamed “talking heads,” but the media exposure can enhance scholars’ standing in the policy community.
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The world’s premier mental-health research organization, NIMH seeks to improve the treatment, diagnosis and prevention of mental disorders that affect millions of adults, children and adolescents. It also serves as an informational and educational clearinghouse, communicating information about the brain, mental health and related research to the public, scientists, news media and healthcare providers. NIMH is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American government’s principal biomedical and behavioral-research agency which in turn falls under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
NIMH supports both internal and external research on mental disorders, neuroscience and behavior. It funds external research through grants or contracts awarded both nationally and internationally to scientists from universities or research facilities.
Scientists in the field initiate most of these studies, examining issues such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and eating disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS and the delivery, financing, quality and costs of mental-health services. NIMH also identifies gaps in research and solicits applications from scientists to conduct needed studies.
NIMH’s own large internal research program supports basic and clinical studies in areas that include genetics, psycho-immunology and brain imaging. Its internal program trains scientists from around the world, helping to meet research shortages in basic brain research, clinical studies on mental and behavioral disorders, as well as the organizational and financial aspects of mentalhealth services. NIMH also actively works to increase hiring of women and minority researchers and clinicians.
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The United States purchased more than fifty islands from Denmark for $25 million in 1917. Today these constitute the territory of the US Virgin Islands (as distinct from British holdings), whose 101,800 citizens are US citizens, although they do not vote in presidential elections. The three main islands—St. Thomas, St. Croix and St. John—offer safe American centers for Caribbean resort life, which is the backbone of the local economy Despite this successful modern incorporation, tensions of race have become apparent in both local development (and the role of the predominantly Afro-Caribbean population) and in treatment of Caribbean migrants.
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Since early this century debate has raged among American academics, parents, media producers, network officials, the FCC, the PTA and mentalhealth organizations about the effects of viewing violent images. Most discussion and research on violent imagery has limited itself to studying television (although video games, movies and music are increasingly targeted). Television differs from other media in its pervasiveness—in the average American home it is on 6 hours daily In addition, the audience includes many children (who are presumed to be more vulnerable to its effects than adults). The mimetic quality of the television is also thought to present realistic portrayals that can serve as powerful socializing agents.
The Kefauver congressional hearings of the 1950s investigating juvenile delinquency implicated violent TV images as a potential cause. TV violence was not to banned, but networks were pressured to be more accountable in their program development.
Networks intended that the family viewing hours from 19:00–21:00 would air less violent programming. The prolonged focus on media violence legitimized it as a public-policy matter with increased budget funding and calls for further research.
During the 1960s, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Crime and the Surgeon General published reports addressing possible connections between violence in media and real life. Since then, researchers have formulated a number of competing arguments as to the existence and nature of violent media effects. Among them are claims that violent media: desensitize the viewer; stimulate or arouse the viewer; disinhibit the viewer so that violent inclinations are more readily expressed; or provoke a catharsis that alleviates aggressive impulses. For instance, studies investigating the stimulation and arousal theory have sought to determine if exposure to aggressive stimuli will increase the level of physiological and emotional arousal which, in turn, will increase the probability of aggressive behavior. Proponents of the imitation theory suggest that people may learn aggressive behavior by observing aggression in media portrayals. Proponents of cultivation theory suggest that fear and paranoia lead to violence and, more generally, that TV cumulatively and progressively shapes the perception of the audience by instilling a particular view of the world—not by directly influencing behavior.
Numerous studies, however, have produced inconsistent research findings, leaving it unclear as to what effects, if any there are from viewing violent media images. The competing findings reflect different definitions of violence and other methodological choices, as well as the concerns of investigators. Researchers have conducted lab experiments that manipulate the subjects’ exposure to violence. Some field experiments have tried to measure more real-life settings. Researchers have also relied on surveys to measure real-life exposure to violent media images. Each of these methodological approaches contains certain weaknesses and strengths and can provide, at best, only a partial answer. Yet the debate continues among politicians and educators amid lurid newspaper coverage and occasional abashed concessions from television and movies before summer blockbusters roll around again.
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While often the first experience of America for contemporary visitors and immigrants, airports provide ambivalent gateways to American cities. Sometimes monumental in architecture, like earlier railroad stations, they have struggled to keep pace with the ever-changing demands of technology and consumption, hence airports embody piecemeal constructions of old and new terminals. Chicago’s O’Hare, the nation’s busiest airport, serves as many as 75 million passengers annually. Moreover, airports must provide industrial and commercial services and aviation maintenance, as well as passenger services within a competitive national market.
Aviation’s rapid postwar development eclipsed models that had envisioned municipalities and neighborhoods with their own airports, combining speed with accessibility. New York City’s state-of-the-art La Guardia Field, for example, opened in 1940, but reached near capacity in 1941. Hence, the city built Idlewild Airport (later JFK) on a site six times as large by 1947. Here, individual airline buildings by Eero Saarinen (TWA), Skidmore Owings Merrill and others created a congested “architectural zoo,” with growing surface transportation problems. The port authority subsequently took over and expanded the 1929 Newark Airport, while smaller airports and heliports contributed to dense transportation webs.
Given corporate competition and complex flight linkages, for most people airports have become less sanctuaries of leisure travel and more calvaries of transfer and delay— notorious for travelers grounded by weather and strikes. Yet, terminals struggle with design identity, efficiency and service; hence, Helmut Jahn’s recent United Terminal at O’Hare must function beyond its beauty. New airports have moved further out to function as inter-urban centers (Dallas-Fort Worth) or multiservice nodes, but complaints also faced Denver’s new airport, whose design echoes the Rockies, because of the expensive ride into town. Similarly, despite Saarinen’s soaring Dulles terminal, outside Washington members of Congress continually expand the convenient National (Ronald Reagan) Airport.
Cities, airlines and consumers are all players in creating and changing these urban spaces. Connections, especially through hub airlines or markets opened by competing airlines, facilitate tourism and business; hence, governments compete with expensive concessions. Geography also plays a role—beside Chicago’s centrality, Los Angeles International (LAX) and San Francisco International (SFI) have become Pacific gateways and New York offers multiple connections to Europe, as Miami does for Latin America. Intermediate hubs like Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Houston have transformed location and corporate ties into power.
Despite their economic centrality, airports as public monuments are rarely seen from outside except at drop-off and pick-up points. Instead, scant expressions of local identity rely on interiors, constrained by needs of movement and security—a major concern exacerbated by terrorism since the 1980s. Southwest motifs may distinguish Albuquerque from the images of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but many airports become “non-places,” recalling the facelessness of suburbs. Interior services, such as stores, restaurants, etc., may emphasize the local, for example, sourdough in San Francisco, lobster in Boston, but fast foods also snare family travelers. In the 1990s, however, revisions of the Pittsburgh airport to include an active mall have sparked interest in the airport as a destination that may transform the future.
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US relations with Iran were dictated in the years following the Second World War by the desire for access to oil. The Shah granted British Petroleum access to Iranian oil fields and, in return for development aid, remained committed to the western nations. With the election of Mohammed Mossadeq as the new prime minister and the Shah’s exile in 1951, however, this changed as the country’s oil wells and refineries were immediately nationalized. President Eisenhower, claiming that the new leader was a puppet of the communists, decided to intervene and sent in CIA operatives to foment demonstrations against Mossadeq, leading to his resignation in 1953.
The Shah returned and, quickly making Iran the largest recipient of American aid outside NATO, he bolstered his secret police and armed forces. All this left a legacy of strong anti-American sentiment, which, following the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, resulted in the invasion of the US Embassy in Teheran and the taking of sixty American hostages. President Carter’s failure to gain the hostages’ release, coupled with the media demonization of Iranian Islamic fundamentalism, was chronicled every evening on ABC’s Nïghtline, and became a key reason for his loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 elections.
The fact that the hostages were released to coincide with Reagan’s inauguration led to the suggestion that a deal had been made between Republican Party leaders and the Khomeini government. Such connections were then further developed in the Iran-Contra affair, in which Attorney-General Edwin Meese revealed that arms had been sold to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon and that profits from these sales had been sent to contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of congressional legislation forbidding such aid. This scandal, breaking in 1986, was the most serious of the Reagan presidency undermining the US foreign policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, though, as Oliver North took the fall, it did not come close to dislodging the “teflon president.” Relations with Iran have been normalized with the emergence of Iraq, Iran’s enemy throughout the 1980s, as the main threat to stability in the region.
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The first ten amendments to the constitution, added by Congress as a block in 1789 and ratified by 1791, guarantee civil liberties to citizens and rights of the states and citizens.
That this charter is often taken “as the Constitution” shows how important contemporary debates over its provisions, often decided by the Supreme Court, have been to changing fundamental American practices. As a living charter, however, one should be aware that the interpretation of these provisions also has shifted, especially from a focus on the engagement of public citizens with the limits of the state to a focus on individual rights within the state.
The 1st Amendment, for example, guarantees freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and petition, which have been worked out through a number of critical court cases in the postwar period, constraining censorship, separating church and state and defining political and public discourse. Much of this debate has involved the actions of liberal interest groups before judicial activist courts like those of the Warren era.
The 2nd Amendment, by contrast, deals with the right to bear arms, creating a focus for debates on guns and gun control. Here, constitutional defense has tended to be on the Right, while those on the Left have sought to limit applications of the amendment or even to repeal it.
After the 3rd Amendment, which prohibits forced quartering of soldiers in peacetime, the next five amendments deal with citizens’ rights in criminal prosecution and punishment. Hence, the 4th Amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, while the Fifth precludes double jeopardy or self-incrimination—often heard in the movie cliché “I refuse to answer on the grounds of the 5th Amendment self-incrimination.” The 6th Amendment guarantees civil rights in trials—a speedy process, the ability to confront witnesses and evidence, the rights to defense and to a jury. The 7th Amendment ensures rights to a jury in civil trials, and the Eighth precludes cruel and unusual punishment. Again, under the Warren court all five of these amendments became charters for rethinking the rights of the accused and the conduct of fair trials in the 1960s.
Subsequent courts have sought to trim back these guarantees as they are sometimes seen as hindrances to effective police work or the conviction of criminals. The cruel and unusual punishment clause has appeared repeatedly in arguments about capital punishment.
The final two amendments limit government by reserving rights not delegated to the states and ultimately to the people. These have also provoked controversy as to whether interpretations of the federal Bill of Rights can be extended to state circumstances.
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The social and historical study of humans in space received much less support in the United States than it did in Europe and Asia. Even the name “National Geographic Society” refers more to a magazine and project (supporting expeditions and photography) than to a professional association. Still, work on the American landscape coincided with other questions of the construction of national identity in important works by pioneering geogra phers Carl Sauer (see Land and Life, 1967) and J.B. Jackson (Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, 1997).
As with other social sciences, American geography later moved towards positivism and quantitative methods. Exemplified by the work of Brian Berry, this approach embraced putatively valuefree methods from demography and economics in the modeling and mapping of spatial systems (see The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America (1977).
Since the 1970s, however, the impact of European scholars like David Harvey and Neil Smith, as well as the work of American geographers in Marxist traditions, has made an impact across the social sciences and some humanities. Important departments have included Harvey’s position at Johns Hopkins, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Southern California (with Jennifer Wolch, Michael Dear and Edward Soja in Planning). American-based geographers have discussed issues of postmodernity (for example, Soja’s Thirdspace, 1996), identity (Yi-Fu Tuan’s Cosmos and Hearth, 1996) and social justice/social change (Wolch and Dears’ Landscapes of Despair, 1987; Smith’s The New Urban Frontier,, 1996). Their awareness of the impact of space and place on society and culture, in turn, has contributed in methods and theory to other fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies.
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The 8.3 million Lutherans in the United States trace their origin primarily to immigrants from Germany and the countries of Scandinavia. Originally organized along national and language lines, American Lutherans now find themselves in eleven separate bodies, the largest of which is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) with over 5 million members and almost 11,000 churches. The second-largest body is the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, with a little over 2,600,000 members in almost 6,100 congregations. The other Lutheran bodies, much smaller and regionally and ethnically diverse, include the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the American Association of Lutheran Churches, the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America, the Church of Lutheran Brethren of America, the Church of the Lutheran Confession, the Conservative Lutheran Association, the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
The ECLA is the fifth-largest Christian body in the United States. Its predecessor bodies date to the mid-eighteenth century. The Augsburg Confession provides the doctrinal standards of the church. It operates eight seminaries and twenty-eight colleges and universities.
The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, founded in 1847, has 6,000 congregations in the United States. It operates the largest Protestant elementary- and secondary-school system in the United States, with 13,795 students enrolled. Its publishing arm, Concordia Publishing House, is the third-largest Protestant publisher. The Arch Books’ children’s series alone has sold more than 55 million copies. Two ministries reach out to blind and deaf people. One thousand volunteers in fifty work centers make Braille publications available for the blind. Of the eighty-five congregations for deaf people in the United States, fifty-nine are Missouri Synod Lutheran congregations.
Doctrinal disputes have marked Lutherans in America as they did the founder of the Lutheran branch of Christianity, Martin Luther. In the 1970s, for example, Missouri Synod Lutherans felt that their main seminary Concordia Theological Seminary was not teaching the belief that the Bible was without error in its original manuscripts. Tensions rose to the point that when three-quarters of the students boycotted classes, the president was removed. Many faculty and students then established what became known as “Seminex,” the Concordia Seminary in Exile.
On the other hand, a spirit of ecumenism has been blowing through the largest Lutheran denomination, the ELCA. It has entered into dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church over the basic theological issue of the Reformation, the doctrine of justification by faith. Lutherans and Catholics have come much closer to a mutual understanding on this issue as a result. Within the Protestant family, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has joined with the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America to recognize the validity of the ordination of each other’s pastors.
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This port and tourist center of 137,000 inhabitants often epitomizes the South in popular media (e.g. John Berendt’s 1994 bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil).
Founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe with a unique urban plan based around a succession of squares, its antebellum center survived the Civil War to be restored since the 1950s as a gentrified historical district. The city’s majority African American population also has created educational (Savannah State College) and religious legacies (First African/First Bryan Baptist Church are among the earliest independent congregations in the US). The city hosted Olympic yachting events (1996).
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