!±8± Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Greg Grandin

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Post Date : Mar 02, 2012 12:40:27 | N/A

In 1927, Henry Ford, then the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square mile-tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he was going to build a rubber plantation. But Ford wanted more than just rubber. To the unkempt rainforest he would bring order, efficiency and productivity - the principles of mass production. And across the United States, small-town America was giving way to consumerism and crass, brash new society. Ford wanted to create an America in his own image - Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. But Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins. Greg Grandin tells the powerful fable of the pride and arrogance of the man who thought he alone could tame the Amazon. It is the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature; it is the struggle too within Ford himself, the man who despised the new America that he himself had set in motion, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, "Fordlandia" portrays a man suffering under the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State

!±8± Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State

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Post Date : Feb 22, 2012 21:17:03 | Usually ships in 24 hours

Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State

At the end of the nineteenth century the United States swiftly occupied a string of small islands dotting the Caribbean and Western Pacific, from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Hawaii and the Philippines. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State reveals how this experiment in direct territorial rule subtly but profoundly shaped U.S. policy and practice—both abroad and, crucially, at home. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, the essays in this volume show how the challenge of ruling such far-flung territories strained the U.S. state to its limits, creating both the need and the opportunity for bold social experiments not yet possible within the United States itself. Plunging Washington’s rudimentary bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and imperial rivalry, colonialism was a crucible of change in American statecraft. From an expansion of the federal government to the creation of agile public-private networks for more effective global governance, U.S. empire produced far-reaching innovations.
Moving well beyond theory, this volume takes the next step, adding a fine-grained, empirical texture to the study of U.S. imperialism by analyzing its specific consequences. Across a broad range of institutions—policing and prisons, education, race relations, public health, law, the military, and environmental management—this formative experience left a lasting institutional imprint. With each essay distilling years, sometimes decades, of scholarship into a concise argument, Colonial Crucible reveals the roots of a legacy evident, most recently, in Washington’s misadventures in the Middle East.