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Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation.Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis in Arc of Containment is the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. In Arc of Containment Ngoei shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was, in fact, far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations-Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia-had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed from an era of Anglo-American predominance into a condition of US hegemony. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.

In Dangerous Intercourse, Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships-from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonization of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "e;benevolence,"e; too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable.Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally.

In An American Brothel, Amanda Boczar considers sexual encounters between American servicemen and civilians throughout the Vietnam War, and she places those fraught and sometimes violent meetings in the context of the US military and diplomatic campaigns.In 1966, US Senator J. William Fulbright declared that "e;Saigon has become an American brothel."e; Concerned that, as US military involvement in Vietnam increased so, too, had prostitution, black market economies, and a drug trade fueled by American dollars, Fulbright decried an arrogance of power on the part of Americans and the corrosive effects unchecked immorality could have on Vietnam as well as on the war effort. The symbol, at home and abroad, of the sweeping social and cultural changes was often the so-called South Vietnamese bar girl.As the war progressed, peaking in 1968 with more than half a million troops engaged, the behavior of soldiers off the battlefield started to impact affect the conflict more broadly. Beyond the brothel, shocking revelations of rapes and the increase in marriage applications complicated how the South Vietnamese and American allies cooperated and managed social behavior. Strictures on how soldiers conducted themselves during rest and relaxation time away from battle further eroded morale of disaffected servicemen. The South Vietnamese were loath to loosen moral restrictions and feared deleterious influence of a permissive wWestern culture on their society.From the consensual to the coerced, sexual encounters shaped the Vietnam War. Boczar shows that these encounters-sometimes facilitated and sometimes banned by the US military command-restructured the South Vietnamese economy, captivated international attention, dictated military policies, and hung over diplomatic relations during and after the war.

Borderline Citizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. Robert C. McGreevey examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups-employers, colonial officials, court officers, and labor...

Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding.Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls...

"This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War cultural politics"--

"This book reveals the little-known story of how the United States colonized and governed Southeast Asian Muslim territories in the early twentieth century"--

"Freedom Incorporated tells the story of American and Filipino anticommunists who sought to turn the Philippines into a laboratory for exportable models of decolonization, postcolonial statehood, and anticommunist warfare"--

Mischa Honeck's Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century.The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The core values of the organization have, since its founding in 1910, shaped what it means to be an American boy and man. As Honeck shows, those masculine values had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country's largest youth organizations, Our Frontier Is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era up to the countercultural moment of the 1960s. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, and started troops on overseas military bases. Scouts traveled to Africa and even sailed to icy Antarctica, hoisting the American flag and standing as models of loyalty, obedience, and bravery. Through scouting America's complex engagements with the world were presented as honorable and playful masculine adventures abroad.Innocent fun and earnest commitment to doing a good turn, of course, were not the whole story. Honeck argues that the good-natured Boy Scout was a ready means for soft power abroad and gentle influence where American values, and democratic capitalism, were at stake. In other instances the BSA provided a pleasant cover for imperial interventions that required coercion and violence. At Scouting's global frontiers the stern expression of empire often lurked behind the smile of a boy.

Anyone interested in the history of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and twentieth century intellectual history will find this impressive biography of Hans Speier, one of the most influential figures in American defense circles of the twentieth century, a must-read.In Democracy in Exile, Daniel Bessner shows how the experience of the...

The Diplomacy of Migration combines important innovations in the field of diplomatic history with new international trends in migration history. During the Cold War, both Chinese and American officials employed a wide range of migration policies and practices to pursue legitimacy, security, and prestige.

In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men...

For God and Globe recovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. Michael G. Thompson explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s.

In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party. He traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War.

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Motoe Sasaki's transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history.

In Imperfect Strangers, Salim Yaqub argues that the 1970s were a pivotal decade for U.S.-Arab relations, whether at the upper levels of diplomacy, in street-level interactions, or in the realm of the imagination.

In White World Order, Black Power Politics, Robert Vitalis recovers the arguments, texts, and institution building of an extraordinary group of professors at Howard University, including Alain Locke, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Eric Williams, and Merze Tate, who was the first black female professor of political science in the country.

Brian Rouleau argues that because of their ubiquity in foreign ports, American sailors were the principal agents of overseas foreign relations in the early republic.

Thomas C. Field Jr. reconstructs the untold story of USAID's first years in Bolivia, including the country's 1964 military coup d'etat.

David Sim examines how Irish nationalists and their American sympathizers tried to convince legislators and statesmen to use the global influence of the United States to achieve Irish independence.

In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem organized an election to depose chief-of-state Bao Dai, after which he proclaimed himself the first president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam. The United States sanctioned the results of this election, which was widely condemned as fraudulent, and provided substantial economic aid and advice to the RVN. Because...