To Support and Defend the Constitution of the United States against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: Four Types of Attorneys General and Wartime Stress

War exacerbates the usual tensions between individual freedoms and national security. In such times, the United States frequently sacrifices its tradition of individual autonomy and deliberative debate for the security and unanimity of an autocratic, military-style government. Individual rights are often the first casualties of hastily enacted legal measures that expand executive power without regard to constitutional checks and balances. While the expansions have generated criticism and calls for greater government accountability, it is often difficult to determine who within the executive should be held accountable. As the President’s chief law enforcement officer, the Attorney General of the United States interprets and implements these legal measures. Yet, in the oath of office, the Attorney General promises, “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Consequently, the Attorney General’s actions have often been linked to the expansion of executive power at the expense of civil liberties

Making it digital : scholarly issues and challenges [videorecording]

Moderator Berkeley Hudson briefly introduces the panel speakers who proceed to illustrate some of the problems with digital archiving and preservation encountered in their scholarly research

Music version versus vocals-only: Islamic pop music, aesthetics, and ethics

This article analyzes vocals-only Islamic pop music as a musical genre and mode of production. The aim is to present and discuss this particular form in relation both to its history as an Islamic phenomenon and, more broadly, to consumer society aesthetics. The article focuses on songs from the Islamic media company Awakening and its highly successful output of Islamic pop music, sketching the genealogy of vocals-only music in Islam before analyzing the recordings of songs both in “music versions” and vocals-only. It is then argued that, in spite of its signals of nonconformist, conservative Islamic ideals, the vocals-only phenomenon is very much a part of global consumer culture, in both its aesthetic qualities and its productio

White House publicity operations during the Korean War, June 1950 – June 1951

Truman was the first modern president to face the challenge of selling a limited war. Based on a wide range of primary sources, this article explores the impact that the Korean War had on Truman’s publicity operations. Whereas all wars place important new demands on presidents to speak out more frequently and forcefully, limited wars place significant constraints on what presidents can say and do. During the Korean War, Truman refused to go public at key moments, often employed rhetoric that was more restrained than at earlier moments of the Cold War, and shied away from creating new structures to coordinate the official message. Such actions also had important consequences. In 1950-51, they hampered the task of effective presidential communication, and contributed to the war’s growing unpopularity. For the longer term, they demonstrated the difficulties of selling a limited war, and hence place into sharper context the problems that beset Truman’s successors during the subsequent conflict in Vietnam