Brazinsky explains why South Korea was one of the few postcolonial nations that achieved rapid economic development and democratization by the end of the twentieth century. He contends that a distinctive combination of American initiatives and Korean agency enabled South Korea's stunning transformation. Expanding the framework of traditional diplomatic history, Brazinsky examines not only state-to-state relations, but also the social and cultural interactions between Americans and South Koreans. He shows how Koreans adapted, resisted, and transformed American influence and promoted socioeconomic change that suited their own aspirations. Ultimately, Brazinsky argues, Koreans' capacity to tailor American institutions and ideas to their own purposes was the most important factor in the making of a democratic South Korea.

[This text discusses] South Carolina's role in the building of the United States. -- A word to the student.

For years, the so-called better-war school of thought has argued that the United States built a legitimate and viable non-Communist state in South Vietnam in the latter years of the Vietnam War and that it was only the military abandonment of this state that brought down the Republic of Vietnam. But Andrew J. Gawthorpe, through a detailed and incisive analysis, shows that, in fact, the United States failed in its efforts at nation building and had not established a durable state in South Vietnam. Drawing on newly opened archival collections and previously unexamined oral histories with dozens of U.S. military officers and government officials, To Build as Well as Destroy demonstrates that the United States never came close to achieving victory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gawthorpe tells a story of policy aspirations and practical failures that stretches from Washington, D.C., to the Vietnamese villages in which the United States implemented its nationbuilding strategy through the Office of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support known as CORDS. Structural factors that could not have been overcome by the further application of military power thwarted U.S. efforts to build a viable set of non-Communist political, economic, and social institutions in South Vietnam. To Build as Well as Destroy provides the most comprehensive account yet of the largest and best-resourced nation-building program in U.S. history. Gawthorpe's analysis helps contemporary policy makers, diplomats, and military officers understand the reasons for this failure. At a moment in time when American strategists are grappling with military and political challenges in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, revisiting the historical lessons of Vietnam is a worthy endeavor.

In 1900 there was a general agreement among Southerners on the need for a comprehensive history of the Southern states. It had been and was a nation, sharing beliefs, traditions, and culture. This series, originally published in 1909, is a record of the South's part in the making of the American nation. It portrays the character, the genius, the achievements, and the progress in the life of the Southern people. This is a wide-ranging study of the intellectual life of the South involving oratory, poetry, folklore, and the inestimable wit of the Big Bear School. Founded by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in Georgia, it spread to every part of the South and was the most vigorous and humorous of the nation. The South was active in the sciences. In medicine, the contributions were especially strong, with many firsts, including the discovery of anesthesia by Carford Long in Georgia and the pioneering vascular work of Dr. Rudolph Matas of New Orleans. From his work sprang Alton Ochsner and Michael Debakey, culminating in cardiac bypass and transplant surgery of the present day. The twenty-five chapters cover almost every aspect of intellectual endeavor, including mathematics, journalism, and the law.

In 1900, there was a general agreement among Southerners on the need for a comprehensive history of the Southern states. It had been and was a nation, sharing beliefs, traditions, and culture. This series, originally published in 1909, is a record of the South's part in the making of the American nation. It portrays the character, the genius, the achievements, and the progress in the life of the Southern people. The South, being a predominately Celtic society, excelled in oratory, and the speeches were always able to stir the crowd. This volume opens with a history of oratory, beginning with the colonial period. This volume features examples from the speeches of Patrick Henry, Luther Martin, Henry Clay, William Pinkney, Hugh S. Legarï¿1/2, John C. Calhoun, William Lowndes Yancey, Robert Y. Hayne, and many others. Even the famous evangelist Sam Jones is included. Given the influence of these spellbinders, it is easy to understand the rise of the great Southern writers and storytellers of modern times.

Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government's retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War, its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development.

This book examines the history of nation-building during the era of decolonization and the Cold War, and on the more recent post-Cold War and post-9/11 pursuit of nation-building in what have become known as ‘collapsed’ or ‘failed’ states. In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 era nation-building, or what is increasingly termed state-building, has taken on renewed salience, making it more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in historical perspective. Focusing on both historical and contemporary examples, the contributors explore a number of important themes that relate to ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ nation-building efforts from South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century. From Nation-Building to State-Building was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly and will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics and peace studies.

Nation-building imperatives compel citizens to focus on what makes them similar and what binds them together, forgetting what makes them different. Democratic institution building, on the other hand, requires fostering opposition through conducting multiparty elections and encouraging debate. Leaders of democratic factions, like parties or interest groups, can consolidate their power by emphasizing difference. But when held in tension, these two impulses—toward remembering difference and forgetting it, between focusing on unity and encouraging division—are mutually constitutive of sustainable democracy. ​Based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2012–13, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa explores various themes of nation- and democracy-building, including the emotional and banal content of symbols of the post-apartheid state, the ways that gender and race condition nascent nationalism, the public performance of nationalism and other group-based identities, integration and sharing of space, language diversity, and the role of democratic functioning including party politics and modes of opposition. Each of these thematic chapters aims to explicate a feature of the multifaceted nature of identity-building, and link the South African case to broader literatures on both nationalism and democracy.

Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a "nation" under construction.