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The mixing of races, especially the marriage or cohabitation between a white person and a member of another race. Miscegenation has been susceptible to changing meanings insofar as racial categories have altered over time (see race and ethnicity). By the early twentieth century, as racial difference came to revolve around categories of white, black and Asian, and American Indian, notions of miscegenation balanced culturally constructed temptations. Certainly until the Civil Rights movement, black and white liaisons remained illegal and disturbing for many Americans, closely connected to the institution of lynching. In the aftermath of civil rights and changing immigration quotas in 1965, a revaluation of notions of color and race has occurred, with the result that miscegenation no longer carries the same weight as it once did.
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The major geographical divisions of the United States—North, South, Midwest and West—reflect different attitudes, dialects, literature, folklore, food, history perspectives, climate and lifestyle that have fostered extensive literary and historical study of each.
Still, many scholars argue that the term is too imprecise to be meaningful. Subregions such as Northwest, Southwest, New England, Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes are perhaps more specific markers of culture, social ties and identity. Additionally, differences between inhabitants of a particular region may be greater than similarities.
Los Angelenos may have more in common with New Yorkers than they do with residents of Taos, New Mexico, although both California and New Mexico are considered part of the West. In spite of these complications, regional identities have been and continue to be a significant aspect of American heritages.
Stereotypes of “genteel Southerners,” “rednecks,” “reserved New Englanders” and “rugged Westerners” remain as plentiful in contemporary median culture as they were in the nineteenth century when regionalism was first identified. The labels may be adopted by residents, imposed and reproduced in film, television and popular culture, or both.
Throughout history, regional identity has often been constructed in relationship to national identity and has cut across racial, gender and class differences. In the nineteenth century, for example, many white Southerners sublimated class, gender and regional consciousness in order to declare their loyalty to the Confederacy. Obviously, blacks relate differently to this heritage.
A strong interest in the study of regionalism permeates scholarship. Regionalism in American literature emerged in the nineteenth century and was manifest in the “local color” movement of the 1880s. In the twentieth century, notions of regionalism were influenced by anthropological, historical and sociological perspectives in works by William Faulkner, Willa Cather and Robert Penn Warren. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Wallace Stegner invoke region more critically in their discussion of race, class, gender and multiple, changing identities in the late twentieth century.
Historians have “discovered” region in a cyclical fashion throughout the past two hundred years. Recently, studies in the “New Western History” building on earlier work in Southern history have rekindled the regionalist impulse. Scholars attribute this to heightened localism related to environmentalism, preservation of historical monuments, journals and publications, and commemorative occasions. A resurgence in studies of local communities, family history and autobiography contributes as well. Scholars also argue that the resurgence of regionalism is linked to a late twentieth-century disillusionment with national identity. This turning inward towards region is seen as related to larger sociological and political shifts to a more conservative, locally based sense of self amidst great mobility and change.
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The April 19, 1995 truck bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal was the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history One hundred and sixty-eight people, including nineteen children, were killed and hundreds more injured by an ammonium-nitrate and fuel-oil (ANFO) bomb hidden in a rental truck parked outside the building’s entrance. The attack precipitated the largest manhunt in US history Two US army veterans, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were put on trial by federal authorities for their role in the attack. In June 1997 McVeigh, the actual bomber, was convicted and sentenced to death in the federal district court in Denver. Terry Nichols was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the bombing. The attack was motivated by intense hostility towards the federal government, generated by the fiery end to the Branch Davidian/Waco stand-off on April 19, 1993.
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The term “Latino” was introduced to differentiate from the label “Hispanic,” which is used in the United States to refer to individuals whose heritage is primarily from one or more Spanish-speaking countries. According to the US Census Bureau, a person is Hispanic if their ancestry is Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Dominican, or from other Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean, Central or South America or Spain. Political and social groups have long criticized the term Hispanic, claiming that it does not account for the varied socio-cultural experiences, as well as political, economic and social histories of the groups that compose this population.
The term Latino is the newest in a 160-year-old conflict of terminology. The term Latino is a condensed version of Latin America, which can be traced back to 1856. The phrase “Latin America” was used to refer to what was known as Spanish America in an effort to ignore the region’s connection to Spain, as well as its indigenous and African heritages. Ironically today the term Latino is used to embody all of the legacies it was first used to disregard. While Latinos still includes the groups identified by the Census Bureau, it also embraces individuals from all Latin American nationalities, in addition to second- and third-generation English dominant American citizens and various non-Spanish speaking indigenous groups.
Latinos in the United States are a diverse sociocultural and demographic population.
Most Latinos in the United States are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, with the exception of Puerto Ricans, who are the only group guaranteed US citizenship from birth through the Jones Act of 1917. While Latinos reside all over the United States, the majority live in California, Texas, New York and Florida, with a disproportionately high number living in urban areas. With the fastest population growth, it is estimated that by the year 2000 Latinos will be the largest minority in the United States. In the United States alone Latinos represent 11 percent of the population, an estimated 31 million, including 3.5 million in Puerto Rico. Of all the groups, Mexicans (64 percent) account for the largest number of Latinos in the United States, while Central and South Americans (22 percent), Puerto Ricans (12 percent) and Cubans (5 percent) compose the remaining Latino population.
Despite their divergent political, economic and social histories, Latinos found a way to converge in the late 1960s and early 1970s through participation in such social-activist groups like the Young Lords Party and the Brown Berets. Latinos fought against the economic and social injustice in their communities. With the Latino agenda being much more extensive today Latinos are a growing force in the formal political arena, representing their communities at the local, state and federal levels to earn respect for their people, culture and tongue.
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To understand postwar American modernism one needs to consider the dynamic field of cultural production that preceded the postwar global hegemony of American culture. In fact, the postwar activity and dissemination of this modernism was arguably a cumulative endpoint of several decades of enthusiastic and creative energy around a particular brand of modernism. As Ann Douglas points out in Terrible Honesty, “(the) modern world as we know it today all the phenomena that to our minds spell the contemporary…arrive on the scene (in the 1920s), and although these phenomena have been extended and vastly empowered in the decades since, they have not fundamentally altered” (1995:192).
The opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 signaled America’s commitment to modernist tendencies in the creative arts of the twentieth century. But the term, modern, is a highly contentious one. If it is an impossible task to define and date precisely international “modernism,” it may be possible, however, to trace the discursive terrain that manufactured American modernism. In other words, late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury ideas of the modern (and, thus, modernism) in America can be sketched as a complicated discourse that brings together a hyper force of creativity with vast amounts of capital, a fascination with nature and machine, an uncertainty of the use of rural and urban spaces, the failures and successes of efficient mechanical reproduction and assembly-line production and a dream of a recognizable American art. This amalgamation of disparate cultural activity played itself out in the creative forms of poetry, novels, painting, photography, film-making, dance and architecture.
The most influential voice for American modernism was that of the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman (1819–92). His elegiac poetry and prose fused the tropes of machine and nature in order to present his vision of an ideal America. In his Democratic Vistas (1870), Whitman eschewed the tradition of Europe as the driving force behind America’s own creative enterprise. America, he claimed, needed to find its own unique national voice. Stripped bare of what he saw as the dilettanti art of Europe, Whitman proposed a creative sensibility that was manly in virtue and neither effeminate nor decadent in form and content. American art, in other words, should combine the heartiness of nature with the precision and function of a machine. Whitman’s call did not go unheard.
American artists such as photographers/filmmakers Paul Strand and Pare Lorentz, and photographers Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz, painters Robert Henri, Georgia O’Keefe and Charles Sheeler, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright acknowledged Whitman as an important creative force in their work. These artists forged a modernist sensibility that sought to represent the American work of art as an intermingling of Midwest ruggedness with the promise of modernage machinery American artists, especially after the First World War, succeeded in producing an image that streamlined nature and machine while, more strikingly it masculinized the parameters of American creativity.
“The general opinion is,” wrote critic Henry McBride in 1922, “that (the new American artists) are to be as lusty as those that Walt Whitman prophesied for us.” Lusty, but strong, virile, efficient and undeniably American, one need only look at the collaborative film project based on a Whitman poem (“Man(a)hatta,” 1920) between Strand and Sheeler to see the poet’s dream of a sublime American modern art come to fruition.
This lusty and virile American modernism wended its way through the twentieth century where it found its apogee in the work of abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock (1912–56). Trained by the hand of regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Pollock (along with art critic Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s and early 1950s) championed an American art that, like Whitman, refused the “effeminate” European tradition and sensibility of art. Garbed in jean jacket, T-shirt and cowboy boots, Pollock exhibited both himself and his work as the pure American masculine ideal of artist and art. As Pollock saw it, he and his work were the profound (American) conjunction of man, nature and art. In 1944 he told painter Hans Hofmann, with perfect Whitmanesque sublimeness, “I am Nature.” To this day, the encomiums continue to be sung for this apparent modernist tradition extant between Pollock and Whitman. Carter Ratcliff, for example, states that Pollock’s work “(evokes) a sense of the limitless possibility the best of his canvases gave us—for the first time—a pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” (1996:3).
With Pollock, America had hoped to find its “pure” national voice, while it hegemonically positioned his work as the international representation of Modern Art. As Serge Guilbaut argues, Pollock’s paintings emerged precisely at the moment when post-Second World War American culture began to saturate the world. Pollock’s paintings now sell for millions of dollars and hang in many major international corporate centers and museums.
To be sure, the tension underscoring the notion of American modernism is riddled with complicated conflict. But the masculinist (and arguably misogynist and homophobic) influence of Whitman as it is reworked by twentieth-century artists cannot be underestimated. But there were interesting cracks in this earnest version of American art.
While admiring the work of Whitman, artists such as poet Charles Henri Ford resisted the heteromasculinizing of American art by championing a convergence of multiple strains of creative practice. His art journal, View (1940–7), co-edited with Parker Tyler, explored the perverse strains of surrealism, magic realism, the analytic art of Marcel Duchamp and the pleasures of the Hollywood film. Painter Paul Cadmus and photographer George Platt-Lynes also embraced a non-American modern aesthetic.
Carl Van Vechten (photographer/impresario) along with painter Florine Stettheimer carried the exotic visions of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe to America. Van Vechten was also instrumental in launching the careers of several young writers (Langston Hughes, for example) who would later become associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Along with Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen penned a new literature and poetry that evoked the creative energies of life in 1920s Harlem. During the 1950s, filmmakers/ artists Kenneth Anger and Joseph Cornell compiled the waste from culture industry production and adorned their films and objets d’art with it. Bebop and swing jazz, modern dance, advertising, movies and egregious camp aesthetics were other vital forces of American modernism. Painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns also turned away from the “pure” notions of abstract expressionism in order to present America to itself as a well-worn tradition of symbols and junk.
After Pollock’s death, the 1960s witnessed a reinvestment and interest in European art movements such as Futurism and Surrealism—Andy Warhol and pop being, of course, the most visible transgression of the “pure” American art movement. Warhol’s ability to play with representation within the quick and ever-(r)evolving universe of technology and media loosened the old-guard terms for American modernism. Many have argued that the 1960s can be marked as the historical break between modernism and postmodernism.
Like modernism, postmodern is yet another term burdened with varying definitions of ideological weight.
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Underground rooms of the Cold War which, at times of heightened paranoia like the Cuban missile crisis, families constructed and stocked to allow them to survive imminent nuclear holocaust, extending civil defense preparations for tornadoes or conventional weapons into a new age. Civic buildings also altered cellars and posted signs. Although many shelters never went beyond planning, they stimulated debates over inclusion and exclusion recalled in a 1962 song by comedian Shel Silverstein, “I’m Standing Outside of your Shelter Looking in.” In subsequent decades these shelters faded into embarrassment and oblivion; a 1999 Hollywood comedy Blast from the Past, ridiculed a Cold War family who spent decades hiding in one. Nonetheless, echoes of this bomb-shelter mentality recur in propaganda of survivalists, messianic Christians and even apocalyptic interpretations of Y2K.
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The public system of education in the United States is a government-controlled, agegraded, hierarchically structured, free and often compulsory system composed of groups of schools administered by full-time experts and staffed primarily by state-certified teachers. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization, the development of a working class, the shift in the definitions and role of the family and the state’s assumption of responsibility for certain aspects of social welfare all contributed to the establishment and standardization of state systems of education designed to achieve specific public policies and, ostensibly, to give all children access to educational opportunity and thus to social and economic advancement.
Within each state, public schools are generally organized into districts, originally intended to allow for local control within state systems of education, but which also lead to inequity of educational opportunity because a district is only as wealthy as the homeowners within it (see financial aid). Each school district is governed by a local school board, composed of community and business people, as well as an administrative hierarchy, These governing bodies choose leaders, collect school taxes, select curricular materials and hire teachers—all within parameters dictated by the state.
The administrative hierarchy of public schools includes, at the top, superintendents, whose primary role is to supervise classroom instruction and assure curricular uniformity and continuity across the elementary schools (kindergarten through 5th or 6th grade, for children ages five to twelve), middle schools (6th or 7th grades through 8th grade, ages twelve to fourteen) and high schools (9th to 12th grades, ages fourteen to eighteen) which compose a district. Next in the hierarchy principals are responsible for administering school policy within their individual elemen-tary, middle or secondary schools. School-board members, superintendents and principals—the three most powerful contingents in public-school systems—tend to be white, professional males. Teachers, however, tend to be primarily female, particularly at the elementary level.
Teachers in public schools must adhere to strict, district- and state-mandated policies and curricular guides. Throughout the history of public schooling there have been debates about curricula—what students study in school (which texts written from whose perspectives and including whom) and what they and teachers may and may not talk about (e.g. abortion, religion and other controversial issues may be defined but not discussed)—and pedagogical approaches, which range from conservative, highly structured and highly standardized models to critical, constructivist pedagogies which draw on and attempt to develop the active, creative capacities and diversities of learners.
(See education and society for an extended discussion of these last two points.) Questions of who has access to quality education have also been central to conceptualizations and reforms of public education. Segregation in public schools in the United States has often correlated with the maintenance of a cheap labor force.
Immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—first Japanese, Chinese and Korean immigrants, who worked for low wages on railroads, in factories and on farms, then African Americans in the South, who worked for industrialization and the maintenance of agriculture, and then Mexican farm workers in the early twentieth century—were segregated in public schools and received an inferior education to that of their European American counterparts. There were numerous “separate-but-equal” rulings in the courts regarding segregation in the public schools, and it was not until 1954 that the US Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that separate schools were inherently unequal and that school desegregation was necessary. This decision legitimated education and public schooling as an appropriate arena for societal issues and conflicts; the classroom became the context of social issues, with teachers in loco parentis, and the state with its agenda for its ward. While institutional segregation has been challenged by law, unofficial segregation remains in the form of attendance patterns across schools (most students are assigned to neighborhood schools) and tracking within schools, which critics suggest often reinforces racial and socioeconomic inequities.
Just after the Second World War, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States—made several unsuccessful attempts to elicit more federal aid for schools. But it was only after the launching of Sputnik in 1957, when schools were criticized for failing to produce enough scientists and engineers, that the federal government stepped in to try to assuage the distrust in educators, and it did so with the National Defense Education Act of 1958. This Act provided money for specific educational categories, including science, mathematics, foreign languages and counseling and testing programs (see standardized testing). Its passage signified that the federal government would not simply supply monies to states, but would attempt to influence the curriculum taught in schools.
The appropriation of curricular choices from educators continued as a theme, as state departments of education as well as local governing bodies of schools became increasingly composed of politicians and business people—neither educators nor representatives of the majority of the population whom schools serve. After the Sputnikinspired focus on math, science and foreign languages in the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s saw first a swing towards more progressive and alternative forms of education (see education: values and beliefs) and then a back-to-basics movement in the schools, with an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic.
The 1980s and 1990s ushered in a proliferation of options within the American publicschool system. Among these are charter schools, which are public schools operating under a contract or charter granted by a school district, university state education board, or some other public authority, depending on the state. Organized by teachers, business people and/or other interested parties, charter schools are generally non-selective, tuitionfree, non-sectarian and based on choice. There are also vouchers and other schoolchoice plans that aim to offer parents and students the opportunity to select and receive public monies for where children attend school, regardless of geographical or financial status.
None of the reforms to public schools, however, has changed the reality of inequitable resources, support and access among the school children of the United States. Even in its new diversified forms, the public-school system seems to continue to reinforce social inequity sorting students by race, ethnicity, social class, gender and special interest through curricular choices, pedagogical approaches, counseling and standardized testing—the gate-keeping mechanisms which regulate educational access and advancement.
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The governor is the head of the executive branch of state government. He or she is popularly elected, serving in most cases for a term of four years. The timing of governors’ elections varies; some are elected in the same year as presidential elections, while others are elected in the mid-term elections that take place halfway through a presidential term of office.
Although the original intent in establishing state governments was that governors should enjoy powers within their states broadly analogous to that of the president, in fact there are substantial restrictions on governors’ powers. Many aspects of governance for which they are nominally responsible, including education, public health and welfare, are also supervised by federal agencies that can override the governors’ powers.
Governors, like presidents, are also answerable to their state Senates and Houses of Representatives. In some cases, governors of states that have large urban centers with powerful mayors find their writ is limited with regard to the latter; the governor of New York, for example, is arguably less powerful than the mayor of New York City who is nominally subordinate to him. The early practice of locating state capitals in relatively minor towns (such as Albany in New York, Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, or Sacramento in California) can also serve to increase governors’ isolation from the main currents of affairs in their states.
Despite this, many governors do have significant impact on their states. Michael Dukakis’ term as governor of Massachusetts saw important reforms affecting legal and social issues, while in Texas George W. Bush’s program of “caring conservatism” has claimed a similar impact.
Until comparatively recently most presidents of the United States came from the ranks of the Washington, DC elite, with most having served previously as senators, members of Congress or vice-presidents; this was the case with, for example, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. More recently however, successful governors have increasingly used their position as a platform for presidential ambitions. Gerald Ford and George Bush are the only recent presidents not to have been governors. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter (Georgia), Ronald Reagan (California), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas) all came from state rather than national politics. Michael Dukakis, Bush’s unsuccessful Democratic opponent in 1988, was also Governor of Massachusetts. The majority of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the presidency in the last two decades have also been governors or former governors; other powerful governors such as Mario Cuomo have been pressed to stand, but have refused. George W. Bush (son of the former president) parlayed the weak governorship of Texas into a platform from which he became Republican presidential nominee in 1999. Among those discussed to balance the ticket was yet another governor, Tom Ridge of Pennsyl Governors of wealthy high-population states such as California, Texas, Massachusetts and New Jersey are often influential figures on the national scene, but many of those in the smaller states in the Midwest and West are all but unknown outside their own state.
The election of a former professional wrestler, Jesse Ventura, as governor of Minnesota was one of the few events in state politics to make national headlines in 1998.
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The study of political relations between and within countries, political science covers topics as diverse as congressional committees in America, the development of cultural and political identities in Zambia and the arms race between Pakistan and India. In the American academy the discipline is usually divided into four sub-disciplines: American politics, which covers such topics as the study of American political institutions, the political actions of the American public and the study of policy formation within the US; comparative politics, involving the study of the internal politics of other nations with the goal of understanding how political institutions develop or operate in different settings; international relations, the study of the relations between countries, may focus on international institutions like the United Nations, or on the study of less formal networks of communication; and political theory which encompasses the study of more broadly theoretical approaches to politics and, in developing concepts for interpreting leadership and democracy, often has a more normative orientation than the work of the discipline as a whole.
American political science began to emerge as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century. The creation of the discipline was tied in with the Progressive movement, a movement determined to end the practices of corrupt party politics and party machines, especially in cities. The discipline’s orientation towards reform lasted until the 1940s, when an increasing drive towards professionalization and establishment of political science as a “science” led to a decreased concern with political reform and greater attempts to consider politics in an objective, and hence uninvolved, manner.
Political scientists of the day considered questions of democratic legitimacy answered; interest groups insured that citizens’ wishes would be heard. The political upheavals of the 1960s brought on a re-evaluation of this neutrality within the discipline; however, many of should be removed from politics. Political science these scholars still accepted that political science remains a discipline that is generally not reformoriented.
Recently there has been some concern over whether the discipline has become too fragmented. As training has become increasingly focused on achieving mastery of one or maybe two subfields, and language becomes more specialized, it has become less likely that scholars will even be aware of work done outside their subfield. The use of sophisticated mathematical models excludes from dialogue those without advanced mathematical training. While this lack of communication between scholars from different subfields is of increasing concern, it is unclear whether anything can or will be done.
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The Secretary of State is the Cabinet member responsible for US foreign policy. As such, the office is one of the most important posts in the United States government. The Secretary of State is one of the senior members of the Cabinet, along with the Secretaries of Defense and the Treasury. The Secretary is nominated by the president along with other Cabinet members, usually at the start of an incoming administration; the appointment must be confirmed by both houses of Congress. Should a Secretary of State resign or be replaced in mid term, the same nomination and confirmation process is observed.
The Secretary of State was one of the four posts in George Washington’s original Cabinet. Early Secretaries of State were powerful political figures; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both Secretaries of State, went on to become presidents. More recently, Secretaries of State have tended to be less overtly political, and have been picked by presidents on the basis of their loyalty to the latter.
To most people overseas, the Secretary of State is, after the president, the most visible figure in the US administration, and much of American prestige abroad depends on the character and effectiveness of the incumbent. Among the most high-profile Secretaries of State in recent years is the controversial Henry Kissinger, who served in Richard Nixon’s administration. Kissinger negotiated with the Vietnamese foreign minister, Li Duc Tho, in Paris to bring about the end of the Vietnam War, and was later jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The award caused outcry both within the US and abroad as Kissinger was widely seen as one of the architects of US war policy including the bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger was also largely responsible for the US rapprochement with China in the early 1970s.
Another controversial Secretary of State was the former general Alexander Haig, appointed by President Reagan in 1980. In the confusion following the assassination attempt of 1981, Haig famously declared, “I’m in charge at the White House,” thus appearing to usurp the authority of the vice-president, to whom control ordinarily passes when the president is incapacitated. Haig was dismissed soon after.
Haig’s successor, George Schultz, had a demanding role as Secretary of State during the last years of the Cold War and then the thawing of relations with the Eastern bloc.
However, he was able to exercise little or no influence over the warring parties in the Middle East. Schultz was often at odds with other members of the administration, and was hampered by the fact that Reagan ran what amounted to a parallel foreign policy through the National Security Council and his own private office, employing officials such as Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North.
James Baker, Secretary of State under George Bush, was widely hailed as a success— his tenure included the revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989–90 and the beginnings of a peace process in the Middle East. Warren Christopher held the post during Bill Clinton’s first term of office; perceived as a compromise candidate, his influence was limited. He was replaced in the second term by Madeleine Albright, former US ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman ever to hold the post.
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