The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force -- not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.

“America First” is “America Alone” Foreign policy is like physics: vacuums quickly fill. As the United States retreats from the international order it helped put in place and maintain since the end of World War II, Russia is rapidly filling the vacuum. Federiga Bindi’s new book assesses the consequences of this retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, showing how the current path of US foreign policy is leading to isolation and a sharp decrease of US influence in international relations. Transatlantic relations reached a peak under President Barack Obama. But under the Trump administration, withdrawal from the global stage has caused irreparable damage to the transatlantic partnership and has propelled Europeans to act more independently. Europe and America explores this tumultuous path by examining the foreign policy of the United States, Russia, and the major European Union member states. The book highlights the consequences of US retreat for transatlantic relations and Europe, demonstrating that “America first” is becoming “America alone,” perhaps marking the end of transatlantic relations as we know it, with Europe no longer beholden to the US national interest.

A quiet revolution has been occurring in post-World War II Europe. A world power has emerged across the Atlantic that is recrafting the rules for how a modern society should provide economic security, environmental sustainability, and global stability. In Europe's Promise, Steven Hill explains Europe's bold new vision. For a decade Hill traveled widely to understand this uniquely European way of life. He shatters myths and shows how Europe's leadership manifests in five major areas: economic strength, with Europe now the world's wealthiest trading bloc, nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined; the best health care and other workfare supports for families and individuals; widespread use of renewable energy technologies and conservation; the world's most advanced democracies; and regional networks of trade, foreign aid, and investment that link one-third of the world to the European Union. Europe's Promise masterfully conveys how Europe has taken the lead in this make-or-break century challenged by a worldwide economic crisis and global warming.

According to mainstream discourse of the Cold War, post-1945 Western Europe was essentially a homogeneous historical space fully integrated into modern industrial society. But as Southern Europe? makes clear, Western European societies were in fact divided by deep political and economic inequalities. While nations in the north embodied consolidated democracies, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were at times all authoritarian regimes. Deeply afflicted with underdevelopment, these countries were cut off from the "economic miracles" other Western European states were experiencing. With its weak democracy, Italy held a contradictory position between the struggles of the Iberian and Greek peninsulas and the progress of its neighbors beyond the Alps. Now, old inequalities long believed to be things of the past have resurfaced, and a new debt crisis appears to be splitting the continent apart along historic lines. This book raises the important question of whether studying the geopolitics and social history of southern Europe might be a valuable analytical tool for understanding these contemporary financial catastrophes.

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

This book explores the linkages between Southern Europe and South America in the post-World War II period, through organized migration and development policies. In the post-war period, regulated migration was widely considered in the West as a route to development and modernization. Southern European and Latin American countries shared this hegemonic view and adopted similar policies, strategies, and patterns, which also served to promote their integration into the Western bloc. This book showcases how overpopulated Southern European countries viewed emigration as a solution for high unemployment and poverty, whereas huge and underpopulated South American developing countries such as Brazil and Argentina looked at skilled European immigrants as a solution to their deficiencies in qualified human resources. By investigating the transnational dynamics, range, and limitations of the ensuing migration flows between Southern Europe and Southern America during the 1950s and 1960s, this book sheds light on post-World War II migration-development nexus strategies and their impact in the peripheral areas of the Western bloc. Whereas many migration studies focus on single countries, the impressive scope of this book will make it an invaluable resource for researchers of the history of migration, development, international relations, as well as Southern Europe and South America. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

"Compares plans and planning framework of 5 U.S. states (Oregon, California, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey) and 5 European nation-states (The Netherlands, Denmark, France, U.K., and Ireland) that took innovative approaches to land use and spatial planning, particularly at the supralocal level. Based on a 2012 symposium"--