Stephen G. Rabe

John F. Kennedy and Latin America: The “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable Record” (Almost)

U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 10, Cuba, 1961-1962 U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 12, American Republics, 1961-1963

Brazilian Propaganda: Legitimizing an Authoritarian Regime by Nina Schneider (review)

ways São Paulo seemed to be a microcosm of what happened later in Brazil, in that it early recognized that public health could not be the responsibility of the individual municipalities, but had to be organized on the state level. Despite the state’s extreme federalism, São Paulo politicians ultimately realized São Paulo had to cooperate with nationwide efforts, especially in combatting rural endemic and epidemic disease, to reduce the negative effects of disease from other states. But, as Hochman shows, a condition of São Paulo’s participation was that it was not mandatory.

A Review of “Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations”

commercial techniques (141). By 1960, eighty-five percent of TV commercials used music to transform listeners into purchasers. Eighty percent of Americans, surveyed in 2007, could list the ingredients of a Big Mac, which had also become the lyrics of a jingle broadcast incessantly at the ears of a people (224). While employing music to manage the moods of potential customers, advertisers realized that the sounds associated with it could give a commodity what commercial composer Mitch Leigh called “emotional memorability” (110). Increasingly sophisticated “conceptualizations of affect” (115) through sound could tie products to the emotions that motivated consumers to spend, and the advertising and music industries became inseparable. In 1984, by airing Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” in its commercials, Sprint increased calls by twentyfive percent in three days. In 1987, when Nike bought the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell tennis shoes, the song became the sales pitch. The continuing comingling of music, video, and marketing during the twenty-first century and mass consumption of “advertainment” that constitutes much of contemporary life has given the advertising industry, in Thomas’s estimation, unprecedented “influence over the making of popular culture” (217). Because historians tend to depend on a text-bound logocentric methodology that privileges visual symbols and the written remains of our yesterdays over anything auditory, this dimension of the American past has gone largely unexplored. Taylor’s book begins to chart that terrain. The author overcomes a major methodological limitation of scholarly writing about auditory evidence by providing a brilliant chronological anthology of dozens of musical examples ranging from “Under the Anheuser Bush” in 1904 to the winning remix of the McDonald’s theme song in 2008, accessible in an online (www.soundsofcapitalism.com) analytical fusion of musicology and history that allows the reader to be a listener as well, analyzing the data base along with the author. This study will interest students of history, musicology, American folkways, marketing, and consumer culture.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (review)

The revolution though, with the subsequent influx of African-born slaves, made this negotiation more difficult. This research goes far beyond the typical debate on the history of agriculture in the United States. It also expands the directions into which the study of culture as related to technology and environment can now branch, bringing up new elements of discussion in the field of domination, and enriching the ongoing discussion on creolization. As such, this book will invigorate debates outside the world of geography and take a significant place in the annals of the history and anthropology on the Atlantic world.

American Trade and Power in the 1960s.

Drawing from a wide array of previously untapped sources, Thomas Zeiler examines United States foreign trade policy in the 1960s. His study probes the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies as they faced the rise of what was then the six-nation European Economic Community and Japan as trade rivals. Trade policy was influenced by five sources: the international environment, the government, American society, the economy, and individual decisionmakers. These five levels are used to examine the motives, aims, policymaking process, and results of U.S. trade programmes during the Kennedy-Johnson years. The in-depth historical analysis is a way toward understanding the reasons for the nations policies toward its rivals, and Americas subsequent decline in world power and predominance in international trade by the end of the decade.