Who Are We?; The Challenges to America's National Identity

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xvii, [1], 427, [1] pages. Notes. Index. Inscription on fep signed by "Sam". This was Huntington's last book. Its subject is the meaning of American national identity and the possible cultural threat posed to it by large-scale Latino immigration, which Huntington warns could "divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages". Huntington focused on an identity crisis as he examines the impact other civilizations and their values are having on our own country. America was founded by British settlers who brought with them a distinct culture, including the English language, values, individualism, and respect for law. The waves of immigrants that later came to the United States gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's culture. Our national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of primarily Hispanic immigrants and challenged by issues such as bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the "denationalization" of American elites. September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism and a renewal of American identity. Huntington argues the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans. Timely and thought-provoking, Who Are We? is an important book that is certain to shape our national conversation. Samuel Phillips Huntington (April 18, 1927 - December 24, 2008) was an American political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. During the Carter administration, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations", of a post-Cold War new world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to Western world domination. Huntington is credited with helping to shape U.S. views on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government. He was a member of Harvard's department of government from 1950 until he was denied tenure during 1959. Along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had also been denied tenure, he moved to Columbia University in New York. From 1959 to 1962 he was an associate professor of government at Columbia, where he was also deputy director of their Institute of War and Peace Studies. Huntington was invited to return to Harvard with tenure during 1963 and remained there until his death. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences during 1965. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel co-founded and co-edited Foreign Policy. Huntington stayed as co-editor until 1977.His first major book was The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), which was highly controversial when it was published, but presently is regarded as the most influential book on American civil-military relations. He became prominent with his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), a work that challenged the conventional opinion of modernization theorists, that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries.As a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and in an influential 1968 article in Foreign Affairs, he advocated the concentration of the rural population of South Vietnam, via a strategy of carpet-bombing and defoliating the rural lands and jungles of Vietnam, as a means of isolating the Viet Cong.If the "direct application of mechanical and conventional power" takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operate. The Maoist-inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution.He also was co-author of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission during 1976. In 1977, his friend Brzezinski - who had been appointed National Security Adviser in the administration of Jimmy Carter - invited him to become White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. He served in this position until the end of 1978.Huntington continued to teach undergraduates until his retirement in 2007.