Greek-American Relations from Monroe to Truman

Greek-American Relations from Monroe to Truman
Author: Angelo Repousis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Greece
ISBN: 9781606351772

The pre-Cold War motives of American intervention in Greece Most studies of U.S. relations with Greece focus on the Cold War period, beginning with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. There is little substance in the extant literature about American policy toward or interaction with Greece prior to World War II. This overlooks the important intersections between the two countries and their peoples that predated the Second World War. U.S. interest in Greece and its people has been long-standing, albeit primarily on an informal or unofficial level. Author Angelo Repousis explores a variety of resonant themes in the field of U.S. foreign relations, including the role of nongovernment individuals and groups in influencing foreign policymaking, the way cultural influences transfer across societies (in this particular case the role of philhellenism), and how public opinion shapes policy--or not. Repousis chronicles American public attitudes and government policies toward modern Greece from its war for independence (1821-1829) to the Truman Doctrine (1947) when Washington intervened to keep Greece from coming under communist domination. Until then, although the U.S. government was not actively in support of Greek efforts, American philhellenes had supported the attempt to achieve and protect Greek independence. They saw modern Greece as the embodiment of the virtues of its classical counterpart (human dignity, freedom of thought, knowledge, love of beauty and the arts, republicanism, etc.) and worked diligently, albeit not always successfully, to push U.S. policymakers toward greater official interest in and concern for Greece. Pre-Cold War American intervention in Greek affairs was motivated in part by a perceived association among American and Greek political cultures. Indebted to ancient Greece for their democratic institutions, philhellenes believed they had an obligation to impart the blessings of free and liberal institutions to Greece, a land where those ideals had first been conceived.

Between Freedom and Progress

Between Freedom and Progress
Author: David Prior
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807172448

Between Freedom and Progress recovers and analyzes the global imaginings of Reconstruction’s partisans—those who struggled over and with Reconstruction—as they vied with one another to define the nature of their country after the Civil War. The remarkable technological and commercial transformations of the mid-nineteenth century—in particular, steam engines, telegraphs, and an expanded commercial printing capacity—created a constant stream of news, description, and storytelling from across and beyond the nation. Reconstruction’s partisans contended with each other to make sense of this information, motivated by intense political antagonism combined with a shared but contested set of ideas about freedom and progress. As writers, lecturers, editors, travelers, moral reformers, racists, abolitionists, politicians, suffragists, soldiers, and diplomats, Reconstruction’s partisans made competing claims about their place in the world. Understanding how, why, and when they did so helps ground our understanding of Reconstruction—itself a mysterious, transatlantic term—in its own intellectual context. Three factors proved pivotal to the making of Reconstruction’s world. First, from 1865 to the early 1870s, the interconnected issues of how to remake the Union and how to remake the South exerted a powerful hold on federal politics, defining the partisan landscape and inspiring rival arguments about what was possible and what was good. The daunting nature of these issues created a sense of crisis across the political spectrum, with political discourse ranging in tone from combative to euphoric to apocalyptic. Second, though domestic in nature, these issues were refracted through two broadly held beliefs: that the causes of freedom and progress defined history and that distinctive peoples with their own characters composed the world’s population. These beliefs produced a disposition to think of developments from across and beyond the United States as essentially relatable to each other, encouraging an intellectual style that favored wide-ranging comparisons. Third, far from being confined to the elite, this mode of thinking and arguing about the world lived and breathed in public texts that were produced and consumed on a weekly and daily basis. This commercialized and politicized world of mass publishing was highly unequal in structure and content, but it was also impressively vibrant and popular. Together, these three factors made the world of Reconstruction a global landscape of information, argumentation, and imagination that derived much of its vigor from domestic political battles.

The Monroe Doctrine and the Greek Revolution

The Monroe Doctrine and the Greek Revolution
Author: Aristotle Tziampiris
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-07-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031297040

This book attempts to explain why despite widespread popular support (the “Greek Fire”) in the United States of America for the Greek Revolution, the promulgation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine led to Washington D.C.’s non-recognition of the Hellenic efforts. It examines the origins and tradition of the diplomatic doctrine of neutrality and argues that the Monroe Doctrine represents its full realization. The new foreign policy doctrine is placed within its proper diplomatic framework, while the role of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams is highlighted. What remains remarkable, is how high on the U.S. policy agenda the Greek War of Independence was and how close it came to being politically vindicated. The epilogue of this book demonstrates based on specific historical episodes, that the “Greek Fire” and the Monroe Doctrine set in many ways the political framework that came to define Hellenic-American relations for almost the next two centuries.

From Byron to bin Laden

From Byron to bin Laden
Author: Nir Arielli
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-01-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674982231

What makes people fight and risk their lives for countries other than their own? Why did diverse individuals such as Lord Byron, George Orwell, Che Guevara, and Osama bin Laden all volunteer for ostensibly foreign causes? Nir Arielli helps us understand this perplexing phenomenon with a wide-ranging history of foreign-war volunteers, from the wars of the French Revolution to the civil war in Syria. Challenging narrow contemporary interpretations of foreign fighters as a security problem, Arielli opens up a broad range of questions about individuals’ motivations and their political and social context, exploring such matters as ideology, gender, international law, military significance, and the memory of war. He shows that even though volunteers have fought for very different causes, they share a number of characteristics. Often driven by a personal search for meaning, they tend to superimpose their own beliefs and perceptions on the wars they join. They also serve to internationalize conflicts not just by being present at the front but by making wars abroad matter back at home. Arielli suggests an innovative way of distinguishing among different types of foreign volunteers, examines the mixed reputation they acquire, and provides the first in-depth comparative analysis of the military roles that foreigners have played in several conflicts. Merging social, cultural, military, and diplomatic history, From Byron to bin Laden is the most comprehensive account yet of a vital, enduring, but rarely explored feature of warfare past and present.

American and Muslim Worlds before 1900

American and Muslim Worlds before 1900
Author: John Ghazvinian
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350109525

American and Muslim Worlds before 1900 challenges the prevailing assumption that when we talk about "American and Muslim worlds", we are talking about two conflicting entities that came into contact with each other in the 20th century. Instead, this book shows there is a long and deep seam of history between the two which provides an important context for contemporary events -- and is also important in its own right. Some of the earliest American Muslims were the African slaves working in the plantations of the Carolinas and Latin America. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, was frequently called an "infidel" and suspected of hidden Muslim sympathies by his opponents. Whether it was the sale of American commodities in Central Asia, Ottoman consuls in Washington, orientalist themes in American fiction, the uprisings of enslaved Muslims in Brazil, or the travels of American missionaries in the Middle East, there was no shortage of opportunities for Muslims and inhabitants of the Americas to meet, interact and shape one another from an early period.

Missionary Diplomacy

Missionary Diplomacy
Author: Emily Conroy-Krutz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501773992

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of US citizens abroad and of the role of the US as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the US entered the first world war, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.

American Apostles

American Apostles
Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809023997

The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world In American Apostles, the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world. As Heyrman shows, the missionaries thrilled their American readers with tales of crossing the Sinai on camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile, and exploring the ancient city of Jerusalem. But their private journals and letters often tell a story far removed from the tales they spun for home consumption, revealing that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians and pursued an elusive Bostonian convert to Islam. As events confounded their expectations, some of the missionaries developed a cosmopolitan curiosity about-even an appreciation of-Islam. But others devised images of Muslims for their American audiences that would both fuel the first wave of Islamophobia in the United States and forge the future character of evangelical Protestantism itself. American Apostles brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.

Sacred Interests

Sacred Interests
Author: Karine V. Walther
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2015-09-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469625407

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans increasingly came into contact with the Islamic world, U.S. diplomatic, cultural, political, and religious beliefs about Islam began to shape their responses to world events. In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther excavates the deep history of American Islamophobia, showing how negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims shaped U.S. foreign relations from the Early Republic to the end of World War I. Beginning with the Greek War of Independence in 1821, Walther illuminates reactions to and involvement in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the efforts to protect Jews from Muslim authorities in Morocco, American colonial policies in the Philippines, and American attempts to aid Christians during the Armenian Genocide. Walther examines the American role in the peace negotiations after World War I, support for the Balfour Declaration, and the establishment of the mandate system in the Middle East. The result is a vital exploration of the crucial role the United States played in the Islamic world during the long nineteenth century--an interaction that shaped a historical legacy that remains with us today.

The Greek Fire

The Greek Fire
Author: Maureen Connors Santelli
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501715798

The Greek Fire examines the United States' early global influence as the fledgling nation that inserted itself in conflicts that were oceans away. Maureen Connors Santelli focuses on the American fascination with and involvement in the Greek Revolution in the 1820s and 1830s. That nationalist movement incited an American philhellenic movement that pushed the borders of US interests into the eastern Mediterranean and infused a global perspective into domestic conversations concerning freedom and reform. Perceiving strong cultural, intellectual, and racial ties with Greece, American men and women identified Greece as the seedbed of American democracy and a crucial source of American values. From Maryland to Missouri and Maine to Georgia, grassroots organizations sent men, money, and supplies to aid the Greeks. Defending the modern Greeks from Turkish slavery and oppression was an issue on which northerners and southerners agreed. Philhellenes, often led by women, joined efforts with benevolence and missionary groups and together they promoted humanitarianism, education reform, and evangelism. Public pressure on the US Congress, however, did not result in intervention on behalf of the Greeks. Commercial interests convinced US officials, who wished to cultivate commercial ties with the Ottomans, to remain out of the conflict. The Greek Fire analyzes the role of Americans in the Greek Revolution and the aftermath of US involvement. In doing so, Santelli revises understandings of US involvement in foreign affairs, and she shows how diplomacy developed at the same time as Americans were learning what it meant to be a country, and what that country stood for.

Anglo-American Relations With Greece

Anglo-American Relations With Greece
Author: Robert Frazier
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2016-01-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 134921552X

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and hurricane Katrina. She warns that women's rights rhetoric is being manipulated as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the radically plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy for the globe.