Arabists: The Romance of an American EliteSimon and Schuster, 1995 M07 1 - 368 pages A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite. |
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... Lawrence (“of Arabia”), Harry “Abdullah” Philby, Wilfred Thesiger, and Gertrude Bell, who went native in the Arabian desert and around whom hovers a gust of fantasy and sexual perversion and nihilism. “I wanted colour and savagery ...
... Lawrence (“of Arabia”), Harry “Abdullah” Philby, Wilfred Thesiger, and Gertrude Bell, who went native in the Arabian desert and around whom hovers a gust of fantasy and sexual perversion and nihilism. “I wanted colour and savagery ...
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... Lawrence and women such as Gertrude Bell were in Araby as British government agents, and thus it was the mechanics of imperial power that primarily concerned them. While British Arabists were imperialists, American Arabists were ...
... Lawrence and women such as Gertrude Bell were in Araby as British government agents, and thus it was the mechanics of imperial power that primarily concerned them. While British Arabists were imperialists, American Arabists were ...
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... Lawrence's traveling gear was a twovolume set of Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles M. Doughty, the only Briton ever to have penetrated to the interior of western Arabia where Lawrence was headed. Lawrence had recently purchased the ...
... Lawrence's traveling gear was a twovolume set of Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles M. Doughty, the only Briton ever to have penetrated to the interior of western Arabia where Lawrence was headed. Lawrence had recently purchased the ...
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... Lawrence's Arab guide, and obviously Lawrence himself, was the room filled only with the “empty, eddyless wind of the desert,” a smell “in which mankind had no share or part.” That was the smell of nothing, the best smell of all. While ...
... Lawrence's Arab guide, and obviously Lawrence himself, was the room filled only with the “empty, eddyless wind of the desert,” a smell “in which mankind had no share or part.” That was the smell of nothing, the best smell of all. While ...
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... Lawrence went so far as to refer to Travels in Arabia Deserta as, simply, Doughty. Doughty's Arabia was the anvil and crucible through which the character of an Englishman might be tested and forged. It is a land of “cloudlike strange ...
... Lawrence went so far as to refer to Travels in Arabia Deserta as, simply, Doughty. Doughty's Arabia was the anvil and crucible through which the character of an Englishman might be tested and forged. It is a land of “cloudlike strange ...
Contents
Aggrieved Area Experts | |
Mugged by Reality | |
Horan of Arabia | |
Indiana Jones | |
Debacle | |
The Icy Eyes That Had Contemplated Nineveh | |
Cowering in a Dark Alley | |
Hostages to Idealism | |
Reality | |
Mr Foreign Service | |
Old Hands | |
Never a Dull Moment | |
Redemption | |
A New Species? | |
Bibliography | |
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Common terms and phrases
Akins American missionaries antiSemitism April Glaspie Arab country Arab nationalism Arab world ArabIsraeli Arabists Aviv Baghdad became Beirut Bill Stoltzfus Bliss British cables Cairo career Christian Cluverius colleagues College Congregationalist Coon Crane culture Custis Damascus David Department Department’s desert Doughty Eagleton Eastern Egypt Eli Smith expatriates Falashas Feisal Foreign Service French FSOs Glaspie’s going Hermann Eilts Hume Horan Iran Iraq Iraq’s Iraqi Islam Israel Israeli Jerry Weaver Jerusalem Jewish Jews Jidda Kelly Khartoum Killgore Kissinger Kissinger’s knew Kuwait language Lawrence Lawrence’s learn Arabic Lebanon lived Loy Henderson Maronites Mesopotamia Middle East military mission Moslem NEA assistant secretary never officer Operation Moses Palestine Palestinian Parker peace Philby political president Protestant Roy Atherton Sadat Saddam Saudi Arabia says Seelye’s Shiite Sisco SixDay Soviet Sterner Sudan Sudanese Syria Talcott Seelye U.S. ambassador U.S. diplomats U.S. embassy United University Veliotes Washington Western Wiley William Yemen