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This book examines how Syngman Rhee and the Korean independence movement used the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to lobby the U.S. government and the American public for support between 1905 and 1945. Alleging that Theodore Roosevelt violated the 1882 Korean-American Treaty when he tacitly supported the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1905, Rhee argued that Germany was not the only nation guilty of regarding treaties as “mere scraps of paper” and exhorted Americans to right this historical wrong by supporting Korean independence. He argued that doing so would prove Americans were the exceptional people many of them believed themselves to be. Rhee’s message gained credibility, not only because the concept of American exceptionalism resonated with Americans, but also because at various junctures certain Americans found the Korean cause useful. During the fight over the Versailles Treaty, the so-called Irreconcilable senators used the Korean issue to criticize President Wilson and to deflect the charge that they were isolationists. During the denouement of World War II, anticommunist politicians and civic organizations argued that Korea must not be abandoned to communism and that the United States’ treatment of Korea would be a test of American resolve in establishing a new rules-based order. The publicity Korea received from these and other episodes transformed Korea into an issue that could not be ignored in the postwar period. The irony and tragedy of Rhee’s efforts is that not only did they fail to regain Korea’s independence, but they directly contributed to the decision to divide Korea—an outcome he never foresaw or supported.

Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962–1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith—at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught fire. Who was the Catholic woman for a new era? Henold uncovers a vast archive of writing, both intimate and public facing, by hundreds of rank-and-file American laywomen active in national laywomen’s groups, including the National Council of Catholic Women, the Catholic Daughters of America, and the Daughters of Isabella. These records evoke a formative period when laywomen played publicly with a surprising variety of ideas about their own position in the Catholic Church. While marginalized near the bottom of the church hierarchy, laywomen quietly but purposefully engaged both their religious and gender roles as changing circumstances called them into question. Some eventually chose feminism while others rejected it, but most, Henold says, crafted a middle position: even conservative, nonfeminist laywomen came to reject the idea that the church could adapt to the modern world while keeping women’s status frozen in amber.

The racial ideology of colorblindness has a long history. In 1963, Martin Luther King famously stated, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." However, in the decades after the civil rights movement, the ideology of colorblindness co-opted the language of the civil rights era in order to reinvent white supremacy, fuel the rise of neoliberalism, and dismantle the civil rights movement’s legal victories without offending political decorum. Yet, the spread of colorblindness could not merely happen through political speeches, newspapers, or books. The key, Justin Gomer contends, was film--as race-conscious language was expelled from public discourse, Hollywood provided the visual medium necessary to dramatize an anti–civil rights agenda over the course of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.In blockbusters like Dirty Harry, Rocky, and Dangerous Minds, filmmakers capitalized upon the volatile racial, social, and economic struggles in the decades after the civil rights movement, shoring up a powerful, bipartisan ideology that would be wielded against race-conscious policy, the memory of black freedom struggles, and core aspects of the liberal state itself.

This book traces the efforts of a dedicated community of experts to create a policy bureaucracy that reigned until Richard Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan in 1969. Although they toiled in relative obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war on the American political establishment, creating policies that challenged the unscientific prejudices that ruled DC politics. The Experts’ War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social data that these social scientists employed in their day-to-day work. Huret argues that this internal “war” at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War undermined and fractured the institutional system officially intended ending poverty. What developed instead, he writes, was a group that was determined to fight poverty in ways that the federal government was unable to pursue by promoting radical policies and a more progressive government role and sweeping reforms. The Expert’s War on Poverty closely examines the intellectual, social, and political dimensions of this community of experts and social scientists and how they shaped American policy in the Cold War era.