Coinciding with the centennial of the Pan American Union (now the Organization of American States), González explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. architects and their clients built a visionary Pan-America to promote commerce and cultural exchange between United States and Latin America.
Late in the nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and political interests began eyeing the countries of Latin America as plantations, farms, and mines to be accessed by new shipping lines and railroads. As their desire to dominate commerce and trade in the Western Hemisphere grew, these U.S. interests promoted the concept of "Pan-Americanism" to link the United States and Latin America and called on U.S. architects to help set the stage for Pan-Americanism's development. Through international expositions, monuments, and institution building, U.S. architects translated the concept of a united Pan-American sensibility into architectural or built form. In the process, they also constructed an artificial ideological identity—a fictional Pan-America peopled with imaginary Pan-American citizens, the hemispheric loyalists who would support these projects and who were the presumed benefactors of this presumed architecture of unification.
Designing Pan-America presents the first examination of the architectural expressions of Pan-Americanism. Concentrating on U.S. architects and their clients, Robert Alexander González demonstrates how they proposed designs reflecting U.S. presumptions and projections about the relationship between the United States and Latin America. This forgotten chapter of American architecture unfolds over the course of a number of international expositions, ranging from the North, Central, and South American Exposition of 1885–1886 in New Orleans to Miami's unrealized Interama fair and San Antonio's HemisFair '68 and encompassing the Pan American Union headquarters building in Washington, D.C. and the creation of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic.
Murphy juxtaposes close readings of novels with analyses of nonfiction texts. From uncovering the literary inspirations for the Monroe Doctrine itself to tracing visions of hemispheric unity and transatlantic separation in novels by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis, she reveals the Doctrine’s forgotten cultural history. In making a vital contribution to the effort to move American Studies beyond its limited focus on the United States, Murphy questions recent proposals to reframe the discipline in hemispheric terms. She warns that to do so risks replicating the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary claim to isolate the Americas from the rest of the world.
The Monroe Doctrine, "dollar diplomacy," the policy of the Good Neighbor—these well-known terms indicate the spectrum of the United States's relationships with its neighbors of the Western Hemisphere. Hemisphere thinking in the "Yankee" nation, founded on economic, political, and strategic needs, has come to encompass an appreciation of social and intellectual aspects as a vital part of a unified international unit.
In The Western Hemisphere: Its Influence on United States Policies to the End of World War II, Wilfrid Hardy Callcott traces the rise of this awareness of the essential unity of the Western Hemisphere in international affairs. Although Callcott concentrates on the United States, he discusses all hemisphere countries, and his inclusion of Canada adds an additional dimension to previous studies on the subject.
From the early days of the Republic to the end of World War I, the relations of the United Stales with its neighbors gradually developed from mere curiosity and from on-the-spot decision-making into policy. During the eighteenth century the persons entrusted with United States foreign policy pressed forward with their own country's westward expansion, while they expressed only an academic interest in the affairs of other Western Hemisphere nations from Canada to Brazil.
By the end of the nineteenth century the United States had enthusiastically joined the imperialist nations. Although it soon replaced the use of force with economic controls, its military and economic manipulations naturally generated more fear and antagonism in the neighboring nations than cooperation and sympathy.
After World War I, attention to the hemisphere was fostered by the need for strategic raw materials that were to be found from Canada to South America, and by Old World rivalries and needs that endangered New World interests. Canadian and Latin American views of Europe and the League of Nations became much like those of the United States. The new conditions that arose called forth the Good Neighbor policy to combine economic and strategic values in a complex program that included intellectual, social, and cultural elements. World War II accentuated the new consciousness and compelled recognition of the significance of hemisphere relationships in all of the New World nations.
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