American Insecurity And The Origins Of Vulnerability

Author : Russ Castronovo
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691249873
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability written by Russ Castronovo and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat. Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe. Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.

Author : Russ Castronovo
Publisher : Oxford Studies in American Lit
ISBN 13 : 0199354901
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Propaganda 1776 written by Russ Castronovo and published by Oxford Studies in American Lit. This book was released on 2014 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Propaganda 1776 reframes the culture of the U.S. Revolution and early Republic, revealing it to be rooted in a vast network of propaganda. Truth, clarity, and honesty were declared virtues of the period-but rumors, falsehoods, forgeries, and unauthorized publication were no less the life's blood of liberty. Looking at famous patriots like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine; the playwright Mary Otis Warren; and the poet Philip Freneau, Castronovo provides various anecdotes that demonstrate the ways propaganda was - contrary to our instinctual understanding - fundamental to democracy rather than antithetical to it. By focusing on the persons and methods involved in Revolutionary communications, Propaganda 1776 both reconsiders the role that print culture plays in historical transformation and reexamines the widely relevant issue of how information circulates in a democracy.

Author : Bryan S. Turner
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271030445
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vulnerability and Human Rights written by Bryan S. Turner and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

Author : Hugh Gusterson
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520945085
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Insecure American written by Hugh Gusterson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

Author : Gordon Martel
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134847254
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Foreign Relations Reconsidered written by Gordon Martel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together 12 scholars of US foreign relations. Each contributor provides a concise summary of an important theme in US affairs since the Spanish-American War. US policy process, economic interests, relations with the Third World, and the nuclear arms race have been highlighted.

Author : David Rothkopf
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book National Insecurity written by David Rothkopf and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats. You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity, David Rothkopf offers an entirely new perspective into the hidden struggles, the surprising triumphs, and the shocking failures of those charged with leading the United States through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Thanks to his extraordinary access, Rothkopf provides fresh insights drawing on more than one hundred exclusive interviews with the key players who shaped this era. At its core, National Insecurity is the gripping story of a superpower in crisis, seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing world, sometimes showing inspiring resilience--but often undone by the human flaws of those at the top, the mismanagement of its own system, the temptation to concentrate too much power within the hands of too few in the White House itself, and an unwillingness to draw the right lessons from the recent past. Nonetheless, within that story are unmistakable clues to a way forward that can help restore American leadership.

Author : James Warren Oberly
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719036880
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book United States History written by James Warren Oberly and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Alfred Goldberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 838 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense written by Alfred Goldberg and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 838 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Caroline Kennedy-Pipe
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350311324
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Origins of the Cold War written by Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible new introduction to the origins and emergence of the Cold War. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe brings to life the clashes of ideas and personalities that led Russia and America into decades of conflict and draws out important lessons for policy and analysis in today's equally formative period in world affairs.

Author : Russ Castronovo
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226096285
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beautiful Democracy written by Russ Castronovo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-09-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking. Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.