The cliché of the Ugly American—loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic—still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a very different national archetype—the nice American—which has been central to ideas of U.S. identity since the nineteenth century. Niceness is often assumed to be a superficial concept unworthy of serious analysis. Yet the distinctiveness of Americans has been shaped by values of sociality and likability for which the adjective “nice” became a catchall. In America’s fledgling democracy, niceness was understood to be the indispensable trait of a people who were refreshingly free of Old World snobbery. Bramen elucidates the role niceness plays in a particular fantasy of American exceptionalism, one based not on military and economic might but on friendliness and openness. Niceness defined the attitudes of a plucky (and white) settler nation, commonly expressed through an affect that Bramen calls “manifest cheerfulness.” To reveal its contested inflections, Bramen shows how American niceness intersects with ideas of femininity, Native American hospitality, and black amiability. Who claimed niceness and why? Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans have largely considered themselves to be a fundamentally nice and decent people, from the supposedly amicable meeting of Puritans and Native Americans at Plymouth Rock to the early days of American imperialism when the mythology of Plymouth Rock became a portable emblem of goodwill for U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines.

Though the Filipino American population has increased numerically in many areas of the United States, especially since the influx of professional immigrants in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act, their impact on schools and related educational institutions has rarely been documented and examined. The Other Students: Filipino Americans, Education, and Power is the first book of its kind to focus specifically on Filipino Americans in education. Through a collection of historical and contemporary perspectives, we fill a profound gap in the scholarship as we analyze the emerging presence of Filipino Americans both as subjects and objects of study in education research and practice. We highlight the argument that one cannot adequately and appropriately understand the complex histories, cultures, and contemporary conditions faced by Filipino Americans in education unless one grapples with the specificities of their colonial pasts and presents, their unique migration and immigration patterns, their differing racialization and processes of identity formations, the connections between diaspora and community belonging, and the various perspectives offered by ethnic group-centered analysis to multicultural projects. The historical, methodological, and theoretical approaches in this anthology will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students in disciplines which include Education, Ethnic Studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Urban Studies, Public Policy, and Public Health.

After years of occupying a vexed position in the American academy, Philippine studies has come into its own, emerging as a trenchant and dynamic space of inquiry. Filipino Studies is a field-defining collection of vibrant voices, critical perspectives, and provocative ideas about the cultural, political, and economic state of the Philippines and its diaspora. Traversing issues of colonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, and nationalism, this volume examines not only the past and present position of the Philippines and its people, but also advances new frameworks for re-conceptualizing this growing field. Written by a prestigious lineup of international scholars grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperial power, the essays examine both the genealogy of the Philippines’ hyphenated identity as well as the future trajectory of the field. Hailing from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors revisit and contest traditional renditions of Philippine colonial histories, from racial formations and the Japanese occupation to the Cold War and “independence” from the United States. Whether addressing the contested memories of World War II, the “voyage” of Filipino men and women into the U.S. metropole, or migrant labor and the notion of home, the assembled essays tease out the links between the past and present, with a hopeful longing for various futures. Filipino Studies makes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.

Former Education Undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz puts together his learning and insights on Philippine education in a collection of essays that tackles the challenges faced by the largest agency of the Philippine government and possible solutions for reform.