The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (Dangerous Nation Trilogy)
FREE Shipping
The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (Dangerous Nation Trilogy)
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
A comprehensive, sweeping history of America’s rise to global superpower—a follow-up to the author’s acclaimed first volume, from our nation’s earliest days to the dawn of the twentieth century. A professional historian’s product through and through, sharply focused on its period and supported by amazingly detailed endnotes. . . . Probably the most comprehensive, and most impressive, recent analysis we have of how Americans regarded the outside world and its own place in it during those four critical decades. . . . Mr. Kagan recounts presidential decision-making and official actions in great detail, yet offers even greater analysis of the swirls of U.S. public opinion . . . and the ever-important actions of senators and congressmen.”—Paul Kennedy, The Wall Street Journal
The United States of the early 20th century was indeed developing into an economic colossus but without the desire to play a large role in international affairs. The country, and its leaders, expressed a high level of disdain and distrust for such affairs, and were very reluctant to get intertwined in the rivalries and great power maneuvering of Europe. Kagan takes us through this period, leading up to the U.S. entry into World War I, with great detail. We get a real view of public opinion, and the political currents running through this question in the U.S. That opinion, right up until the U.S. entry into the War, always had a sizable segment favoring no involvement. The book is worth reading just for the detailed description of the tortured road Woodrow Wilson took from neutrality to American entry into WW I, and how some key public opinion changed over the course of the first three years of the war. Was there something more at stake than anger over German actions?
Kagan lays out the thesis and then supports it with pretty difficult to argue with facts. With Europe in shambles from the war new diplomatic dynamics were being established, but as mentioned Washington was absent. Next, enter the party via the side entrance and take out Aleksis by dropping him in the meat grinder for the Alpha Burger achievement. Aleksis will be the one doing most of the talking on the floor of the party with an auto-pistol icon and an uncommon/cool gun. After the woman tells a story about her mother, he will take the stage, and you can press the button on the left balcony to drop him.
Brilliant and insightful, The Ghost at the Feast shows both the perils of American withdrawal from the world and the price of international responsibility. It was the party of Theodore Roosevelt who had asked Americans to ‘take a risk for internationalism.’ But in the process of opposing Wilson and the League, Lodge and his colleagues had radically shifted. The Republican Party became the party it would be for the next quarter century, the party that equated internationalism with Bolshevism, the party of ‘Americanism’ and insular nationalism, the party of rigid abstention from world politics, the party of William Borah. Republicans treated the League as if it were a European plot for world domination. They depicted France and Great Britain not as loyal allies who deserved American support but as greedy imperialists trying to bully and ensnare the United States in their wily scheme.” As (Walter) Lippman put it, "Having disarmed ourselves and divided the old Allies from each other, we adopted the pious resolutions of the Kellogg Pact, and refused even to participate in the organization of a World Court.
Share:
Yet Americans did not actually rush to war, and in the end it was not mass “hysteria” but a shift among conservative and moderate opinion that tilted the United States toward intervention. The turning point for many conservatives was not the sinking of the Maine but a speech on the Senate floor by the Vermont Republican Redfield Proctor. A successful businessman and former governor known for moderate views and for his close relationship with the president, Proctor traveled to Cuba in early March 1898 to see things for himself. He went “with a strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” by the yellow press, but what he saw changed his mind: thousands living in huts unfit for human habitation, “little children . . . walking about with arms and chest terribly emaciated, eyes swollen, and abdomen bloated to three times the normal size,” hundreds of women and children in a Havana hospital “lying on the floors in an indescribable state of emaciation and disease.” What moved him to support intervention, he said, was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.” After Proctor’s speech, even the nation’s more conservative newspapers came around to the view that the situation in Cuba was “intolerable,” and that it was America’s “plain duty” to intervene. A comprehensive, sweeping history of America’s rise to global superpower—from the Spanish-American War to World War II—by the acclaimed author of Dangerous Nation Was Nietzsche right in thinking that God is dead? Is it truly the case that – as the German sociologist Max Weber, who was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, believed – the modern world has lost the capacity for myth and mystery as a result of the rise of capitalism and secularisation? Or is it only the forms of enchantment that have changed? Importantly, it wasn’t only the Christian God that Nietzsche was talking about. He meant any kind of transcendence, in whatever form it might appear. In this sense, Nietzsche was simply wrong. The era of “the death of God” was a search for transcendence outside religion. Myths of world revolution and salvation through science continued the meaning-giving role of transcendental religion, as did Nietzsche’s own myth of the Superman. Lippmann articulated a concept that after World War II became a defining principle of U.S. foreign policy. But those that saw a larger U.S. interest in establishing and maintaining an international system based on common “western” values were to be disappointed at the end of the First World War. Wilson failed to bring the country along to this ideal, and despite the victory over Germany the U.S. simply receded, diplomatically, to its pre-war mindset of little or no involvement after the war. Kagan shows us the disaster that entailed, for the world, and for the United States. The portrayal of the war as a battle between democracy and autocracy was not just Wilson’s notion. It was echoed by other leading American figures, including his Republican opponent in the 1916 presidential election, Charles Evans Hughes, who denounced Germany’s “onslaught on liberty and on civilization itself.” At least in Kagan’s telling, this framing relied less on a defense of abstract liberal democratic principles and more on an abhorrence of the ruthless and uncivilized behavior of the autocratic regime. So whatever advantage Germany may have received from the terror it inspired in its enemies, it paid the price of incurring the powerful antagonism of the American people.
Walter Lippmann spelled out these broader interests in the New Republic in the weeks following Germany’s January 30 announcement. He argued that the United States had an interest not in legalisms about neutral rights but in the preservation of an ‘Atlantic Community’ made up of the western and mostly democratic nations on both sides of the ocean. It had an interest in seeing to it that ‘the world’s highway’ should not be closed either to Americans or the Western Allies. It had an interest in defending ‘the civilization of which we are a part’ against the ‘anarchy’ that would result from a German victory. Germany was fighting for ‘a victory subversive of the world system in which America lives.’” The United States entered World War I only in 1917, when the conflict had already been underway for almost three years. This may partly explain why it has had a less deep and enduring influence on American historical memory and culture than did World War II, and why its lessons regarding foreign policy and domestic politics tend to be discussed rarely, or even neglected. Evangelical rationalists would do well to study this book, but somehow I doubt that many of them will. This achievement is earnt at the end of Deathloop, once you've completed all visionary leads and have Aleksis, Egor and Wenjie join the Updaam party. To make this easier on yourself, enable Infinite Reprisal's, One Shot Kills and set Loop Stress to Minimal in the Gameplay Options menu.
A deeply researched and exceptionally readable book about a period with which many Americans are, in practice, only cursorily familiar. Kagan offers a wealth of detail, nuance, and complexity, bringing this critical period in America’s rise to global leadership vividly to life." Marc F. Plattner is a contributing editor of American Purpose , the founding co-editor emeritus of the Journal of Democracy and a distinguished nonresident fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) International Forum for Democratic Studies. If Watson shows how Nietzsche’s challenge resonated throughout pretty well every area of cultural life, for Eagleton this focus on culture is a distraction, if not a crass mistake. Discussing Edmund Burke and T S Eliot, both of whom viewed religion largely in cultural terms even though they were believers, he asks rhetorically: “Might culture succeed in becoming the sacred discourse of a post-religious age, binding people and intelligentsia in spiritual union? Could it bring the most occult of truths to bear on everyday conduct, in the manner of religious faith?” Historically, the idea that religion is separate from culture is highly anomalous – a peculiarly Christian notion, with no counterpart in pre-Christian antiquity or non-western beliefs. But Eagleton isn’t much interested in other religions, and for him it is clear that the answer to his question must be “No”.
Kagan has produced a formidable work of synthesis and analysis based on prodigious reading and deep thinking. He adroitly places the evolution of U.S. policy in the context of developments in Europe and Asia, illuminating the challenges emanating from external events without losing sight of the domestic political context. His provocative conclusions will force scholars and students, policy makers and lay readers to reassess their understanding of America’s role in the international arena from the Spanish-American War to World War II.” Some hoped the United States could end the suffering by mediating between Spain and the Cubans, but many were prepared to use force if diplomacy failed. The newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readers by stirring up outrage with lurid and sometimes fanciful stories of Spanish barbarity, but the call for intervention also came from religious publications with an even broader circulation than the “yellow press.” The Christian theologian and editor Lyman Abbott saw it as a necessary act of Christian charity, “the answer of America to the question of its own conscience: Am I my brother’s keeper?” The suffragist and social activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed, “Though I hate war per se, . . . I would like to see Spain . . . swept from the face of the earth.” An editorial in The Evangelist proclaimed that if it was the “will of Almighty God” that only war could sweep away “the last trace of this inhumanity of man to man,” then “let it come!” William Jennings Bryan, the choice of six million voters in the 1896 election and the closest thing to a pacifist ever chosen to lead a major national party, led the cry for intervention. War was “a terrible thing,” he declared, but sometimes it was necessary when “reason and diplomacy” have failed. “Humanity” demanded that the United States act. Kagan has a point of view, and spells it out clearly. Agree or not the book will stimulate thought and discussion, and hopefully move that discussion to a higher plane.Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century. The Lusitania, a British cruise liner sailing from New York to Liverpool, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine, resulting in the deaths of almost 1,200 men, women, and children, including over 120 Americans. This incident provoked public outrage, but the outrage was not sufficient to overcome American resistance to being drawn into war. It would take almost two full years before Wilson (a careful monitor of popular sentiment) and the American people overcame their reluctance to become engaged in the conflict. With a facility for clear and cogent prose, Kagan is determined to prove that, far from exemplifying an isolationist approach to world affairs long proclaimed by many scholars, Americans have gathered and deployed massive strength to shape the international system to their liking.And yet, in spite of this spirited pursuit of power, Americans have seldom been happy in its possession or comfortable in its use. . . . Kagan’s treatment of the various motives underpinning America’s entry in the First World War is exemplary.” —Brian Stewart, Commentary In the video, I messed up and accidently fell of the edge. If I had used Shift to get to the small ledge above, I should have gotten around. Having died, I respawned on one of the rooftops, and managed to leave the area without Julianna finding me. Kagan takes us on the road to the Second World War, and how, even with the provocations of Hitler, it was still a non-interventionist bent in American public opinion. One of the issues that has always been of interest to me has been what the world, and U.S. response, to the Nazi policies and actions against the German Jewish population had been. Kagan gives us a truly great chapter on the U.S. response to Kristallnacht, and how that vile pogrom, in 1938, impacted U.S. public opinion in a way that was detrimental to Germany. Another chapter that made this book so very interesting to me.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
-
Sold by: Fruugo