In the immediate post-Cold War period, as the security rationale for the U.S. embargo disappeared, the United States tightened rather than eased sanctions on Cuba. This dissertation focuses on the competition between Congress and the executive for control of policy towards Cuba, and the domestic interests which shaped policymaking and led to the passage of two major pieces of legislation fiercely resisted by U.S. allies. The dissertation begins with an analysis of U.S. policy towards Cuba in the summer of 1989, before the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Five days of congressional hearings called by Representative George Crockett (D.Michigan) in his attempt to spark a reassessment of relations between the two countries form the basis for a review of policy over the preceding thirty years. The first chapter will also introduce the Cuban American National Foundation, the pre-eminent domestic interest group in U.S. policy towards Cuba in 1989-1996, and the U.S. campaign to have Cuba condemned for human rights violations at the United Nations Human Right Commission. The second chapter examines the policy debate in 1989-1992, focusing on the provision of information to Cubans, the intensification of economic sanctions, and the continuation of the human rights campaign. The third chapter analyses the role of migration from Cuba to the United States between 1959-1992, arguing the main objective of U.S. policy. Chapter four looks at continuity and change under the Clinton administration, and in particular at the administration’s handling of the rafter (migration) crisis of 1994 and the resulting agreements reached with the Cuban government. The primary focus of the fifth chapter will be the struggle between the executive and Congress over the Helms-Burton legislation, signed by Clinton in March 1996.

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No description available.

The dissertation offers a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States during the years 1965-1972. It seeks to explore two related themes - the varying response to the war within the civil rights movement, and the failure of the two movements to work together closely. The dissertation explains the differing responses of civil rights groups to the war by placing them within the context of 'organising experience'. 'On-the-ground' experience in the Deep South or in northern ghettos had a radicalising influence on civil rights workers, thus increasing the likelihood of cynicism about the war or outright opposition to it. This paradigm also helps to explain the reluctance of the national NAACP and others to take a stand on the war. Since Roy Wilkins et al had a much more positive experience of working with the Democratic Party and white liberals, they had little reason to alienate their allies by opposing the war. One advantage of this approach is that it adds nuance to the decision taken by moderate black leaders to not oppose the war, and rescues them from a historiography that has, on occasion, been too quick to condemn them as sell-outs. The numerous efforts at constructing peace and freedom coalitions are also analysed (such as the August 1965 Assembly of Unrepresented People and the 1967 convention of the National Conference for New Politics), and the problems encountered are documented and evaluated. Prominent among these are Black Power, white factionalism, and counterculturalism. The dissertation also examines the peace movement's attempts to attract black support, and the intense and intractable debate within the antiwar movement over whether to focus solely on ending the war, or encompass domestic issues as well. I demonstrate how the inability of the white-dominated peace movement to do little more than associate with the black struggle in a rhetorical way, undermined efforts at building genuine co-operation between the two movements. Moreover, this debate about 'multi-issuism' was invariably related to the factionalism that alienated black activists and made them reluctant to work with the peace movement at the organisational level.

This dissertation addresses Plutarco Elías Calles's government in the Mexican state of Sonora between 1915 and 1919, the years immediately following the period of most intense armed conflict in the Mexican revolution. Calles, the most astute and influential politician to emerge from the revolutionary struggle as well as the founder of the modern Mexican state, has been the most conspicuously ignored figure in the extensive historiography on the revolution. Until very recently it was generally accepted that Calles's political development began with his appointment in 1920 as Obregón's interior minister, and that from this office and later as president he pioneered corporatistic programs of agrarian reform and labour organization. Furthermore, revisionist historians have long characterized Calles as the principal influence in the betrayal of the supposedly more 'radical' and 'revolutionary' movements led by Villa and Zapata, who represented popular aspirations and a nationalistic response towards foreign capital finally redeemed by President Cárdenas in the late 1930s. My research, which in a narrative sense complements the wellknown work of the Mexican historian Héctor Aguilar Camín, suggests that the half decade of the <I>callista</I> state government in Sonora had a direct and important bearing on the future character of Mexican government and politics. Indeed, I have found Calles's governorship in Sonora to be a dry run for policies later implemented nationally. Calles pursued a programme which included the expansion of the public education system, substantial, often militarized agrarian reform, advanced labour reforms and the promotion of unions linked to the government, and the successful submission of large American firms to Mexican law; he expelled the Catholic clergy from the state and enforced the prohibition of alcohol and gambling.

The dissertation considers the early twentieth century culture of northern Canadian exploration through a selective examination of the lives and written works of four contemporary explorers: George Douglas (1875-1963), Guy Blanchet (1884-1966), Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), and Richard Finnie (1906-1987). Written from a cultural historical perspective, the dissertation also draws upon recent work in the interdisciplinary study of exploration that understands this activity as an assemblage of cultural practices to do with the production and consumption of travel. Against the current trend of northern Canadian historiography, it asserts the importance of twentieth-century exploration, and of exploration generally, in creating modern identities, in producing and circulating knowledge about the Canadian North, and in creating representations of that region for the private and public consumption of southern Canadians and Americans. A series of case studies, set predominantly between the years of 1920 and 1965, describe and analyze exploratory encounters within the individuals under consideration – the interaction of their experiences, memories, and beliefs – and without: that, between these individuals and other northern and southern peoples, environments, and cultures. The second and third chapters analyse the relations between northern exploratory identities and practices, the representation of the North, and cultural trends in interwar Canada and the United States, namely antimodernism and the debunking of myths. The fourth and fifth chapters are detailed accounts of two knowledge projects in which these explorers participated: an informal republic of northern letters, and the preparation of an <i>Encyclopedia Arctica</i> in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The sixth chapter considers the individual and communal efforts of these four men to preserve their knowledge and commemorate their achievements as the end of their lives grew near.

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No description available.

This study examines the turbulent American polity of the 1790s. Specifically, it analyses the electoral competition of the Federalist and Republican parties which dominated that polity between the inauguration of George Washington as president in 1789 and of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1801. Its chief concern is emphatically the Republican party and the politicisation and mobilisation strategies thereof. Over the course of its four chapters, each extensively subdivided to explore particular aspects and themes, it will argue that the key to the Republican party's success lay in the domain of language. By aggressively revivifying the conventional language of the American Revolution, and thereby mobilising its underlying ideological structures, the Republicans were able to construct a standardised, normative language of political action with transcended local variations in political culture and provided the foundations for a formidable, nationally-conscious electoral alliance. This language, thoroughly partisan by the late 1790s, could not be adequately met by an increasing anathematised Federalist administration. Indeed, a central element of that language was the stigmatisation of the incumbent administration as Anglophile, aristocratic, and monarchic. Two states, Pennsylvania and Virginia, conventionally regarded as evincing quite distinct political cultures during the eighteenth century, provide the evidential basis for the study's contention that a Republican-sponsored political language served to standardise political cognitions and (electoral) behaviour. In brief, the chapters will examine the structure and historical sources of Republican language, and the manner in which signification itself became an arena for political conflict (Chapter One); the central role of state legislatures as sources of local political cues in early national America, and their early absorption into the partisan conflict (Chapter Two); the pivotal role played by international relations, particularly as they concerned France and Great Britain, in sharpening partisan and rhetorical differences (Chapter Three); and, finally, the function of non-linguistic communicative forms in the Republican symbolic repertoire; certain groups, it will be argued, were to be excluded from an already potentially dangerous egalitarian discourse, whatever the symbolic form its articulation took (Chapter Four). Each chapter, while exploring diverse aspects of the political landscape on which Federalists and Republicans waged electoral war in the 1790s, will seek to maintain the central place of language in its topography.

This dissertation uses long-neglected or forgotten speeches and articles by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his pre-presidential life to provide a new and comprehensive narrative of his internationalist thinking as it developed to 1933. Its three parts cover FDR’s life chronologically. The first part describes the impact of his background and upbringing in the period 1882 to 1917. It examines the influence of key individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Woodrow Wilson. The second part covers the years 1917 to 1920 and includes FDR’s experiences during World War I, the fight for the League of Nations and the presidential campaign of 1920. It was in this period that he developed new and lasting ideological positions in the debates on his country’s political, military, economic and moral connections to the rest of the world. The third part covers the years 1921 to 1933. Although this period saw no important new thinking, international problems, Democratic Party divisions and an apparently successful Republican foreign policy during the 1920s forced FDR to develop important communication strategies for his internationalism. In conclusion the study argues that FDR took a well developed internationalist worldview to the White House in 1933 and that knowledge of this is useful for tracing the subsequent development of his outlook.