Results by title

Archival literature is full of what we do and how we do it. In Archival Virtue, Scott Cline raises questions that grapple with the meaning of what we do and, perhaps more important, who we are. A book about archivists as individuals and as community, Archival Virtue explores ideas of moral commitment, truth, difference, and just behavior in the pursuit of archival ideals.

The relationship of history, archival studies, and the emergent information disciplines continues to be a topic of debate in the modern archival profession. Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981) is the quintessential proponent of archival knowledge based on historical scholarship, and his writings remain prescient decades after his death, writes Richard J. Cox in his excellent introduction. The 12 essays collected for the first time in a single volume cover the range of Cappon's primary interests: archival theory, archival collecting and appraisal, the relationship between archivists and historians or archives and history, and documentary editing. These essays, which reflect Cappon's considerable soul searching about the knowledge and identity of the archivist, and his own strong sense of history and archives, continue to be relevant today and make an important contribution to the professional discourse.

United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903 is a collection of essays that provide an in-depth analysis of the developing relationship between the Americas during the critical period from the Mexican War to the Panama Canal treaty of 1903.

During the second half of the 19th century several forces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe converged to set the stage for the establishment of a more permanent relationship between the United States and Latin America. The key factors--security, economics, and modernization--created both commonalities and conflicts between and among regions. In this volume, scholars examine not only the domestic but also the geopolitical forces that encouraged and guided development of diplomatic relations in this rapidly changing period.

As the contributors note, by the end of the century, economic interests dominated the relationship that eventually developed. This period saw the building of a string of U.S. naval bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rapid industrialization of the United States and the development of a substantial export market, the entrance of many U.S. entrepreneurs into Latin American countries, and the first two inter-American conferences. By the century's end, the United States appeared as the dominant partner in the relationship, a perception that earned it the "imperialist" label.

This volume untangles this complex relationship by examining U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States and the individual Latin American countries.

A companion volume to United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations, edited by T. Ray Shurbutt, this book establishes a historical perspective crucial to understanding contemporary diplomatic relations.

 

A Scholarly Exploration of How Relationships Shape Moral Understanding.

Whenever Two or More Are Gathered focuses on the critical role of ethics and moral responsibility in the field of public administration. Michael M. Harmon and O. C. McSwite posit that administrative ethics, as presently conceived and practiced, is largely a failure, incapable of delivering on its original promise of effectively regulating official conduct in order to promote the public interest. They argue that administrative ethics is compromised at its very foundations by two core assumptions: that human beings act rationally and that language is capable of conveying clear, stable, and unambiguous principles of ethical conduct.

The result is the illusion that values, principles, and rules of ethical conduct can be specified in workably clear ways, in particular, through their formalization in official codes of ethics; that people are capable of comprehending and responding to them as they are intended; and that the rewards and punishments attached to them will be effective in structuring daily behavior.

In a series of essays that draw on both fiction and film, as well as the disciplines of pragmatism, organizational theory, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, and economics, Harmon and McSwite make their case for human relationship as the proper foundation of administrative ethics. “Exercising responsible ethical practice requires attaining a special kind of relationship with other people. Relationship is how the pure freedom that resides in the human psyche—for ethical choice, creativity, or original action of any type—can be brought into the structured world of human social relations without damaging or destroying it.” Furthermore, they make the case for dropping the term “ethics” in favor of the term “responsibility,” as “responsibility accentuates the social [relational] nature of moral action.”