by John Bigelow Jr.
The major land campaign of the Spanish-American War of 1898 was the American battle with Spain for the Cuban city of Santiago. Painfully aware of the mistakes made and lives needlessly lost, John Bigelow, Jr, who served as the Captain in the U.S. Calvary, wrote:
“The enlisting, organizing, drilling, and equipping of an army of over two hundred and fifty thousand men, the transportation of about twenty thousand of them to a theatre of war a thousand miles or more distant, and from a temperate to a tropical climate, on less than one month’s notice for preparation, involved endless confusion and an almost total disregard of the rules and precautions of scientific warfare. In this narration I have not sought to give undue prominence to, still less to disguise, any of the consequences of this want of preparation. On the contrary, if what I have to report can have any value, professionally or otherwise, and I hope it will be found to have some, it must consist mainly in the frank disclosure of everything that fell under my personal observation, the recurrence of which our Government in the future should strive to avoid.”
Military historians will find this an unusually candid account of a war that too often is described as an unmitigated success.
s como en las retoricas literarias, las expresiones artisticas, el marketing turistico y en los proyectos politicos. Pero el nacionalismo contemporaneo se ha transformado tanto como el sistema internacional y como las propias sociedades en su interior. A veces, como una respuesta al nuevo orden internacional, y otras como una propuesta para crear un nuevo orden internacional. Precisamente el objetivo de este libro es plantear los nuevos horizontes del discurso sobre el nacionalismo en la actualidad. Las naciones que componen los BRICS (Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudafrica) son los estudios de caso ideales para analizar las transformaciones del nacionalismo a la luz del rol de estas naciones que se asumen como los nuevos protagonistas del siglo XXI. Los capitulos del libro, ademas, fueron escritos por academicos latinoamericanos y suponen una mirada refrescante y propositiva al fenomeno del nacionalismo contemporaneo.
masonry has often proposed that it “does not do politics.” That will surprise historians of Mexico who have to explain that the country’s first civil war was between York and Scottish Rite Masons, or students of American political parties who note that the first organized political party was the Anti-Masonic. A comprehensive article on the Mormon religious movement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints, provides another example in these pages of the relevance of Masonry to broader issues. In sum then, an effort to wall off ritualistic fraternalism from broader social and geopolitical issues is doomed. Like other recent viewpoints such as gender studies and racial studies, ritual studies are an important help to our understanding of the world, not a footnote.
Westphalia Press 