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Transatlantic relations since World War II have been characterised by a military-power differential between the United States and Western Europe coupled with differences in foreign policy goals among the nations of the transatlantic alliance. Since the Cold War ended, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has struggled to identify a new role for itself, although the newly-independent nations of eastern Europe have looked to it as a shield against Russian territorial ambitions. Transatlantic relations have reached a nadir under the presidency of Donald Trump and, if he is elected to a second term as United States president on 3 November 2020, may continue their downward spiral. Should, however, Joe Biden become the next United States president, transatlantic relations and international governance norms and institutions can be expected to experience a recovery, though with some caveats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to a review of "The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, Volume 11: 1 May 1816-3 March 1817, with a Supplement, 1809-1815" edited by J. C. A. Stagg and others, in the May 2023 issue, is presented.

Examines the transfer of a selection of former U.S. President Richard Nixon prepresidential papers to the U.S. government, his attempts to take an illegal tax deduction for the move, and the role of archivists in bringing the matter to public attention. Reasons behind the conflict over Nixon's gift of prepresidential papers in 1969; Effect of a news story by "Washington Post" national correspondent Nick Kotz on the discovery of the deed at the U.S. National Archives; Benefits of the case for archivists.

Polarization and gridlock are defining characteristics of present-day American national politics, reflecting the interaction of the Madisonian system's checks and balances with the widening partisan and ideological divisions in the House and Senate. These divisions have coevolved with complimentary changes in electoral politics over the same period in a mutually reinforcing spiral. The partisan, ideological, and policy opinions of American voters have grown more internally consistent, more distinctive between parties, and more predictive of voting in national elections. Party loyalty has increased, ticket splitting has decreased, and winning congressional seats against the local partisan grain has become much more difficult. The congressional parties thus represent increasingly divergent electoral constituencies. Republicans enjoy a structural advantage in the distribution of their regular voters across House districts, so these changes have solidified their control of the House even as their national party grows less competitive nationally. Divided government and polarized politics thus rest on a firm electoral base, and partisan warfare in Washington is unlikely to diminish until voters begin to punish the warriors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the development of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) established by George W. Bush on February 6, 2007. AFRICOM was developed with the aim for peace and security for growing development challenges to education and health matters, economic growth and viable democratic institutions. In addition, AFRICOM remained under the supervision of the Central Command (CENTCOM) and had attained initial operating capability under European Command for operational unified command. African leaders have adapted the neo-imperialistic designs on the foreign policy options to checkmate the establishment of AFRICOM headquarters in Africa in order to relocate a full-fledged military command.

We examine the tone of the president's immigration policy speeches as a function of the political context, policy characteristics, and individual presidents in two ways. First, we describe the tone of the president's immigration rhetoric using DICTION software and its five global categories of tone. Second, we hypothesize that commonality and optimism, two categories of tone expressive of immigration policy, will co‐vary by political context, policy characteristics of immigration, and a president's approach to rhetoric. To test our expectations, we collected presidential mentions of immigration since 1953 from the Public Papers of the Presidents. Key variables, like the president's honeymoon and the post‐9/11 era, increase a president's commonality tone, and the president's approval ratings encourage greater optimism. Individual presidents also shape presidential rhetoric, indicating the importance of presidential style to immigration tone, especially for optimism. We conclude with implications of our work for the systematic study of presidential tone and the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the web site the Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, which can be found at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu:8080/pgwde, and the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799, which is available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html.

As President of the United States, Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel served to heighten tensions in the Middle East and instantly undermined his stated goal of bringing peace to the troubled region. This paper will argue that there are important lessons to be gained from the political process in Northern Ireland to help bolster a peace process in the Middle East. Through an analysis of Unionist politics pre- and post- the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the paper will argue that there is a need to not only encourage militants to make peace, but also to incentivise regional hegemons into meaningful negotiations. The paper will highlight the important role played by international hegemonic powers as they seek to create a Strategically Benefical Moment for all sides in the conflict as they seek to 'ripen' the conditions for peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can an individual impact a phenomenon as overwhelming and complex as war? Do leaders impact interstate war dynamics? Leaders high in grandiose narcissism focus their efforts on maintaining their inflated self-image during war by striving desperately for victory. While most leaders sacrifice their historical image for state interests, more narcissistic leaders only exit wars if they "win", or overcome threats to their self-image. Narcissists essentially ignore revealed information and create deadlock to avoid looking like losers. In other words, narcissistic leaders encourage us to look beyond traditional rationalist models of wartime dynamics. This paper analyzes United States' interstate war duration from 1897 to 2007 and finds support for the argument that more narcissistic United States presidents extend war duration. This paper also compares Eisenhower's handling of the Korean War and Nixon's handling of the Vietnam War as an illustrative probe of causal mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the morality of U.S. policy in the aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1999, using criteria for evaluating the morality of the U.S. president’s policy proposed by Joseph Nye (Joseph S. Nye Jr.). The aggression against FRY is controversial, particularly its a priori determined moral character and the designation of humanitarian intervention. Our main goal is to demonstrate the unsustainability of the assessment of the moral justification of the aggression precisely according to his criteria. Therefore, our hypothetical starting point is that if morality is present in the foreign policy of the U.S. president, the criteria by which Joseph Nye evaluates each president will also show whether the policy that is directly related to the aggression against FRY is also moral. After explaining the theoretical-methodological approach, and presenting the attitudes towards morality of the most important theories of international relations, the paper presents an analysis of the morality of aggression conducted on the basis of intentions, means, and consequences. In relation to this, we examined the deontological and consequentialist sustainability of the morality of aggression according to the proposed criteria and questions. It was concluded that there is no ethical justification for aggression, unless achieving political interests is valued as morally acceptable in the spirit of consequentialist ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gerald R. Ford was the 38th president of the United States. He was appointed as vice president by Richard Nixon in 1974 upon the resignation of Spiro T. Agnew. In the midst of the Watergate Crisis, Nixon resigned making Ford the only president to serve without being elected as either president or vice president. In the year 2000, 13 years after his abbreviated term in office, he was attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia where he developed pain in his tongue, slurring of his speech, and signs of a stroke. He was taken to the emergency room of Hahnemann University Hospital where a CT scan showed a posterior circulation stroke. Within 24 hours, all of Ford's symptoms improved except for his tongue pain and speech. An MRI of the head and neck showed a tongue mass and he was taken to the operating room where an abscess was found. The bacteriology confirmed actinomycosis of the tongue and Ford rapidly improved after the incision and drainage. This paper will review the clinical course of Gerald Ford's lingual actinomycosis and will discuss this rare condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1950, the President of the American Psychological Association emphasised the economic and political importance of creativity for US society. His account of creativity exhibits a number of tensions that can be identified in other psychologists' theories and conceptualisations of creativity. This paper considers the tensions from the perspective of critical discursive psychology. In the terms of that approach, the tensions derive from multiple non‐academic discourses around creativity, including popular discourses of creativity and art. The paper argues that conceptualisations of creativity from academic psychology have in turn entered wider discourses, invoked, for example, in recent celebrations of the global sector of the creative and cultural industries (CCI). The tensions within psychology's conceptualisations are significant, however, because they raise questions about the extent to which the psychology of creativity has a common reference and coheres around the study of a single phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 7, 1924, Calvin Coolidge Jr., son of Calvin Coolidge, the 30th U.S. president, died from blood poisoning. This paper explores how that death impaired the presidency of Coolidge. Self-blame, questions about God and theodicy, and severe depression significantly impaired his ability to perform presidential responsibilities. Worden's work on “historical antecedents” underpins this paper. To comprehend Coolidge's grief for Calvin, Worden asserted, one must explore his antecedent losses. (Coolidge's beloved mother died when he was 12; his only sister died when he was 17.) Coolidge poorly navigated four major deaths: mother, sister, son, and assumptive world. Coolidge's grief narrative offers insights for clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching architectural history with a commitment to social justice presents an epistemological challenge for two key reasons. First, the spatialization of social justice is irredeemably political, raising the question as to how to discuss politics in the classroom. Second, how does an educator articulate an ethical framework within which to situate histories of injustice and exclusion in the realm of knowledge production? By analyzing diverse public reactions to the controversial Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedman's Memorial) in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC during the social justice movements of 2020, this paper examines the politics of social justice through an exploration of the notion of "invisibility," a paradoxical condition that, as African American novelist Ralph Ellison suggests, can imply both a fantasy of empowerment and a tragedy of powerlessness. The Freedman's Memorial was erected in 1876 to commemorate United States President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which many American textbooks credit with "freeing the slaves." Set on a high pedestal, the monument depicts Lincoln as a towering savior and the unshackled man kneeling in front of him. Though sculptor Thomas Ball modeled the kneeling man after the formerly enslaved man Archer Alexander, the monument denies Alexander's personal history and his traumatic escape to freedom. It is Lincoln's heroism, and not that of formerly enslaved people like Alexander, that is disseminated through an entrenched web of hegemonic cultural consent. How does an educator discuss Alexander's invisibility in the context of this memorial to deepen the understanding of racial ideologies undergirding the institution of slavery in America? The paper argues that microhistory can serve as a powerful historiographic antidote to the dehumanizing effects of invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1967, Robert Bellah argued that America's "founding myth", what he called American civil religion, helps bind American society together by providing its citizens with a sense of origin, direction, and meaning. For evidence, Bellah primarily turned to the inaugural speeches of American presidents. This paper draws on semantic network analysis to empirically examine the inaugural addresses of Presidents Trump and Biden, looking for evidence of what some would consider aspects of American civil religion. As some believe American civil religion to be no more than a thinly veiled form of nationalism, it also considers the importance of words associated with nationalism. It finds that both Trump and Biden employed the language of nationalism and American civil religion in their respective addresses, and while it found no differences in their use of nationalist discourse, it did find that American civil religion figures more prominently in Biden's address than in Trump's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the US presidency literature widely examines how Congress limits executive power, recent discourse argues the public is the more effective restraint. This paper develops a theory explaining when inter-institutional relations and public constraints influence the alteration of unilateral directives. Both are important for curbing substantial policy changes that likely provoke congressional and public response. Using data on when executive orders are amended and revoked between 1955 and 2013 to measure policy shifts, I find orders are less likely to be altered under presidents facing oppositional or cohesive congresses and high public disapproval. Both types of constraints are strongest for large policy changes, that is, revocations or targeting ideologically distant orders. This study advances the unilateralism literature by examining interactions between multiple constraints and degrees of policy change, while also contributing to studies of policy duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 1847, a year after his graduation from Harvard College, Francis James Child, beloved Harvard professor, first president of the American Folklore Society, and perhaps the greatest ballad scholar of the nineteenth century, began what would become a twenty-year correspondence with his closest college friend and future brother-in-law, William Ellery Sedgwick. Based on this previously unknown cache of letters contained among the Sedgwick family papers deposited at the Massachusetts Historical Society, this essay will examine the first five years of Child's self-described "secret autobiography" for what it tells about the emotional experiences that shaped the man behind the ballads when he was a young, struggling academic trying to establish himself at Harvard, and not yet the patronym for traditional balladry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on correspondence, photographs and other documents related to the U.S. military career and presidency of Ulysses S. Grant which are being housed at Mitchell Memorial Library on the campus of Mississippi State University (MSU) in Starkville. Officials of MSU Libraries took delivery of almost 90 filing cabinets of original and photocopied manuscripts in December 2009. Civil War scholar John F. Marszalek is undertaking the roles of executive director and managing editor of the Ulysses S. Grant Association.

This paper has two purposes. First, it attempts to explore why the U.S. will not abandon South Korea despite the Trump Administration was reluctant to provide support to South Korea. Second, this paper illustrates the values of the U.S.-ROK alliance to the security on the Korean Peninsula and the U.S. presence in the "Indo-Pacific" region. To achieve these goals, this paper will extract four variables from Victor Cha's "Powerplay" theory. In this paper, the author argues that the U.S. will not abandon South Korea, no matter a Democratic or a Republican to be the U.S. president. It is because the U.S. still needs to prevent North Korea from provoking the U.S. and the U.S. relies on South Korea to ensure its presence in the "Indo-Pacific" region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of Jews from President Donald Trump's 2017 Holocaust Remembrance Day speech was not the first occasion Trump's relationship to anti-Semitism was brought up by the popular press, but this paper argues it is one example of many in the emergence of a new mode of presidential speech in the United States that I term "contumelious oratory." This paper analyzes several examples of the Trump's administration's rhetoric including tweets, press conferences, and public speeches. I read the Trump administration's briefness, strategic absences, metaphors, and hyperbolic statements as salient features of the new, contumelious oratorical mode. It is important to identify how this communication departs from traditional presidential speech of previous United States presidents, classify the techniques used, and grasp clearly the potential damage this type of speech can do. The Trump teams' contumelious oratory does not placate, it provokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, after a brief survey of the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem in ancient civilisations, we present eight historical proofs of this theorem in detail: the proofs of Euclid and Ptolemy, three proofs by Thabit ibn Qurra, the proof attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, U.S. president James A. Garfield’s proof, and Albert Einstein’s boyhood proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." The Executive Vesting Clause is one of three originalist pillars for the unitary executive theory, the idea that the President possesses executive powers like removal without congressional limitations (that is, the powers are indefeasible). An underlying assumption is that "vest" connotes a formalist approach to separation of powers rather than a more functional system of Madisonian checks and balances. Assumptions about "vesting" for official powers are likely the result of semantic drift from property rights and ahistoric projections back from the later Marshall Court doctrine of "vested rights." This Article offers a close textual reading of the word "vesting" and an examination of its eighteenth-century usage and context, with the first survey of available dictionaries (from 1637 to 1846), colonial charters and state constitutions, the Constitutional Convention, and Ratification debates. Dictionaries defined "vest" in terms of basic landed property rights, without reference to exclusivity or indefeasibility, and rarely with any reference to offices or powers. Other legal documents and digital collections of the Founders' papers indicate a range of usage, from "fully vested" to "simply vested" to "partly vested," so that the word "vesting" by itself would signify less completeness. Meanwhile, words used in the Constitution or by the Framers to convey exclusivity or indefeasibility (for example, "all," "exclusive," "sole," "alone," or "indefeasible") are missing from the Executive Vesting Clause. The ordinary meaning of "vesting" was most likely a simple grant of powers without signifying the impermissibility of legislative conditions such as good-cause requirements for removals, undermining the unitary theory's originalist basis. On the other hand, the "all" in the Legislative Vesting Clause may be more legally meaningful for nondelegation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]