Literatura académica sobre el tema "Presidents' writings, American"

This final chapter in the book is an afterword that explores the broader themes which emanate from the contributions. The book’s authors demonstrate how presidents’ experiences with various sports shaped their views about sport and physical fitness broadly, which they promoted in speeches, writings, and occasionally policies. This chapter argues that sport and the presidency is also centrally tied to the media. It also suggests areas for future research on the intersection of sport and the presidency.

Abstract On February 18, 1915, The Birth of a Nation became the first motion picture ever to be shown in the White House. Operators wearing full evening dress utilized two Simplex machines to project the film onto the white wooden panels of the East Room. The screening was a personal favor by President Woodrow Wilson to Thomas Dixon Jr., a former classmate and longtime friend. Invited by Dixon to view Griffith’s film, the president had only one objection, and that was practical: he could not accept social invitations because he was still officially in mourning for his wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, who had died a few months earlier. To get around this difficulty, Dixon suggested exhibiting the film at the White House, where the president, his daughters, and some members of the cabinet would be able to view it. There is a legend (one of many that would grow up around this movie) that at the end of the showing, Wilson remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” He may have said this. After all, the film’s view of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods was not too different from Wilson’s own (his historical writings were several times quoted in the film’s intertitles). Moreover, it is unlikely that the Southern-born Wilson (who, as president, had extended segregation to all departments of the federal government) was bothered by the film’s rampant racism. But there seems to be no contemporary reference for the remark. In 1977, when the only survivor of the White House screening was interviewed, she recalled that the president “seemed lost in thought during the showing” and “walked out of the room without saying a word when the movie was over.”

This chapter describes the fanciful character “Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan” created by early America’s leading fiction writer, Washington Irving. Mustapha is a Tripoli ship captain “held prisoner in New York.” Trapped behind enemy lines, he spies on the land of his captivity, writing home to his friend Asem. Mustapha’s concern, however, is America’s own “Bashaw”: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is pictured as a “grand” Sultan who “governs” a New World “empire.” Although Irving’s letters were facetious, they capitalized on serious anxieties confronting Jefferson’s America. Interweaving Islam and imprisonment, while sending covert reports of an American President to a “slave-driver” in North Africa, Irving’s parody cuts rather close to home, even though framed through a Muslim lens.

During the first generation after passage of the U.S. Constitution, the prominence of the Bible, especially public references to the Old Testament, made the nation appear to many of its citizens like “a Hebrew Republic.” Names for children and places newly encountered were often taken from the Old Testament, especially during the early nineteenth century in initial white settlement of the Midwest. The many biblical names of the presidents (and even more of the presidents’ wives) illustrated this naming pattern. Writing often reflected deep or reflexive immersion in Scripture, especially among African American women and men. The diction and vocabulary of the King James Version also strongly shaped public utterance, as can be seen clearly in the presidential inaugural addresses of the era.

This chapter discusses how Ralph Ellison actively dealt with Faulkner’s influence on his work and public image. Ellison valued Faulkner both as a racially attuned novelist and as a publicly active critic refining his intellect throughout the civil rights era. Ellison’s connection with Faulkner was partly direct, partly indirect: there was shared correspondence, at least two brief meetings, and a lot of reading and writing on Ellison’s part. The chapter examines two related threads: (1) the authors’ exchange of letters in 1956–57 about the White House’s People-to-People Program; (2) Ellison’s interest in Faulkner as literary model and racial critic. Throughout his career as novelist, essayist, and educator, Ellison “had accepted the challenge of William Faulkner’s complex literary image of the South,” in Albert Murray’s words, as his writings and archival documents spanning forty-odd years indicate.

The nomination and election of Barack Obama as the first African American president invited numerous references to sport, especially through comparisons to historically significant athletes such as Jackie Robinson and Tiger Woods. Such references relied on mythic notions of merit and liberal progress that have long underscored the narrative of the American Dream. For the most optimistic of observers, Obama’s election signaled that the nation had cleared the final hurdle in the quest for racial equality. Yet, declarations of a “post-racial” society failed to account for both the persistence of racism in U.S. culture and the unique constraints facing a Black president. This chapter attends to those constraints by examining the influence of respectability politics and uplift ideology. It revisits the analogical associations made between Obama and figures such as Robinson and Woods to identify the limits of sport as a political metaphor. Through a critical examination of contemporary writing about sport as a site for equality and inclusion, the chapter argues that the common narrative of racial progress through sport serves as a rhetorical means for deflecting political conflict and celebrating the triumph of liberal democracy.

Fethullah Gülen is one of the most influential scholars and thinkers in the contemporary Islamic world, particularly in Turkey. Although recent studies have put forward Gülen’s ideas on various topics, Gülen’s approach to peace building is one of the less studied. Given the contemporary reality of wars and ethnic/religious strife, this is a neglect that needs to be corrected. Fethullah Gülen stands up for peace and for the prevention of any clash of civilisa- tions, not only through his speeches and writing, but through his actions as well. This paper examines the concept of peace building through Gülen’s writings and activities with refer- ence to the main sources of Islam and Gülen’s commentary on them. In focusing on Gülen’s activities, the paper emphasises certain American institutions, notably the Washington D.C. based Rumi Forum for Interfaith Dialogue (of which Gülen is the honorary president), and its contribution to peace-building through interfaith activities.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is promoting the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act, introduced in Congress in June 2020. An SIA press release describes the bill as “bipartisan legislation that would invest tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor manufacturing incentives and research initiatives over the next 5-10 years to strengthen and sustain American leadership in chip technology, which is essential to our country’s economy and national security.” On June 8, 2021, the Senate approved $52 billion for the CHIPS for America Act, dedicated to supporting the U.S. semiconductor industry over the next decade. As of this writing, the Act awaits approval in the House of Representatives. This paper highlights a curious paradox: Most of the SIA corporate members now lobbying for the CHIPS for America Act have squandered past support that the U.S. semiconductor industry has received from the U.S. government for decades by using their corporate cash to do buybacks to boost their own companies’ stock prices. Among the SIA corporate signatories of the letter to President Biden, the five largest stock repurchasers—Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom—did a combined $249 billion in buybacks over the decade 2011-2020, equal to 71 percent of their profits and almost five times the subsidies over the next decade for which the SIA is lobbying. In addition, among the members of the Semiconductors in America Coalition (SIAC), formed specifically in May 2021 to lobby Congress for the passage of the CHIPS for America Act, are Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google. These firms spent a combined $633 billion on buybacks during 2011-2020. That is about 12 times the government subsidies provided under the CHIPS for America Act to support semiconductor fabrication in the United States in the upcoming decade. If the Congress wants to achieve the legislation’s stated purpose of promoting major new investments in semiconductors, it needs to deal with this paradox. It could, for example, require the SIA and SIAC to extract pledges from its member corporations that they will cease doing stock buybacks as open-market repurchases over the next ten years. Such regulation could be a first step in rescinding Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b-18, which has since 1982 been a major cause of extreme income inequality and loss of global industrial competitiveness in the United States.