America Compared

America Compared

Samantha Alderton

History 141

Gridded Lives• In both Karaganda, Kazakhstan

and Billings, Montana are built in the same way: grid-syle formation.

• Residential tracts were built with assembly-line efficiency

• Billings was founded by railroad entrepreneurs, miners, businessmen, and farmers.

• Karaganda was founded in an authoritarian state, on a prison town

Gridded Lives• The American West represents American

individualism-- people wanted to be free and enterprising. They are pioneers, democratic, and free laborers.

• Northern Kazakhstan is a place of unfreedom, exile, and imprisonment. They have a planned economy.

• Both cities were unmarked voids before they were founded as cities.

Gridded Lives• Usually cities are founded after a large

collection of people are accumulated in an area; Karaganda and Billings were the exception to this rule.

• People moved to Montana to break the soil and try to improve their lives based on what advertisers made Montana out to be

• NKDV officers painted a better picture of Kazakhstan than it actually was which made people actually want to be on the deportation list

• Because farming in a dry area was difficult, more laborers and machinery were necessary. From these circumstances, the use of migrant, unskilled workers proliferated.

Summary

Though both countries (Unitied States and Kazakhstan) are founded on opposing principles and ideologies, two of their cities bear striking resemblance to one another as argued by Kate Brown. Kazakhstan is a land that lacks individualism and was founded on authoritarianism and exile. It is a place that lacks freedom for its people. The United States, however, was founded on the belief that people should be free laborers and have the opportunity to exercise their own decisions and beliefs.

These two cities seem to tell opposing tales, but as Brown argues, the two cities are similar because of their grid formats, farming, and the way in which people were prompted into the cities. Both Karaganda and Billings use grid format to keep the city ready for expansion and accommodate railroads. Both cities lured people with glossy visions of a better place (however, Karaganda was a prison town with many coerced to it). And finally, both cities used migrant workers to establish efficient farming to feed their respective nations’ people. Though it seems as if these two

cities are worlds apart, their tales tell a similar story.

Americans, Europeans, and the Movies

• The silent feature film took the world by storm but flourished and died in a span of less than 20 years

• More than 10,000 silent features were made between 1912 and 1929

• Most silent films fell into well defined categories of subject and treatment. For example the crime story, western, historical costume, domestic melodrama, and romance were all popular.

• The films were centered on upper-middle and wealthy upper-class men and women with lavish houses, clothing, and personal possessions.


• In this period American society and culture were changing at a faster rate than the movies being produced

• “Hyphenated Americans” were newcomers arriving to America to pursue a better life. They had to endure discrimination, restricted legislation, and violence. They also had to submerge into American culture (language, religion, clothing, cuisine, etc.) Their character traits, complexion, speech, and features made them standout against the homogenous looking culture projected onto the movie screen.


• US society was reorienting after WWI• Cecil B. DeMille: Male and Female (1919) outraged Moralists

when a glimpse of a female’s breast was revealed onscreen; this signified the transforming social codes

• The European films showcased a liberated a bold sexuality• American films centered on constant action, a trait that

Europeans admired• American films also transitioned to a form of comedy that

showcased the humor of sexuality.

Summary

During the explosion of silent films, more than 10,000 American features were made in less than two decades. These films showcased the ideals of American culture. The films painted a picture of wealthy men and women. As the culture began to change after WWI, filmmakers began to take more risks including the shot of female breasts in 1919’s Male and Female.

European films highlighted the freedom of sexuality. Women featured in these films were flirtatious, bold, and not timid. American films featured dramatic action and change. These characteristics were admired by European moviegoers.

Roosevelt and Hitler

• After WWI, both Germany and the United States suffered from the Great Depression-- more than any other nations

• The nations experienced an unemployment rate of about 25%. Between 13 and 16 million Americans in the labor force found themselves unemployed while more than 6 million Germans found themselves in the same conditions

Roosevelt and Hitler• Both countries looked for a leader who displayed

confidence and political charisma. Roosevelt and Hitler symbolized energy and commitment. Both leaders were willing to experiment to attempt to save the economy. They supported experimental government initiatives on an unprecedented scale.

• Roosevelt wanted to preserve the “American way of life” while Hitler was focused on world conquest.

• Both were preceded by inadequate leaders: Herbert Hoover (US) and Heinrich Bruning (GER).

Roosevelt and Hitler

• Both governments government work programs to attempt to stimulate the economy and create new jobs

• Both supported farm subsidies and rural relocation and idealized rural life

• Both supported corporatism in which the government supervised the cooperation of businesses and laborers.

Summary

After WWI the world was in shambles. The tumult of the war caused the United States and Germany to suffer tremendously economically. In a state of despair, both countries looked to leaders who promised a brighter future. For the United States, this leader was FDR who would become praised and idolized throughout history. FDR’s ideas and politics were strikingly similar to Germany’s leader: Adolph Hitler. Though their practices were very similar, Hitler would go down in history as one of the most evil rulers.

Their practices aimed to lift the country out of economic despair. The New Deal and the Third Reich established government work programs and encouraged nationalism.

Imperial Responses to Revolution

• Because of the way that the United States behaved politically during the Cold War and the beginning of the Vietnamese fight for independence, the US became known around the world as an imperialist bully

• In 1776 the United States fought for independence from imperialistic Great Britain. In 1960 Vietnam fought for

independence from imperialistic US.


• Within five years the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led the nation into a greater military commitment in South Vietnam. By the end of 1965 American ground troops totaled 180,000; a year later there were another 200,000

• Vietnam War is the longest, least productive war in American history


• By 1775 the British colonial authorities had lost control over the situation

• After the war, the United States places severe restrictions on the Vietnamese economy through a number of punitive measures. Among these are the Ford Administration’s decision to freeze $150 million in Vietnamese assets as well as expanding an embargo on North Vietnam.

Summary

This country was founded on the principles of freedoms for all. The nation values capitalism, human rights, and other various freedoms. In the late 1700’s, colonists fought for their right to separate from the British monarchy. They fought and were underestimated by the British which eventually led to a win. It is ironic then that the ways in which the British attempted to control the colonists is the same way that the US attempted to control Vietnam nearly two hundred years later.

Globalization and American Power

• America's aggressive unilateral turn opened a public debate over the prospect and the morality of an " American empore." In an influential article in the New York Times. political scientist Michael Ignatieff noted that the United States had moved unmistakably toward a new version of empire not built on colonies and conquest but based on enforcing order in the world, promoting American values and interests, and exempting itself from international rules.

• The reassertion of American military power under Ronald Regan prompted fresh warnings against the "imperial temptation."

• In the past three or four years, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term American Empire less pejoratively, if still ambivalently, and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm.

• Whil Mallaby and Ignatieff are perhaps best described as liberal interventionists- proponents of what Eric Hobsbawm has sneeringly dismissed as "the imperialism of human rights" - the majority of the new imperialists are neoconservatives, and it was their views that came to the fore during and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

• Within the Pentagon the figure most frequently associated with the "new imperialism" is Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who first won notoriety, as undersecretary of defense under the current president's father, by arguing that the aim of U.S. policy should be to "convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interest."


• Officially, to be sure, the United States remains an empire in denial. Most politicians would agree with the distinction drawn by the historian Charles Beard back in 1939: "American is not Rome or Britain. It is to be America,"

• We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused- perffering greatness to power, and justice to glory."

• Julius Caesar call himself imperator (emperor) but never king. His adopted heirs Augustus preferred princeps. Emperors can call themselves what they like, and so can empires.

• Define the term empire narrowly enough, of course, and the United States can easily be excluded from the category.

• What the United States did after the end of the second World War was, however, fundamentally different in character. According to one recent formulation, it was " not an imperial state with a predatory intent" ; it was " more concerned with enhancing regional stability and security and protecting international trade than enlarging its power at the expense of others."

• Most historians would agree that if anything, American economic power after 1945 exceeded that of Britain after 1815, a comparable watershed of power following the final defeat of Napoleonic France.


• The extraordinary growth in productivity achieved between around 1890 and 1950 eclipse anything previously achieved by Britain, even in the first flush of the Industrial Revolution.

• The United Sates ver deliberately used its power to advance multilateral and mutually balanced tariff reductions under the General Agreement of Tariffs and Tarde(later the World Trade Organization.

• The distinction between hegemony and empire would be legitimate if the term empire did simply mean , as so many American commentators seem to assume, direct rule over foreign territories without any political representation of their inhabitants.

Summary

In 1987 British historian Paul Kennedy' best- selling book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers stirred controversy by linking the fate of the United States to the gloomy precedent of Rome, the Hapsburgs, and Great Britain. Events have a way of embarrassing historians who take on the role of prophets. No sooner did Kennedy's dismal prognosis appear than things began to look up for the United States. In the later 1980s and through the 1990s, the American economy surged from gains in productivity, the rise of the computer industry, and booms in banking and real estate, while rivals such as Japan and Germany stagnated. America's aggressive unilateral turn opened a public debate over the prospect and the morality of an " American empire." In an influential article in the New York Times. political scientist Michael Ignatieff noted that the United States had moved unmistakably toward a new version of empire not built on colonies and conquest but based on enforcing order in the world, promoting American values and intrests, and exempting itself from international rules.

America Compared

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