One Day for Democracy: Independence Day and the Americanization of Iron Range Immigrants

Review of: "One Day for Democracy: Independence Day and the Americanization of Iron Range Immigrants," by Mary Lou Nemanic

Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

How do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts

Female Institutional Directors on Boards and Firm Value

The aim of this research is to examine what impact female institutional directors on boards have on corporate performance. Previous research shows that institutional female directors cannot be considered as a homogeneous group since they represent investors who may or may not maintain business relations with the companies on whose corporate boards they sit. Thus, it is not only the effect of female institutional directors as a whole on firm value that has been analysed, but also the impact of pressure-resistant female directors, who represent institutional investors (investment, pension and mutual funds) that only invest in the company, and do not maintain a business relation with the firm. We hypothesize that there is a non-linear association, specifically quadratic, between institutional and pressure-resistant female directors on boards and corporate performance. Our results report that female institutional directors on boards enhance corporate performance, but when they reach a certain threshold on boards (11.72 %), firm value decreases. In line with female institutional directors, pressure-resistant female directors on boards also increase firm value, but only up to a certain figure (12.71 % on boards), above which they have a negative impact on firm performance. These findings are consistent with an inverted U-shaped relationship between female institutional directors and pressure-resistant female directors and firm performance

Review of \u3ci\u3e Come to Texas: Enticing Immigrants, 1865-1915\u3c/i\u3e By Barbara J. Rozek

Citizens in the southernmost reaches of the Great Plains, as Barbara J. Rozek demonstrates in her exhaustively researched study, strove to convince all able-bodied individuals from other states and Europe to Come to Texas. Rozek examines a fifty-year period, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War I, in which energetic Texans produced a stunning collection of almanacs, brochures, letters, newspapers, and pamphlets, trusting in the power of the written word to entice migration into the state. Committed Texans did this, she asserts, with a vigor, a persistence, and a creativity not always found in other states or United States territories. That the population of Texas increased 671 percent between 1860 and 1920 convinced many of those involved in the production of enticement literature that their efforts produced tangible results