Covert Capital

Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27464-8
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 432 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 236 mm x 163 mm, Gewicht: 710 g

Reihe: American Crossroads

The capital of the U.S. Empire after World War II was not a city. It was an American suburb. In this innovative and timely history, Andrew Friedman chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions created a U.S. imperial home front in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. In this covert capital, the suburban landscape provided a cover for the workings of U.S. imperial power, which shaped domestic suburban life. The Pentagon and the CIA built two of the largest office buildings in the country there during and after the war that anchored a new imperial culture and social world.

As the U.S. expanded its power abroad by developing roads, embassies, and villages, its subjects also arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, homeowners, builders, and landscapers who constructed spaces and living monuments that both nurtured and critiqued postwar U.S. foreign policy. Tracing the relationships among American agents and the migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, and elsewhere who settled in the southwestern suburbs of D.C., Friedman tells the story of a place that recasts ideas about U.S. immigration, citizenship, nationalism, global interconnection, and ethical responsibility from the post-WW2 period to the present. Opening a new window onto the intertwined history of the American suburbs and U.S. foreign policy, Covert Capital will also give readers a broad interdisciplinary and often surprising understanding of how U.S. domestic and global histories intersect in many contexts and at many scales.

American Crossroads, 37

Autoren/Hrsg.

Friedman, Andrew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte Regionalgeschichte der USA: Einzelne Staaten, Städte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Covert Intimacies of Langley and Dulles

Chapter 2: At Home with the CIA

Chapter 3: Saigon Road: the Co-Constituted Landscape of Northern Virginia and South Vietnam

Chapter 4: The Fall of South Vietnam and the Transnational Intimacies of Falls Church, Arlington and McLean

Chapter 5: Iran-Contra as Built Space: U.S. Imperial Tehran in Exile and Edge City’s Central American Presence

Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Andrew Friedman is Associate Professor and Chair of History at Haverford College. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Journal of Urban History, the Baffler, and the Village Voice. He was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians Spiro Kostof Book Award.