Henry Justin Smith's Books

Conservative Internationalism

Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan

By: Henry R. Nau

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Conservative Internationalism

Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan

By: Henry R. Nau

A reexamination of America's overloaded foreign policy tradition and its importance for global politics today Debates about U.S. foreign policy have revolved around three main traditions—liberal internationalism, realism, and nationalism. In this book, distinguished political scientist Henry Nau delves deeply into a fourth, overlooked foreign policy tradition that he calls "conservative internationalism." This approach spreads freedom, like liberal internationalism; arms diplomacy, like realism; and preserves national sovereignty, like nationalism. It targets a world of limited government or independent "sister republics," not a world of great power concerts or centralized international institutions. Nau explores conservative internationalism in the foreign policies of Thomas Jefferson, James Polk, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. These presidents did more than any others to expand the arc of freedom using a deft combination of force, diplomacy, and compromise. Since Reagan, presidents have swung back and forth among the main traditions, overreaching under Bush and now retrenching under Obama. Nau demonstrates that conservative internationalism offers an alternative way. It pursues freedom but not everywhere, prioritizing situations that border on existing free countries—Turkey, for example, rather than Iraq. It uses lesser force early to influence negotiations rather than greater force later after negotiations fail. And it reaches timely compromises to cash in military leverage and sustain public support. A groundbreaking revival of a neglected foreign policy tradition, Conservative Internationalism shows how the United States can effectively sustain global leadership while respecting the constraints of public will and material resources.

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691159319

ISBN 13

9780691159317

The Black Box

Writing the Race

By: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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The Black Box

Writing the Race

By: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African-American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” — Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society. It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

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Page Count

170

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0593299795

ISBN 13

9780593299791

The Papers of Henry Clay

The Whig Leader, January 1, 1837-December 31,1843

By: Henry Clay

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The Papers of Henry Clay

The Whig Leader, January 1, 1837-December 31,1843

By: Henry Clay

The Papers of Henry Clay span the crucial first half of the nineteenth century in American history. Few men in his time were so intimately concerned with the formation of national policy, and few influenced so profoundly the growth of American political institutions. The year 1837 found Henry Clay hard at work in a successful effort to organize and strengthen the new Whig party. In his attempt to provide for it an ideological core, he emphasized restoration of the Bank of the United States, distribution of the treasury surplus to the states, continued adherence to his Compromise Tariff Act of 1833, and federal funding of internal improvements. The achievement of these goals, Clay reasoned, would mitigate the severe impact of the Depression of 1837 and sweep the Whigs into the White House in 1840. Soon after the election of 1836, Clay began running again for the presidency. By 1838 it was clear to him that he would have to come to grips politically with the long-muted slavery question. This he did in February 1839 in a Senate speech that was so proslavery, anti-abolitionist, and racially extremist that it cost him the Whig presidential nomination at the Harrisburg convention in December 1839. William Henry Harrison was nominated in his stead and won handily. But one month after his inauguration Harrison died and Vice President John Tyler, a states' rights Democrat turned Whig, was elevated to the presidency. Senator Clay emerged from his disappointment at Harrisburg as the acknowledged leader of the Whig party and further unified it in a wide-ranging assault on the Tyler administration's refusal to support Whig principles. By the end of 1843 Tyler had been broken, the Whig party was Clay's to lead, and the Kentuckian was again in the presidential lists. Confident that 1844 would surely be his year, Clay unfortunately failed to see the formation and growth of the black cloud that was Texas annexation. Publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

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Page Count

996

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

ISBN 10

0813130514

ISBN 13

9780813130514

Book's by Henry Justin Smith

Conservative Internationalism

Conservative Internationalism

The Black Box

The Black Box

The Papers of Henry Clay

The Papers of Henry Clay

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