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. |
From inside the book
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... East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East is the finest general study available about American missionaries in the Levant. Leo J. Bocage's The Public Career of Charles R. Crane goes into detail about a figure that is given ...
... East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East is the finest general study available about American missionaries in the Levant. Leo J. Bocage's The Public Career of Charles R. Crane goes into detail about a figure that is given ...
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... Middle East, borders did not really exist. There was just the limestone plateau region of the north, called Syria, and everything else—a sandstone desert reaching all the way south to Yemen. Syria, a Greek word derived from the Semitic ...
... Middle East, borders did not really exist. There was just the limestone plateau region of the north, called Syria, and everything else—a sandstone desert reaching all the way south to Yemen. Syria, a Greek word derived from the Semitic ...
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... Middle East as a businessman and publicly espousing the Arab cause against Israel. What is not known, however, is that some of Agnew's first tutorials on Middle East politics came from Bill Stoltzfus. “You see,” explains Bill, “it is ...
... Middle East as a businessman and publicly espousing the Arab cause against Israel. What is not known, however, is that some of Agnew's first tutorials on Middle East politics came from Bill Stoltzfus. “You see,” explains Bill, “it is ...
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... Middle East policy types who appear on talk shows. Arabists are men and women, like Bill, who read and speak Arabic and who have passed many years of their professional lives, with their families, in the Arab world, whether as diplomats ...
... Middle East policy types who appear on talk shows. Arabists are men and women, like Bill, who read and speak Arabic and who have passed many years of their professional lives, with their families, in the Arab world, whether as diplomats ...
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... Middle East, men and women whose influence was prodigious. Indeed, never before in the American or British experience has there been an expatriate culture quite like the American missionary colonies in the Moslem world. It is a story ...
... Middle East, men and women whose influence was prodigious. Indeed, never before in the American or British experience has there been an expatriate culture quite like the American missionary colonies in the Moslem world. It is a story ...
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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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