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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... desert to shoot guinea fowl. We had a lot of liquor, though. We were drunk much of the time,” laughs Janet, openly exaggerating. Bill, a tall and athletic man in his sixties with a full crop of white hair, breaks into a deep smile at ...
... desert to shoot guinea fowl. We had a lot of liquor, though. We were drunk much of the time,” laughs Janet, openly exaggerating. Bill, a tall and athletic man in his sixties with a full crop of white hair, breaks into a deep smile at ...
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... desert. There was no airconditioning. In the hundreddegree summer nights Bill and Janet slept outside on the roof. Their first son, William A. Stoltzfus III, was the first nonArab baby born in the local hospital, built by American ...
... desert. There was no airconditioning. In the hundreddegree summer nights Bill and Janet slept outside on the roof. Their first son, William A. Stoltzfus III, was the first nonArab baby born in the local hospital, built by American ...
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... desert reaching all the way south to Yemen. Syria, a Greek word derived from the Semitic Siryon, first appears in Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon, a mountain straddling the current frontiers of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Not ...
... desert reaching all the way south to Yemen. Syria, a Greek word derived from the Semitic Siryon, first appears in Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon, a mountain straddling the current frontiers of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Not ...
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... desert and around whom hovers a gust of fantasy and sexual perversion and nihilism. “I wanted colour and savagery,” Wilfred Thesiger cries, “a cleanness which was infinitely remote from the world of men.... I craved for the past ...
... desert and around whom hovers a gust of fantasy and sexual perversion and nihilism. “I wanted colour and savagery,” Wilfred Thesiger cries, “a cleanness which was infinitely remote from the world of men.... I craved for the past ...
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... desert, occident and orient all come together for a stirring synthesis amidst a sylvan backdrop of cedars and cypresses, where one can swim and windsurf in sight of the mountain snows. To have known it not only before the Lebanese civil ...
... desert, occident and orient all come together for a stirring synthesis amidst a sylvan backdrop of cedars and cypresses, where one can swim and windsurf in sight of the mountain snows. To have known it not only before the Lebanese civil ...
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