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American politics have become increasingly polarized in recent decades, not only ideologically but also geographically. The extent of that geographical polarization is explored at the county and SMSA scales for the presidential elections held between 1992 and 2016 and also, at the much finer, precinct, scale for the 2008, 2012 and 2016 elections. The patterns that emerge show that much of non-metropolitan USA has becoming increasingly dominated by Republican party candidates, whereas the large metropolitan central cities remain dominated by the Democrats. Within those metropolitan areas, change, especially at the 2016 contest, was largely confined to their suburban districts.

Artefacts from Latin America are popular on international art markets, however their supply is closely linked to heritage crimes such as looting, illegal excavations, and theft. This results in a wide and ongoing circulation of artefacts with illicit origins, despite Latin American states claiming ownership. Regulation and policy responses are continuously developed to address the opaque market structures and criminal networks facilitating this illicit trade in Latin America, with policing as the first line of defence against heritage crimes. Despite increasing research into the illicit trafficking of cultural artefacts in the region, specific strategies and interregional cooperation within heritage crime policing in Latin America has rarely been discussed. Therefore, we examine the policing, prevention, and legislation tactics in twelve Latin American countries as a state-by-state survey, and provide an overview of the current regional and international collaborations concerning the policing of heritage crime. We conclude that there is significant collaboration between Latin American countries, but that improvements could be made regarding the number of dedicated specialists within police and government agencies. This lack of economic resources and specialists within relevant agencies has been recorded in locations beyond Latin America, and we assert that this is the primary weakness in regional and global efforts to police heritage crimes.

From an obscure sector synonymous with mercenaryism, the private military and security industry has grown to become a significant complementing instrument in military operations. This rise has brought with it a considerable attention. Researchers have examined the role of private military and security companies in international relations as well as the history of these companies, and, above all, the legal implications of their use in the place of military organizations. As research progresses, a significant gap has become clear. Only a handful of studies have addressed the complex of issues associated with contractors' demographics and lived experience. This article sheds some light over this lacuna, examining contractors' demographics using descriptive statistics from an original data set of American and British contractors who died in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2016. The article augments our understanding of an important population of post-Fordist-contracted workforce, those peripheral workers supplementing military activity in high-risk occupations with uncertain long-term outcomes.

The French/Ojibwa lawyer, activist, and Office of Indian Affairs employee, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin (1863–1952), often receives mention in scholarly works on the Society of American Indians (SAI). Very few, however, have examined her contributions in detail. Only one article focusing exclusively on Baldwin has ever been published. Cathleen D. Cahill's flattering portrait depicts Baldwin as a devoted suffragette and leading SAI figure who, in her roles as cofounder and treasurer, promoted the cause of Indian rights and her own Ojibwa values concerning women's equality. Cahill explains Baldwin's sudden exit from the SAI as a result of attacks by male, anti-Indian Office "radicals" who condemned her as disloyal for holding a government post, such as Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai) and Philip Gordon (Ojibwa). Closer inspection of the SAI's conference proceedings and epistolary record reveals a very different story. In providing the first full account of Baldwin's involvement in intertribal activism, this essay counters Cahill's inaccurate interpretation of Baldwin's withdrawal from the society, and, more importantly, examines Baldwin's underreported, yet openly racist campaign among key SAI members to ban African Americans from the Indian Service. Baldwin's incendiary statements on race offers a point of departure for further study of how the Society of American Indians viewed African Americans during the Progressive era's intense segregation and prevailing social Darwinist theories of race.

This essay focuses on the Senecas of western New York and their transformation, resilience, and resistance in the early nineteenth century. Rooted in a hybrid economy and environmental practice, among the postcolonial threats they faced in the context of white territorial expansion, republican and capitalist ideology, was an emerging new instrumental view of property, a radically changing economy, and embryonic ideas about "conservation." Colonial expansion in the early American republic came at the expense of the Senecas and other Indians—or least that was the design. This expropriation has often been less visible because its story mostly is told from the perspective of (white) nationalism, democracy, and expanding opportunity embedded in the promise of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In addition, such colonialism in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth has often been masked by another emerging, "greenish" ideology, that of conservationism. Native (residual) rights, autonomy, and sovereignty could be ignored or overwhelmed by the supposedly objective, universal, scientific, and progressive demands that land and resources be conserved, not only from outsiders, but from Native people themselves. Thus, occurring at the expense of American Indians and environmental justice, conservation could be as exploitive and unjust as development.

The present contribution first describes the aggravated Middle Eastern power competition in the 21st century, thereby emphasizing two aspects: the concentration of participants in the regional power game to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran, including shifts in regional power distribution; and the recent trend of entanglement of the Israeli–Iranian conflict with that between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Second, it contributes to an explanation of these developments by discussing the explanatory power of approaches based on three paradigms: primordialism, rationalism, and social constructivism. It is shown that a rationalist school of thought – structural realism – does not perform perfectly but nonetheless does rather well in explaining the aggravated power competition in the Middle East and the entanglement of the rivalries of each of the two American allies with Iran. At the same time, it is shown that the best way of bridging some of the explanatory gaps of structural realism in the case of Middle Eastern power politics is to epistemologically embed insights from rationalist schools of thought in a setting of a positivist version of social constructivism. On this fundament, the article explores a Copenhagen School-inspired approach of securitization to better comprehend recent developments of aggravated Middle Eastern power conflicts.

In the early 1930s, many British politicians, journalists, and scientists were greatly alarmed by the feral exploits of a recently introduced North American furbearer that readily escaped confinement. The uncontainable muskrat precipitated Britain's first legislation to combat non-native invasive species (NIS), triggering a campaign of extermination that was successful within five years, representing a rare instance of mission accomplished in the global history of efforts to eliminate NIS. The short, but intensive, British chapter in the muskrat's history has attracted just one historian to date. Thirty years ago, John Sheail foregrounded alarm-raising scientists' efforts to engender political action and provided a detailed account of the Destructive Imported Animals Act's passage and provisions. Yet many questions remain. How do we explain the acute level of anxiety over the muskrat? How do we account for the surprising ease with which the species was wiped out? And why was there such a spectacular difference between projected and actual numbers at large? These matters will all be touched on, but the novel vantage point adopted is that of the frontier, as understood in the United States and Europe. This requires a broader geographical context than Sheail's, embracing the muskrat's homeland and continental Europe as well as a wider source base that extends beyond government records to embrace parliamentary debates, press coverage, and the reports of Bavarian experts that the British government recruited. This approach, the wider spatial setting, and these additional records drive the argument that the muskrat found a new frontier in Britain, where it operated as an unusual kind of creature of empire.

In this commentary, we engage and summarize existing practices for recruiting and retaining American Indian and Alaska Native students in postsecondary institutions in California. This commentary is the output of a two-day symposium, "Lighting a Path Forward: UC Land Grants, Public Memory, and Tovaangar," held at the University of California, Los Angeles in October of 2019. The symposium brought together campus and community leaders from across California to discuss the past, present and future of American Indian and Alaska Native student and community concerns, and provide intervening policy and practice recommendations. Participants included both American Indian and Alaska Native and non-Native individuals with a wealth of professional experience and employment in American Indian and Alaska Native education, from the California Community College, California State University and University of California systems. We jointly created a table of critical interventions in education, the justification for this, and potential strategies for implementation. Here, we summarize the discussion of participants from the American Indian and Alaska Native student retention and recruitment workshop to document recommends interventions for campus practitioners and leaders to serve as a guiding document for system and campus advocacy.

AbstractThe American debate over free trade and protectionism has taken many forms, but it is particularly instructive when it occurs within a single sector of the economy, pitting allied economic interests against each other. That occurred in the shipping industry in the 19th century when shippers and shipbuilders fought each other over trade‐related questions: subsidies for shipbuilding and reciprocal trade agreements with foreign nations. Shipbuilders wanted protection and subsidies; shippers wanted the freedom to make use of cheaper foreign vessels for trade and to develop trade agreements. We show how these opposing forces stymied each other and prevented the shipping industry from taking an active, unified role in national politics. These particular intra‐industry debates reveal broader divisions within the business community over the relationship between business and government under modern commercial capitalism.

AbstractThis article examines China's growing influence in Venezuela and other parts of Latin America as it seeks to secure a steady supply of cheap oil and new export markets. In recent years, China has offered loans to cash‐strapped nations in the region on better terms than those offered by the United States and other multilateral lending institutions. China's growing influence worries the United States and other global observers who fear the spread of anti‐democratic and anti‐capitalist views. China maintains that its only interest in the region is economic. The current political turmoil in Venezuela offers China the opportunity to assuage these fears by supporting the presidency of Juan Guiado.

The problems of undocumented youth in contemporary American immigrant fiction have been given a major focus, as political shifts and competing agendas fuel an ongoing national debate. Especially for young people who are on the brink of adulthood, their status as documented or undocumented results in inclusion in or exclusion from social, economic and political spheres, which affect their daily experiences and influence their plans for the future. This paper will explore the ways in which illegal status informs, impacts, and shapes the protagonists' identity. The concept of undocumented status is used in my paper as an analytical lens through which the novels are read. My choice of the comingof- age genre reflects the importance of adolescence as a crucial period in the formation of a person's identity. I argue that young adult fiction with undocumented protagonists on the one hand gives voice to those who are silenced and forced to live on the margins of American society, and on the other hand familiarizes native-born Americans with the social struggles that might be distant from their own experiences but offer alternative ways of looking at the world. The narratives about "Dreamers" are part of a broader political discourse on the U.S. immigration. By exploring the relationship between fiction and the dominant legal system, they signal current social issues and offer a critique of exclusionary practices of American law and society.

The United States had developed trade relations with the Dutch East Indies before World War I. In the 1920s, American diplomatic services prepared reports on the economic and political situation in the Dutch colony. The U.S. wanted to defend their interests in the region. In 1949, after several years of attempts to regain power in Indonesia, the Dutch withdrew in the absence of American support. A decade later, suchlike events occurred in connection with Dutch New Guinea.

In his book, Paul Berman outlines a productive framework for a further interpretation of ideas of the leftist thinkers in North America and Europe. This article tries to follow Berman's approach and to provide a critical stance towards the views of a number of Western social and political philosophers who write after 1968 and even after 1989. My findings confirm Berman's light irony to this trend of thought but emphasize that some of the works discussed seem to be realistic in avoiding unjustified optimism concerning the leftist position.

Partly as a result of compartmentalized academic specializations and history teaching, in accounts of the global upheavals of 1968, Native Americans are either not mentioned, or at best are tagged on as an afterthought. "Was there a Native American 1968?" is the central question this article aims to answer. Native American activism in the 1960s was no less flashy, dramatic or confrontational than the protests by the era's other struggles – it is simply overshadowed by later actions of the movement. Using approaches from Transnational American Studies and the history of social movements, this article argues that American Indians had a "long 1968" that originated in Native America's responses to the US government's Termination policy in the 1950s, and stretched from their 'training' period in the 1960s, through their dramatic protests from the late 1960s through the 1970s, all the way to their participation at the United Nations from 1977 through the rest of the Cold War. While their radicalism and protest strategies made Native American activism a part of the US domestic social movements of the long 1960s, the nature of American Indian sovereignty rights and transnationalism place the Native American long 1968 on the rights spectrum further away from civil rights, and closer to a national liberation struggle—which links American Indian activism to the decolonization movements of the Cold War.

A book review of: Wai Chee Dimock, et. al., editors, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler. Columbia UP, 2017.