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History of the United States (1980–1991)

The history of the United States from 1980 until 1991 includes the last year of the Jimmy Carter presidency, eight years of the Ronald Reagan administration, and the first three years of the George H. W. Bush presidency, up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plagued by the Iran hostage crisis, runaway inflation, and mounting domestic opposition, Carter lost the 1980 United States presidential election to Republican Reagan.

In his first term, Reagan introduced expansionary fiscal policies aimed at stimulating the American economy after a recession in 1981 and 1982, including oil deregulation policies which led to the 1980s oil glut. He met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in four summit conferences, culminating with the signing of the INF Treaty. These actions accelerated the end of the Cold War, which occurred in 1989–1991, as typified by the collapse of communism both in Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union, and in numerous Third World clients. The economy was in recession in 1981–1983, but recovered and grew sharply after that.

The Iran–Contra affair was the most prominent scandal during this time, wherein the Reagan Administration sold weapons to Iran, and used the money for CIA aid to pro-American guerrilla Contras in left-leaning Nicaragua.

Changing demographics and growth of the Sun Belt
A widely discussed demographic phenomenon of the 1970s was the rise of the "Sun Belt", a region encapsulating the Southwest, Southeast, and especially Florida and California (surpassing New York as the nation's most populous state in 1964). By 1980, the population of the Sun Belt had risen to exceed that of the industrial regions of the Northeast and Midwest—the Rust Belt, which had steadily lost industry and had little population growth. The rise of the Sun Belt was the culmination of changes that began in American society starting in the 1950s, as cheap air travel, automobiles, the interstate system, and the growth of air conditioning all spurred a mass migration south and west. Young, working-age Americans and affluent retirees all flocked to the Sun Belt.

The rise of the Sun Belt has been producing a change in the nation's political climate, strengthening conservatism. The boom mentality in this growing region conflicted sharply with the concerns of the Rust Belt, populated mainly by those either unable or unwilling to move elsewhere, particularly minority groups and senior citizens. The Northeast and Midwest have remained more committed to social programs and more interested in regulated growth than the wide-open, sprawling states of the South and West. Electoral trends in the regions reflect this divergence—the Northeast and Midwest have been increasingly voting for Democratic candidates in federal, state and local elections while the South and West are now the solid base for the Republican Party.

As manufacturing industry gradually moved out of its traditional centers in the Northeast and Midwest, joblessness and poverty increased. The liberal response, typified by Mayor John Lindsay of New York City was to dramatically increase welfare services and education, as well as public employment and public salaries, at a time when the tax base was shrinking. New York City barely averted bankruptcy in 1975; it was rescued using state and federal money, along with strict state control of its budget.

Meanwhile, conservatives, based in the suburbs, the rural areas, and the Sunbelt railed against what they identified as the failures of liberal social programs, as well as their enormous expenses. This was a potent theme in the 1980 presidential race and the 1994 mid-term elections, when the Republicans captured the House of Representatives after 40 years of Democratic control.

The liberal leaders of the 1960s, characteristic of the era of the Great Society and the civil rights movement, gave way to conservative urban politicians in the 1970s across the country, such as New York City's Mayor, Ed Koch, a conservative Democrat.

Rejection of U.S./Soviet détente
In the 1970s, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal inflicted diminished confidence in the presidency. International frustrations, including the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the growth of international terrorism, and the acceleration of the arms race raised fears over the country's ability to control international affairs. The energy crisis, high unemployment, and very high inflation and escalating interest rates made economic planning difficult and raised fundamental questions over the future of American prosperity.

American "malaise", a term that caught on following Carter's 1979 "crisis of confidence" speech, in the late 1970s and early 1980s was not unfounded as the nation seemed to be losing its self-confidence.

Under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet economy was falling behind. The Soviets were decades behind in computers and high technology, and its economy was heavily dependent on lucrative oil exports. Meanwhile, détente with the Soviets collapsed as the communists made gains across the Third World. Most dramatic was the fall of South Vietnam in 1975 when North Vietnam invaded and conquered the nation; American forces were involved only to rescue American supporters. Nearly a million refugees fled; most who survived came to the U.S. Other Communist movements, backed by Moscow or Beijing, were spreading rapidly across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The Soviet Union, guided by the Brezhnev Doctrine, invaded Afghanistan in 1979 in a move roundly denounced by the West and Muslim countries.

Reacting to all these perceptions of American decline internationally and domestically, a group of academics, journalists, politicians, and policymakers, labeled by many as "new conservatives" or "neoconservatives", since many of them were still Democrats, rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, and blamed liberal Democrats for the nation's weakened geopolitical stance. Many clustered around Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but they later aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and Republicans, who promised to confront pro-Soviet Communist expansion. They were lagely anti-communist Democrats and opposed to the welfare programs of the Great Society. But their main targets were the old policies of containment of communism and détente with the Soviet Union. They wanted rollback and the peaceful end of the Communist threat rather than aimless negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control.

Neoconservatives attacked the foreign policy orthodoxy of containment in the Cold War as appeasement, a allusion to the British concessions to Nazi Germany in the Munich Agreement in 1938. They regarded concessions to relatively weak enemies of the United States as appeasin "evil", attacked détente, opposed most-favored nation trade status for the Soviet Union, and supported unilateral American intervention in the Third World as a means of boosting U.S. leverage over international affairs. Before Reagan's election in November 1980, neoconservatives sought to stem the antiwar sentiments caused by the U.S. defeats in the Vietnam War and the associated massive casualties in Southeast Asia that the war induced.

During the 1970s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a political scientist and later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Ronald Reagan, increasingly criticized the Democratic Party. Kirkpatrick became a convert to the ideas of the new conservatism of once liberal Democratic academics. She drew a distinction between authoritarian dictators, who she believed were capable of embracing democracy and who were, not coincidentally, allies of the United States, and Communist totalitarian dictators, who she viewed as unyielding and incapable of change.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. was gripped by the worst economy since the 1930s with American automobile and steel industries confronting serious challenges, the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, and the Soviet Union expanding globally in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. In the 1980 Winter Olympics, the U.S. amateur Olympic hockey team defeated their professional Soviet counterparts in the Miracle on Ice, providing some symbolic sense of renewed American optimism.

Ronald Reagan and the elections of 1980

Conservative sentiment was growing, in part due to a disgust at the excesses of the sexual revolution and the failure of liberal policies such as the War on Poverty to deliver on their promises. President Jimmy Carter's prospects for reelection in the U.S. presidential election of 1980 were strengthened when he easily beat back a primary challenge by liberal icon Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Against the backdrop of economic stagflation and perceived American weakness against the USSR abroad, Ronald Reagan, former governor of California, won the Republican nomination in 1980 by winning most of the primaries. After failing to reach an unprecedented deal with Ford, who wanted to be a sort of co-president, Reagan picked his chief primary rival, George H. W. Bush, as the vice-presidential nominee. During the campaign, Reagan relied on Jeane Kirkpatrick as his foreign policy adviser to identify Carter's vulnerabilities on foreign policy.

Reagan promised to rebuild the U.S. military, which had sharply declined in strength and morale after the Vietnam War, and restore American power and prestige on the international front. He also promised an end to "big government" and to restore economic health by use of supply-side economics.

Supply-side economists were against the welfare state built up by the Great Society. They asserted that the woes of the U.S. economy were in large part a result of excessive taxation, which "crowded out" money away from private investors and thus stifled economic growth. The solution, they argued, was to cut taxes across the board, particularly in the upper income brackets, in order to encourage private investment. They also aimed to reduce government spending on welfare and social services geared toward the poorer sectors of society which had built up during the 1960s.

The public, particularly the middle class in the Sun Belt region, agreed with Reagan's proposals, and voted for him in 1980. Critics charged that Reagan was insensitive to the plight of the poor, and that the economic troubles of the 1970s were beyond any president's ability to control or reverse.

The presidential election of 1980 was a key turning point in American politics. It signaled the new electoral power of the suburbs and the Sun Belt, with the Religious Right for the first time a major factor. Moreover, it was a watershed ushering out the commitment to government anti-poverty programs and affirmative action characteristic of the Great Society. It also signaled a commitment to a hawkish foreign policy.

A third-party candidacy by Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, a moderate Republican, did poorly. The major issues of the campaign were the economic stagflation, threats to national security, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the general malaise that seemed to indicate America's great days were over. Carter seemed unable to control inflation and had failed in his rescue effort of the hostages in Tehran. Carter dropped his détente-oriented advisers and moved sharply to the right against the Soviets, but Reagan said it was too little, too late.

Reagan won a landslide victory with 489 votes in the electoral college to Carter's 49. Republicans defeated twelve Democratic senators to regain control of the Senate for the first time in 25 years. Reagan received 43,904,153 votes in the election (50.7% of total votes cast), and Carter, 35,483,883 (41.0%). John B. Anderson won 5,720,060 (6.6%) popular votes.

Reagan administration (1981–1989)
After years of unstinting praise from the right, and unrelenting criticism from the left, historian David Henry finds that by 2010 a consensus had emerged among scholars that Reagan revived conservatism and turned the nation to the right by demonstrating a "pragmatic conservatism" that promoted ideology within the constraints imposed by the divided political system. Furthermore, says Henry, the consensus agrees that he revived faith in the presidency and American self-confidence, and contributed critically to ending the Cold War.

Reagan's approach to the presidency was somewhat of a departure from his predecessors; he delegated a great deal of work to his subordinates, letting them handle most of the government's day-to-day affairs. As an executive, Reagan framed broad themes and made a strong personal connection to voters. He used very strong aides especially chief of staff James Baker (Ford's campaign manager), and Michael Deaver as deputy chief of staff, and Edwin Meese as White House counsel, as well as David Stockman at the Bureau of the Budget and his own campaign manager Bill Casey at the CIA.

On March 30, 1981, Reagan was shot in Washington by a disturbed nonpolitical man. He recovered fully, with opponents silenced in the meanwhile.

Reagan stunned the nation by appointing the first woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981. He promoted conservative leader William Rehnquist to Chief Justice in 1986, with arch-conservative Antonin Scalia taking Rehnquist's slot. His fourth appointment in 1987 proved controversial, as the initial choice had to withdraw (he smoked marijuana in college), and the Senate rejected Robert Bork. Reagan finally won approval for Anthony Kennedy.

Reaganomics and the 1981 federal budget
Ronald Reagan promised an economic revival that would affect all sectors of the population. He proposed to achieve this goal by cutting taxes and reducing the size and scope of federal programs. Critics of his plan charged that the tax cuts would reduce revenues, leading to large federal deficits, which would lead in turn to higher interest rates, stifling any economic benefits. Reagan and his supporters, drawing on the theories of supply-side economics, claimed that the tax cuts would increase revenues through economic growth, allowing the federal government to balance its budget for the first time since 1969.

Reagan's 1981 economic legislation, however, was a mixture of rival programs to satisfy all his conservative constituencies (monetarists, cold warriors, middle-class swing voters, and the affluent). Monetarists were placated by tight controls of the money supply; cold warriors, especially neoconservatives like Kirkpatrick, won large increases in the defense budget; wealthy taxpayers won sweeping three-year tax rate reductions on both individual (marginal rates would eventually come down to 50% from 70%) and corporate taxes; and the middle class saw that its pensions and entitlements would not be targeted. Reagan declared spending cuts for the Social Security budget, which accounted for almost half of government spending, off limits due to fears over an electoral backlash, but the administration was hard pressed to explain how his program of sweeping tax cuts and large defense spending would not increase the deficit.

Budget Director David Stockman raced to put Reagan's program through Congress within the administration's deadline of forty days. Stockman had no doubt that spending cuts were needed, and slashed expenditures across the board (with the exception of defense expenditures) by some $40 billion; and when figures did not add up, he resorted to the "magic asterisk"—which signified "future savings to be identified". He would later say that the program was rushed through too quickly and not given enough thought. Appeals from constituencies threatened by the loss of social services were ineffectual; the budget cuts passed through the Congress with relative ease.

The recession of 1982

By early 1982, Reagan's economic program was beset with difficulties as the recession that had begun in 1979 continued. In the short term, the effect of Reaganomics was a soaring budget deficit. Government borrowing, along with the tightening of the money supply, resulted in sky high interest rates (briefly hovering around 20 percent) and a serious recession with 10-percent unemployment in 1982. Some regions of the "Rust Belt" (the industrial Midwest and Northeast) descended into virtual depression conditions as steel mills and other industries closed. Many family farms in the Midwest and elsewhere were ruined by high interest rates and sold off to large agribusinesses.

Reagan allowed the Federal Reserve to drastically reduce the money supply to cure inflation, but it resulted in the recession deepening temporarily. His approval ratings plummeted in the worst months of the recession of 1982. Democrats swept the mid-term elections, making up for their losses in the previous election cycle. At the time, critics often accused Reagan of being out of touch. His Budget Director David Stockman, an ardent fiscal conservative, wrote, "I knew the Reagan Revolution was impossible—it was a metaphor with no anchor in political and economic reality." Unemployment reached a peak of 11% in late 1982, after which recovery began. A factor in the recovery from the worst periods of 1982–83 was the radical drop in oil prices due to increased production levels of the mid-1980s, which ended inflationary pressures on fuel prices. The virtual collapse of the OPEC cartel enabled the administration to alter its tight money policies, to the consternation of conservative monetarist economists, who began pressing for a reduction of interest rates and an expansion of the money supply, in effect subordinating concern about inflation (which now seemed under control) to concern about unemployment and declining investment.

By the middle of 1983, unemployment fell from 11 percent in 1982 to 8.2 percent. GDP growth was 3.3 percent, the highest since the mid-1970s. Inflation was below 5 percent. When the economy recovered, Ronald Reagan declared it was Morning in America. Housing starts boomed, the automobile industry recovered its vitality, and consumer spending achieved new heights. Blue-collar workers were, however, mostly left behind in the economic boom years of the Reagan Administration, and the old factory jobs that had once offered high wages to even unskilled workers no longer existed.

Reagan went on to defeat Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election by a massive 49 out of 50 state landslide.

Rising deficits
Following the economic recovery that began in 1983, the medium-term fiscal effect of Reaganomics was a soaring budget deficit as spending continually exceeded revenue due to tax cuts and increased defense spending. Military budgets rose while tax revenues, despite having increased as compared to the stagnant late 1970s and early 1980s, failed to make up for the spiraling cost.

The 1981 tax cuts, some of the largest in U.S. history, also eroded the revenue base of the federal government in the short-term. The massive increase in military spending (about $1.6 trillion over five years) far exceeded cuts in social spending, despite wrenching impact of such cuts spending geared toward some of the poorest segments of society. Even so, by the end of 1985, funding for domestic programs had been cut nearly as far as Congress could tolerate.

In this context, the deficit rose from $60 billion in 1980 to a peak of $220 billion in 1986 (well over 5% of GDP). Over this period, national debt more than doubled from $749 billion to $1.746 trillion.

Since U.S. saving rates were very low (roughly one-third of Japan's,) the deficit was mostly covered by borrowing from abroad, turning the United States within a few years from the world's greatest creditor nation to the world's greatest debtor. Not only was this damaging to America's status, it was also a profound shift in the postwar international financial system, which had relied on the export of U.S. capital. In addition, the media and entertainment industry during the 1980s glamorized the stock market and financial sector (e.g. the 1987 movie Wall Street), causing many young people to pursue careers as brokers, investors, or bankers instead of manufacturing and making it unlikely that any of the lost industrial base would be restored any time soon.

The deficits were keeping interest rates high (although lower than the 20% peak levels earlier in the administration due to a respite in the administration's tight money policies), and threatening to push them higher. The government was thus forced to borrow so much money to pay its bills that it was driving up the price of borrowing. Although supply-siders promised increased investment as a result of top-rate and corporate tax cuts, growth and investment suffered for now in the context of high interest rates. In October 1987, a sudden and alarming stock market crash took place, but the Federal Reserve responded by increasing the money supply and averted what could have been another Great Depression.

Perhaps more alarmingly, Reagan-era deficits were keeping the U.S. dollar overvalued. With such a high demand for dollars (due in large measure to government borrowing), the dollar achieved an alarming strength against other major currencies. As the dollar soared in value, American exports became increasingly uncompetitive, with Japan as the leading beneficiary. The high value of the dollar made it difficult for foreigners to buy American goods and encouraged Americans to buy imports, coming at a high price to the industrial export sector. Steel and other heavy industries declined due to excessive demands by labor unions and outdated technology that made them unable to compete with Japanese imports. The consumer electronics industry (which had begun declining in the 1970s) was one of the worst victims of dumping and other unfair Japanese trade practices. American consumer electronics also suffered from poor quality and a relative lack of technical innovation compared to Japanese electronics, in part because the Cold War had caused most American scientific and engineering effort to go into the defense sector rather than the consumer one. By the end of the decade, it had virtually ceased to exist. On the bright side, the upstart computer industry flourished during the 1980s.

The U.S. balance of trade grew increasingly unfavorable; the trade deficit grew from $20 billion to well over $100 billion. Thus, American industries such as automobiles and steel, faced renewed competition abroad and within the domestic market as well. The auto industry was given breathing space after the Reagan administration imposed voluntary import restraints on Japanese manufacturers (allowing them to sell a maximum of 1.3 million vehicles in the U.S. per year) and imposed a 25% tariff on all imported trucks (a lighter 3% tariff was put on passenger cars). The Japanese responded by opening assembly plants in the U.S. to get around this, and in doing so were able to say that they were providing Americans with jobs. The VIR was repealed in 1985 after auto sales were booming again, but the tariffs remain in effect to this day. With the event of CAFE regulations, small cars came to dominate in the 1980s, and much like with electronics, Japanese makes bested American ones in terms of build quality and technical sophistication.

The enormous deficits were in large measure holdovers from Lyndon Johnson's commitment to both "guns and butter" (the Vietnam War and the Great Society) and the growing competition from other G7 nations after their postwar reconstruction, but it was the Reagan administration that chose to let the deficits develop.

Reagan asked Congress for a line-item veto which would allow him to lower the deficits by cutting spending that he thought was wasteful, but he did not receive it. He also called for a balanced budget amendment which would mandate that the federal government spends no more money than it takes in, which never materialized.

Foreign policy: Third World
With Reagan's promises to restore the nation's military strength, the 1980s saw massive increases in military spending, amounting to about $1.6 trillion over five years. A new arms race would develop as superpower relations deteriorated to a level not seen since the Kennedy administration a generation earlier.

Reagan's foreign policy was generally considered more successful and more thoughtful and strategic than his predecessor. He favored a hawkish approach to the Cold War, especially in the Third World arena of superpower competition. In the wake of the Vietnam War, however, Americans were increasingly skeptical of bearing the economic and financial cost of large troop commitments. The administration sought to overcome this by backing the relatively cheap strategy of specially trained counterinsurgencies or "low-intensity conflicts" rather than large-scale campaigns like Korea and Vietnam, which were enormously costly both in money and human life.

The Arab–Israeli conflict was another impetus for military action. Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But in the wake of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila Massacre, which provoked a political crisis in Israel, U.S. forces moved into Beirut to encourage Israeli withdrawal. The Reagan administration stood by Israel's invasion of Lebanon in mid-1982 to maintain the support of Israel on one hand, but also to quell the influence of Israel's pro-Soviet enemy Syria in Lebanon. However, U.S. intervention in the multi-sided Lebanese civil war had disastrous consequences. On October 23, 1983, the Marine Barracks Bombing killed 241 American troops. Shortly afterward, the U.S. withdrew its remaining 1,600 soldiers.

In Operation Urgent Fury in the Caribbean nation of Grenada, the United States for the first time invaded and successfully rolled back a Communist regime. On October 19, the small island nation of Grenada had undergone a coup d'état by Bernard Coard, a staunch Marxist–Leninist seeking to strengthen the country's existing ties with Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other Communist states. The prime minister was killed and insurgents had orders to shoot on sight. Over 1,000 Americans were on the island, mostly medical students and their families, and the government could not guarantee their security. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, the regional security association of neighboring states led by Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica officially called on the United States for protection. In a short campaign launched Oct. 25, fought primarily against armed Cuban construction workers, the U.S. military invaded and took control, and democracy was restored to Grenada.

In 1986, Reagan launched an air strike against Libya after Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was found to have connections to the West Berlin discotheque bombing, which killed two American soldiers.

The Reagan administration also supplied funds and weapons to heavily militarily-influenced governments in El Salvador beginning in 1980 and Honduras, and to a lesser extent in Guatemala, which was ruled by right-wing military autocrat General Efraín Ríos Montt from 1982–83. It reversed ex-President Jimmy Carter's official condemnation of the Argentine junta for human rights abuses and allowed the CIA to collaborate with Argentine intelligence in funding the Contras.

Central America was the Reagan administration's primary concern, especially El Salvador and Nicaragua, where the Sandinista revolution brought down U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza Debayle's rule in 1979. The two countries had been historically dominated by multinational corporations and wealthy landowning oligarchs while most of their population remained in poverty; as a result, predominantly Marxist revolutionary leaders had won increasing support from the peasantry in both nations.

In 1982, the CIA, with assistance from the Argentine national intelligence agency, organized and financed right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, known as the Contras. The tracing of secret funds for this scheme led to the revelations of the Iran–Contra affair. In 1985, Reagan authorized the sale of arms in Iran in an unsuccessful effort to free U.S. hostages in Lebanon; he later professed ignorance that subordinates were illegally diverting the proceeds to the Contras, a matter for which Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, an aide to National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter, took much of the blame. Reagan's approval ratings plummeted in 1986 as a result of the scandal, and many Americans began to seriously question his judgement. While the president's popularity improved in his final two years, he never again enjoyed the level of support he had had in 1985. Democrats regained control of Congress in the 1986 midterm elections. Oliver North, meanwhile, achieved a brief celebrity status in 1987 during his testimonies before Congress.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the Reagan administration, with help from apartheid South Africa, also attempted to topple the substantially Cuban and Soviet-backed Marxist–Leninist FRELIMO and MPLA dictatorships of Mozambique and Angola, respectively, during those countries' civil wars. The administration intervened on the side of insurgent groups RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, supplying each group with covert military and humanitarian aid.

In Afghanistan, Reagan massively stepped up military and humanitarian aid for mujahideen fighters against the Soviet proxy government there, providing them with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan also provided the rebels with significant assistance. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev reduced and eventually ended his country's commitment to Afghanistan as Soviet troops there were bogged down in guerrilla war.

Reagan also expressed opposition to the Vietnamese-installed Communist regime of Heng Samrin (and later, Hun Sen) in Cambodia, which had ousted the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime after Vietnam invaded the country. The administration approved military and humanitarian aid to the republican KPNLF and royalist Funcinpec insurgents. The Reagan administration also supported continued UN recognition of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (a tripartite rebel alliance of the KPNLF, Funcinpec, and the Khmer Rouge) over the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea regime. Reagan also continued American support for the autocratic Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, an ardent anti-Communist. In a 1984 presidential debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters, he explained his administration's support of Marcos by stating, "I know there are things there in the Philippines that do not look good to us from the standpoint right now of democratic rights, but what is the alternative? It is a large communist movement", referring to active Communist guerrillas operating in the Philippines at the time. The U.S. also had significant strategic military interests in the Philippines, knowing that Marcos's government would not tamper with agreements to maintain U.S. naval bases in the country. Marcos was later ousted in 1986 by the mostly peaceful People Power movement, led by Corazón Aquino.

Reagan was sharply critical of the United Nations, once the darling of liberals. He repudiated what he felt was its corruption, inefficiency and anti-Americanism. In 1985–1987 the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO, which had failed in its cultural missions, and began to deliberately withhold its UN dues. American policymakers considered this tactic an effective tool for asserting influence in the UN. When the UN and UNESCO mended their ways, the U.S. returned and paid its dues.

Last stage of the Cold War
The Reagan administration adopted a hard-line stance toward the USSR. Early in his first term, the president attacked the rival superpower as the "evil empire". While it was Jimmy Carter who had officially ended the policy of détente following Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, East-West tensions in the early 1980s reached levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was born out of the worsening U.S.-Soviet relations of the Reagan Era. Popularly dubbed "Star Wars" at the time, SDI was a multibillion-dollar research project for a missile defense system that could shoot down incoming Soviet missiles and eliminate the need for mutually assured destruction.

While the Soviets had enjoyed great achievements on the international stage before Reagan entered office in 1981, such as the unification of their socialist ally, Vietnam, in 1976, and a string of socialist revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the country's strengthening ties with Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s only masked its weakness. The Soviet economy suffered severe structural problems and started suffering from an increased stagnation in the 1970s. Documents being circulated in the Kremlin in 1980, when Carter was still president, expressed the bleak view that Moscow ultimately could not win the technological or ideological battle with the US.

East-West tensions eased rapidly after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three elderly Soviet leaders in a row since 1982, the Politburo elected Gorbachev Soviet Communist Party chief in 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young reform-oriented technocrats rapidly consolidated power, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.

Focused on perestroika, Gorbachev struggled to boost production of consumer goods, which would be impossible given the twin burdens of the Cold War arms race on one hand, and the provision of large sums of foreign and military aid, which the socialist allies had grown to expect, on the other. Under Gorbachev, Soviet policymakers increasingly accepted Reagan administration warnings that the U.S. would make the arms race a huge burden for them. The Soviets were already spending massive amounts on defense, and developing a counterpart to SDI was far more than their economy could handle. The result in the Soviet Union was a dual approach of concessions to the United States and economic restructuring (perestroika) and democratization (glasnost) domestically, which eventually made it impossible for Gorbachev to reassert central control. Reaganite hawks have since argued that pressures stemming from increased U.S. defense spending was an additional impetus for reform.

During the Cold War, the division of the world into two rival blocs had served to legitimize a broad and diffuse alliance not only with the Western European nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) but many countries in the developing world. Starting in the late 1980s, however, the regimes of the Eastern European Warsaw Pact began to collapse in rapid succession. The "fall of the Berlin Wall" was seen as a symbol of the fall of the Eastern European Communist governments in 1989. U.S.-Soviet relations had greatly improved in the latter half of the decade, with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987 and the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan as well as Cuban forces from Angola. These developments undercut the rationale for providing support to such repressive governments as those in Chile and South Korea, which underwent processes of democratization with U.S. support during the same period as those of Warsaw Pact nations.

George H. W. Bush administration (1989–1991)
Reagan's vice-president George H. W. Bush easily won the 1988 Republican nomination and defeated Democratic Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis by an electoral landslide in the 1988 election. The campaign was marked by numerous blunders by Dukakis, including most famously a campaign ad featuring Dukakis in an M1 Abrams tank.

Foreign affairs
Unlike Reagan, Bush downplayed vision and emphasized caution and careful management. His main foreign policy advisors were Secretaries of State James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger, and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Bush entered the White House with a long and successful portfolio in foreign affairs including ambassadorial roles to China in the United Nations, director of the CIA, and official visits to 65 foreign countries as vice president.

Momentous geopolitical events that occurred during Bush's presidency include: Except for Tiananmen Square in China, all the events strongly favored the United States. Bush took the initiative in the invasion of Panama and the START treaties. Otherwise, he was mostly a passive observer trying not to interfere or gloat about the events. Given the favorable outcomes, scholars generally give Bush high marks in foreign policy, except for his unwillingness to condemn the Tiananmen Square crackdown. He thought long-term favorable relations with China were too important to jeopardize. In terms of gaining public support, Bush never tried to mobilize much popular support for his foreign policy, and in domestic affairs his support was steadily slipping.
 * The crushing in June 1989 of the Tiananmen Square protests in China, which was widely condemned in the United States and around the world.
 * The United States invasion of Panama in December 1989 to overthrow a local dictator.
 * The signing with the USSR of the START I and START II treaties for nuclear disarmament.
 * The Gulf War in 1991, in which Bush led a large coalition that defeated Iraq when it invaded Kuwait.
 * Victory in the Cold War over Soviet communism.
 * Revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of Communism, especially in Eastern Europe
 * German reunification in 1990, with the democratic West absorbing the ex-Communist East.
 * The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, replaced by a friendly Russia and 14 other countries.

After the Cold War
Bush argued for the emergence of "a new world order... freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony."

Nationalist agitation in the Baltic States for independence led to first Lithuania and then the other two states, Estonia and Latvia, declaring independence from the USSR. On December 26, 1991, the USSR was officially disbanded, breaking up into fifteen constituent parts. The Cold War was over, and the vacuum left by the collapse of governments such as in Yugoslavia and Somalia revealed or reopened other animosities concealed by decades of authoritarian rule. While there was a certain reluctance among the U.S. public, and even within the government, to get involved in localized conflicts in which there was little or no direct U.S. interest at stake, these crises served as a basis for the renewal of Western alliances while communism was becoming less relevant. To this effect, President Bill Clinton would declare in his inaugural address: "Today, as an old order passes, the new world is more free but less stable. Communism's collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers. Clearly America must continue to lead the world we did so much to make."

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has sought to revitalize Cold War institutional structures, especially NATO, as well as multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank through which it promotes economic reforms around the globe. NATO was set to expand initially to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic and has since moved further eastward. In addition, U.S. policy placed a special emphasis on the neoliberal "Washington Consensus", manifesting in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994.

The U.S. often made moves to economically sanction countries which were said to be sponsoring terrorism, engaging in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or committing serious human rights abuses. There was sometimes a consensus for these moves, such as with the U.S. and European embargoes imposed on arms sales to China after its violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, as well as for the UN Security Council's imposition of sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. Support for other unilateral sanctions however, such as the ones levied on Iran and Cuba, were limited, leading Congress to impose measures intended to punish foreign companies which violated the terms of the U.S.'s own laws. In a 1999 Foreign Affairs essay, Samuel P. Huntington wrote that to reinforce its primacy in the post–Cold War world,
 * the United States has, among other things, attempted or been perceived as attempting more or less unilaterally to do the following: pressure other countries to adopt American values and practices regarding human rights and democracy; prevent other countries from acquiring military capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority; enforce American law extra-territorially in other societies; grade countries according to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and now religious freedom; apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free trade and open markets [NAFTA and GATT being the main examples of the free trade policy initiatives of the 1990s; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies to serve those same corporate interests; intervene in local conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; ... ; promote American arms sales abroad while attempting to prevent comparable sales by other countries; force out one U.N. secretary-general and dictate the appointment of his successor; expand NATO...undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic sanctions against the regime; and categorize certain countries as 'rogue states,' excluding them from global institutions....1

Max Boot, another influential contemporary commentator on U.S. policy, argues that the very ambitious goals of the U.S. in the post–Cold War period are designed:
 * to instill democracy in lands that have known tyranny, in the hope that doing so will short-circuit terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation....This is an ambitious undertaking, the most successful examples of which are post–World War II Germany, Italy and Japan. In those cases, the U.S. Army helped transform militaristic dictatorships into pillars of liberal democracy—one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century."

Economics
Initially, Bush inherited an economy that continued the strong rally that had begun in the final months of 1982. However, the Federal Reserve continued with restrictive monetary policy, limiting economic growth in the late 1980s. When the 1990 oil price shock hit in mid-1990, consumer spending contracted and the economy entered recession. Unlike the early 1980s recession, the recession beginning in 1990 was relatively mild. Some of the hardest hit cities were in California and the Northeast, while much of the South was less affected.

Historiography

 * Ehrman, John. "The Age of Reagan? Three Questions for Future Research," Journal of the Historical Society, March 2011, Vol. 11 Issue 1, pp 111–131 online


text:
User talk:Repabil

Hello, Repabil. Welcome to Wikipedia.

A few tips for you to start going. (I'll send more if I see that I can help you :-)

 * Just edit stuff off the cuff for a while. We like that!
 * When you have time, check out Welcome, newcomers + the links in there.
 * You can sign your stuff on talk pages with ~ It will convert to your username + the time. "anon" is fine too.
 * If puzzled, put a question on Village pump, or feel free to ask me on my talk page if it's a very general question.
 * Most of all, have fun but take our work seriously!

-- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:13 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Sweatmaster
A tag has been placed on Sweatmaster requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a band, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not indicate the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for musical topics.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the article's talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Jfire (talk) 01:59, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:Repabil


text:
User talk:Tompagenet

Hello, Tompagenet. Welcome to Wikipedia.

A few tips for you to start going. (I'll send more if I see that I can help you :-)

 * Just edit stuff off the cuff for a while. We like that!
 * When you have time, check out Welcome, newcomers + the links in there.
 * You can sign your stuff on talk pages with ~ It will convert to your username + the time. "anon" is fine too.
 * If puzzled, put a question on Village pump, or feel free to ask me on my talk page if it's a very general question.
 * Most of all, have fun but take our work seriously!

-- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:15 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Regarding the edit you made to Extortion, please see Legal_advice. The disclaimer you deleted is encouraged on such pages. Angela 19:44, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Sysop status granted
Congratulations, you have just been made a sysop! You have volunteered for boring housekeeping activities which normal users sadly cannot participate in. Sysops basically can't do anything: They cannot delete pages arbitarily (only obvious junk like "jklasdfl,öasdf JOSH IS GAY"), they cannot protect pages in an edit war they are involved in, they cannot ban signed in users. What they can do is delete junk as it appears, ban anonymous vandals, remove pages that have been listed on Votes for deletion for more than a week, protect pages when asked to by other members, and help keep the few protected pages there are, among them the precious Main Page, up to date.

Note that almost everything you can do can be undone, so don't be too worried about making mistakes. You will find more information at Administrators, please take a look before experimenting with your new powers. Drop me a message if there are any questions or if you want to stop being a sysop (could it be?). Have fun!—Eloquence 02:45, Aug 19, 2003 (UTC)

It had to be done.Ark30inf

"What is the point in this page - it is, and as far as I can see always will be, a purely dictionary-definition page" -- Tompagenet, April 10, 2003

Well, look again! Does this look like a dictionary-definition page to you? Wiwaxia 09:11, 29 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Stalin non-quotation
Please see the talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Famous_non-quotation for my comments about this. One Salient Oversight 23:25, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Category:UK Wikipedians
Hi, just to let you know that the list of UK participants at the UK notice board was getting rather long, so I have replaced it with the above category which I have added to your user page. -- Francs2000 | Talk 30 June 2005 21:11 (UTC)

Visual Basic Classic wikibook
I see you have contributed to the BASIC programming language article on Wikipedia. Any chance you would like to join in editing the wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Visual_Basic_Classic? --Kjwhitefoot 11:01, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Templeton Prize reference system
When I first gave the reference (Dawkins 2006:19) I was using the standard Harvard referencing system as layed out in Citing sources. I reverted it to the Harvard system, but removed the page number, since I don't believe it is really necessary. Feel free to add it again if you think it is important, or use any other referencing system layed out in Citing sources.

The above relates to Templeton Prize Tompagenet 14:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

WP:LT
 Welcome!

Hi, and welcome to the London Transport WikiProject! We're a group of editors working to improve Wikipedia's coverage of London's transport system.

A few features that you might find helpful:

 * You may want to join or create a task force which attempts to drive the improvement of articles within a smaller scope.
 * The project also provides templates to help you make the perfect article.

There are a variety of interesting things to do within the project; you're free to participate however much—or little—you like:

 * Starting some new articles? Our article structure tips outlines some things to include.
 * Want to know how good our articles are? The assessment department is working on rating the quality of every London transport article in Wikipedia.
 * You can vote for the London Transport portal's selected article and selected image of the month here.
 * Submit your interesting London Transport facts at Portal:London Transport/Did you know for our portal.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask another fellow member, and we'll be happy to help you. Again, welcome! We look forward to seeing you around!

— From the members of WikiProject London Transport 12:49, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

VTech page

 * hello there! nooo, believe me i never find it arrogant to congratulate others for their work, much appreciated, friend. i'm really impressed with that page in general, it certainly shows that this whole rigorous group effort thing can indeed be done accurately & well. cheers again. tomasz.  17:09, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Ken Korda at AFD
Hey, you left an odd note about the Ken Korda article at the A W Neill Middle School AFD. Were you trying to nominate the Korda article for deletion? If there's some significance to the middle school article that I missed, my apologies. GlassCobra 21:51, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see what happened. I fixed the problem; whenever you nominate an article for deletion, make sure you follow all the instructions at Template:AfD footer, okay? Thanks! GlassCobra 21:58, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No problem! GlassCobra 13:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

New DLR Pictures
Do you have any pictures of the new DLR Rolling stocks for use at this article Docklands Light Railway rolling stock? If you do, can you please replace this image Image:NewDLR.jpg. Thanks,  Tyw7, formerly Troop350    (Talk  ●  Contributions) 11:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Docklands Light Railway rolling stock
Do you want to help me improve the Docklands Light Railway rolling stock article? Please respond on my talk page. -- Tyw7 (Talk • Contributions) 11:27, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

August 2010
Thank you for your contributions. Please remember to mark your edits as "minor" only if they truly are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes, or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you.  GB fan  talk 02:45, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

License tagging for File:BALPA logo.png
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Signpost Interview

 * Brought to you by Simply south...... eating shoes for 5 years So much for ER 18:32, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Notification of pending suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity
Following a community discussion in June 2011, consensus was reached to provisionally suspend the administrative permissions of users who have been inactive for one year (i.e. administrators who have not made any edits or logged actions in over one year). As a result of this discussion, your administrative permissions will be removed pending your return if you do not return to activity within the next month. If you wish to have these permissions reinstated should this occur, please post to the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and the userright will be restored per the re-sysopping process (i.e. as long as the attending bureaucrats are reasonably satisfied that your account has not been compromised, that your inactivity did not have the effect of evading scrutiny of any actions which might have led to sanctions, and that you have not been inactive for a three year period of time). If you remain inactive for a three year period of time, including the present year you have been inactive, you will need to request reinstatement at WP:RFA. This removal of access is procedural only, and not intended to reflect negatively upon you in any way. We wish you the best in future endeavors, and thank you for your past administrative efforts. MadmanBot (talk) 00:30, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Notification of pending suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity
Following a community discussion in June 2011, consensus was reached to provisionally suspend the administrative permissions of users who have been inactive for one year (i.e. administrators who have not made any edits or logged actions in more than one year). As a result of this discussion, your administrative permissions will be removed pending your return if you do not return to activity within the next month. If you wish to have these permissions reinstated should this occur, please post to the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and the userright will be restored per the re-sysopping process (i.e. as long as the attending bureaucrats are reasonably satisfied that your account has not been compromised, that your inactivity did not have the effect of evading scrutiny of any actions which might have led to sanctions, and that you have not been inactive for a three-year period of time). If you remain inactive for a three-year period of time, including the present year you have been inactive, you will need to request reinstatement at WP:RFA. This removal of access is procedural only, and not intended to reflect negatively upon you in any way. We wish you the best in future endeavors, and thank you for your past administrative efforts. MadmanBot (talk) 00:30, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Notification of imminent suspension of administrative permissions due to inactivity
Following a community discussion in June 2011, consensus was reached to provisionally suspend the administrative permissions of users who have been inactive for one year (i.e. administrators who have not made any edits or logged actions in more than one year). As a result of this discussion, your administrative permissions will be removed pending your return if you do not return to activity within the next several days. If you wish to have these permissions reinstated should this occur, please post to the Bureaucrats' noticeboard and the userright will be restored per the re-sysopping process (i.e. as long as the attending bureaucrats are reasonably satisfied that your account has not been compromised, that your inactivity did not have the effect of evading scrutiny of any actions which might have led to sanctions, and that you have not been inactive for a three-year period of time). If you remain inactive for a three-year period of time, including the present year you have been inactive, you will need to request reinstatement at WP:RFA. This removal of access is procedural only, and not intended to reflect negatively upon you in any way. We wish you the best in future endeavors, and thank you for your past administrative efforts. MadmanBot (talk) 00:30, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

title: User talk:Tompagenet


text:
Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 – January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of a colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the classic American memoir Two Years Before the Mast and as an attorney who successfully represented the U.S. government before the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War in the Prize Cases. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves and freedmen.

Early life and education
Dana was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1815 into a family that had settled in colonial America in 1640, counting Anne Bradstreet among its ancestors. His father was the poet and critic Richard Henry Dana Sr. As a boy, Dana studied in Cambridgeport under a strict schoolmaster named Samuel Barrett, alongside fellow Cambridge native and future writer James Russell Lowell. Barrett was infamous as a disciplinarian who punished his students for any infraction by flogging. He also often pulled students by their ears and, on one such occasion, nearly pulled Dana's ear off, causing the boy's father to protest enough that the practice was abolished.

In 1825, Dana enrolled in a private school overseen by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Dana later mildly praised as "a very pleasant instructor", though he lacked a "system or discipline enough to ensure regular and vigorous study." In July 1831, Dana enrolled at Harvard College, where in his freshman year his support of a student protest cost him a six-month suspension. In his junior year, he contracted measles, which in his case led to ophthalmia.

This worsening vision inspired him to take a sea voyage. But rather than going on a fashionable Grand Tour of Europe he decided, despite his social standing, to enlist as a merchant seaman.

On August 14, 1834, he departed Boston aboard the brig Pilgrim, captained by Frank Thompson, bound for Alta California, at that time still a part of Mexico. This voyage would bring Dana to a number of settlements in California (including Monterey, San Buenaventura, San Pedro, San Juan Capistrano, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and San Francisco). After witnessing Thompson's sadistic practices, including a flogging on board the ship, he vowed that he would try to help improve the lot of the common seaman. The Pilgrim collected hides for shipment to Boston, and Dana spent much of his time in California at San Diego's Point Loma curing hides and loading them onto the ship.

Dana's description of his time on Point Loma depicted love and concern for the Hawaiians who worked there alongside him. He may have been predisposed to feel positively toward them by a previous stay in Andover, Massachusetts, among evangelicals who had embraced Hawaiians in New England and sent the first Protestant missionaries to Hawaii.

Wishing to return home sooner, Dana was reassigned by the ship's owners to a different ship: the Alert. Dana gives the classic account of the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter. He describes terrifying storms and profound beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, which he calls incomparable. He found the most incredible part of the journey the weeks and weeks it took to negotiate passage against winds and storms—all the while having to race up and down the ice-covered rigging to furl and unfurl sails. At one point he had an infected tooth, and his face swelled up so that he was unable to work for several days, despite the need for all hands. He also describes the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew after the rounding of the Horn. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote, "But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle."

On September 22, 1836, Dana arrived back in Massachusetts. He then enrolled at what is now Harvard Law School, then called the Dane Law School after Nathan Dane. He graduated in 1837, and was admitted to the bar in 1840.

Career
Dana went on to specialize in maritime law. In the October 1839 issue of a magazine, he took a local judge, one of his own instructors in law school, to task for letting off a ship's captain and mate with a slap on the wrist for murdering the ship's cook, beating him to death for not "laying hold" of a piece of equipment. The judge had sentenced the captain to ninety days in jail and the mate to thirty days.

In 1841, Dana published The Seaman's Friend, which became a standard reference on the legal rights and responsibilities of sailors. He defended many common seamen in court. During his voyages he had kept a diary, and in 1840 (coinciding with his admission to the bar) he published a memoir, Two Years Before the Mast. The term "before the mast" refers to sailors' quarters, which were located in the forecastle (the ship's bow), officers' quarters being near the stern. His writing evinces his later sympathy for the oppressed. With the California Gold Rush later in the decade, Two Years Before the Mast would become highly sought after as one of the few sources of information on California.

Dana became a prominent abolitionist, helping to found the anti-slavery Free Soil Party in 1848 and representing the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854. He was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted fugitive slaves.

In 1853, Dana represented William T. G. Morton in Morton's attempt to establish that he discovered the "anaesthetic properties of ether".

In 1859, while the U.S. Senate was considering whether the United States should try to annex the Spanish possession of Cuba, Dana traveled there and visited Havana, a sugar plantation, a bullfight, and various churches, hospitals, schools, and prisons, a trip documented in his book To Cuba and Back.

During the American Civil War, Dana served as a United States Attorney, and, in the Prize Cases, successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the U.S. president had the power under the U.S. Constitution to blockade Confederate ports.

After the end of the Civil War, he resigned his office since he did not approve of President Andrew Johnson's policy of Reconstruction, which was denounced by Radical Republicans as being too moderate in regard to blacks’ civil rights and the punishment of former Confederates, and entered private practice. During 1867–1868, Dana was a member of the Massachusetts legislature and also served as a U.S. counsel in the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

On August 24, 1868, Dana wrote a letter to Attorney General William Evarts arguing that the United States should abandon the prosecution because, even though there was no doubt that Davis had committed treason, a jury in Virginia would be unlikely to convict, which "would be most humiliating to the Government and people of this country." A conviction, even "if obtained, will settle nothing in law or natural practice not now settled, and nothing in fact not now history...."

In 1868, Dana ran as an independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Essex County, Massachusetts. He lost to incumbent Republican Benjamin Butler and also received fewer votes than Democrat Otis P. Lord.

In 1876, his nomination as minister to Great Britain was defeated in the Senate by political enemies William Beach Lawrence and Benjamin Butler, partly because of a lawsuit for plagiarism brought against him for a legal textbook he had edited, Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law (8th ed., 1866). Immediately after the book's publication, Dana had been charged by the editor of two earlier editions, William Beach Lawrence, with infringing his copyright, and was involved in litigation that continued for thirteen years. In such minor matters as arrangement of notes and verification of citations the court found against Dana, but in the main Dana's notes were vastly different from Lawrence's.

In 1877, Dana was one of the counsel for the U.S. federal government, appearing before the Halifax Fisheries Commission, appointed under the Treaty of Washington (1871) to resolve outstanding issues, including fishing rights. The Commission gave an award directing the U.S. to pay $5,500,000 to the British government. Towards the end of his life he went to Europe to devote himself to the preparation of a treatise on international law, but the actual composition of this work was little more than begun when he died in Rome, January 6, 1882.

His son, Richard Henry Dana III, married Edith Longfellow, daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Additional biographical information and insights into the life of Richard Henry Dana Jr. are in the "Introductory Note" to the Harvard Classics edition of Two Years Before the Mast, edited by Charles W. Eliot, L.L.D., and published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1909. Here is an excerpt:

"Richard Henry Dana, the second of that name, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 1, 1815. He came of a stock that had resided there since the days of the early settlements; his grandfather, Francis Dana, had been the first American minister to Russia and later became chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts; his father was distinguished as a man of letters. He entered Harvard College in 1831; but near the beginning of his third year an attack of measles left his eyesight so weak that study was impossible.  Tired of the tedium of a slow convalescence, he decided on a sea voyage; and choosing to go as a sailor rather than a passenger, he shipped from Boston on August 14, 1834, on the brig Pilgrim, bound for the coast of California.  His experiences for the next two years form the subject of the present volume."

In the December following his return to Boston in 1836, Dana re-entered Harvard, the hero of his fellow students, graduating the following June. He next took up the study of law, at the same time teaching elocution in the College, and in 1840 he opened an office in Boston. While in law school he had written the narrative of his voyage, which he now published; and in the following year, 1841, issued The Seaman's Friend. Both books were republished in England and brought him an immediate reputation.

After several years of practicing law, during which he dealt largely with cases involving the rights of seamen, he began to take part in politics as an active member of the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party was founded in 1847–48 in opposition to the extension of slavery into the western U.S. territories newly acquired from Mexico.

During the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act he served as counsel on behalf of the fugitives Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns, and on one occasion suffered a serious assault as a consequence of his zeal. His prominence in these cases, along with his fame as a writer, brought him much social recognition on his visit to England in 1856. Three years later, his health gave way from overwork, and he set out on a voyage round the world, revisiting California, where he made the observations that appear in the postscript to this book. The postscript is titled, "Twenty-Four Years After."

On his return, Dana was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as United States Attorney for Massachusetts. In his argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Prize Cases, which upheld Lincoln's blockade of Southern ports, he greatly increased an already brilliant legal reputation. He spoke out in favor of African-American voting, education, property, and firearms ownership, stating:

His sentiments were echoed by future U.S. President James A. Garfield in his speeches, who agreed with Dana's message.

Namesakes

 * The point and city of Dana Point, California, located on the Pacific coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, are named for him, and a reproduction of the brig Pilgrim, on which Dana sailed around Cape Horn, was on display there by the Ocean Institute until its sinking in 2020.
 * Several schools are named in his honor:
 * Richard Henry Dana Elementary School in Dana Point, California
 * Richard Henry Dana Middle School in Arcadia, California
 * Dana Middle School in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, California
 * Richard Henry Dana Middle School in Hawthorne, California
 * Dana Middle School in San Pedro, California
 * A roadway in Coronado, California is named in his Honor. R.H. Dana Place looks across the entry to San Diego Bay towards where Richard Henry Dana, a young man of only 20 years, first set foot at San Diego, California in 1834.  There he worked and lived in a large curing house processing hides which would be shipped to Boston and made into leather goods.  It was this same view that inspired the Coronado City Council, in January 1931, to rename what was then Ada Place, as R.H. Dana Place, honoring Dana, and recognizing his accomplishments, and connection to San Diego and Coronado.
 * The R.H. Dana Patio sits along R.H. Dana Place in Coronado, California. This garden patio at Coronado Plaza was developed by the Dan McGeorge Gallery.
 * Dana Place, a street in Washington, D.C.
 * The Richard Henry Dana Branch Library in Los Angeles
 * The Dana Neighborhood Library in Long Beach, California

Selected works by Dana

 * 1840. Two Years Before the Mast . Revised 1869 by the author; revised 1911 by his son.
 * 1841. The Seaman's Friend: Containing a Treatise on Practical Seamanship, with Plates; A Dictionary of Sea Terms; Customs and Usages of the Merchant Service; Laws Relating to the Practical Duties of Master and Mariners. 1st edition; 6th edition, 1851
 * 1839. Cruelty to Seamen: Being the Case of Nichols & Couch. American Jurist and Law Magazine, October 1839, 22:92–107. This magazine was published in two volumes per year. Dana's article was republished in 1937 under the same title at Berkeley, California: The hand press of Wilder and Ellen Bentley.
 * c. 1842. An Autobiographical Sketch.
 * 1859. To Cuba and Back.
 * 1869. Twenty-Four Years After. Now included in subsequent editions of Two Years Before the Mast
 * 1871. A 2005 article in Lake Placid News, without giving any evidence, reference, or explanation, has called "How We Met John Brown" "an outright fabrication".
 * 1871. A 2005 article in Lake Placid News, without giving any evidence, reference, or explanation, has called "How We Met John Brown" "an outright fabrication".

 * 1968. The Journal. Robert F. Lucid, editor. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Six volumes of diaries from 1841–1860.
 * 2005. Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859-1860. The final section of Dana's journal (above), reprinted in the Library of America volume on Dana (Two Years Before the Mast & Other Voyages. Edited by Thomas Philbrick. New York: Library of America); it "records the 14-month circumnavigation that took Dana to California, Hawaii, China, Japan, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Europe. Written with unflagging energy and curiosity, the journal provides fascinating vignettes of frontier life in California, missionary influence in Hawaii, the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War on China, and the opening of Japan to the West, while capturing the transition from the age of sail to the faster, smaller world created by the steamship and the telegraph."

title: Richard Henry Dana Jr.


text:
Antenna (ZZ Top album)

Antenna is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band ZZ Top, released in 1994. It was the band's first album to be released on the RCA label.

The single "Pincushion", reached number 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the US. The second single "Breakaway" featured a non-album B-side: "Mary's".

Personnel

 * Billy Gibbons – lead guitar, lead and backing vocals
 * Dusty Hill – bass, keyboards, backing vocals, lead vocals on "World of Swirl", "Antenna Head", and "Deal Goin' Down", rhythm guitar on “Breakaway”.
 * Frank Beard – drums, percussion (dominated percussion in 2)

Production

 * Billy Gibbons – production
 * Bill Ham – production
 * Tom Harding – engineering
 * Joe Hardy – engineering, mixing
 * Bob Ludwig – mastering
 * Bill Bernstein – photography
 * Barbara LaBarge – photography
 * Jim Bessman – text

title: Antenna (ZZ Top album)


text:
User talk:Erwin (SUL)

Hello, Erwin. Welcome to Wikipedia.

A few tips for you to start going. (I'll send more if I see that I can help you :-)

 * Just edit stuff off the cuff for a while. We like that!
 * When you have time, check out Welcome, newcomers + the links in there.
 * You can sign your stuff on talk pages with ~ It will convert to your username + the time. "anon" is fine too.
 * If puzzled, put a question on Village pump, or feel free to ask me on my talk page if it's a very general question.
 * Most of all, have fun but take our work seriously!

-- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 23:24 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Erwin
Not sure if you still post here, but was curious if Erwin was your last name? NickBurns 23:21, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Username
Hi Erwin, I'm Erwin at nl.wikipedia.org and would like to create a global account with the username Erwin. That means that I'd like to use the name Erwin here. At the moment this isn't possible, because you've already registered this username. Would you please consider requesting a username change, so my username can be changed to Erwin? Currently there's no policy about how to deal with usernames used by different people at different projects and I hope we can solve this ourselves. Regards, Erwin85 (talk) 21:41, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

title: User talk:Erwin (SUL)


text:
Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast is a memoir by the American author Richard Henry Dana Jr., published in 1840, having been written after a two-year sea voyage from Boston to California on a merchant ship starting in 1834. A film adaptation under the same name was released in 1946.

Outbound
In the book, which takes place between 1834 and 1836, Dana gives a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is." He sails from Boston to South America and around Cape Horn to California. Dana's brig was on a voyage to trade goods from the United States for the Mexican colonial Californian California missions' and ranchos' cow hides. They traded at the ports in San Diego Bay, San Pedro Bay, Santa Barbara Channel, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay. The provenance of this history is well supported by records showing the company of Sprague and James building and launching a brig named Pilgrim in 1825 in Medford, Massachusetts.

California

Dana arrived in Alta California when it was a province of Mexico, and no longer Spanish colonial Las Californias. He gives descriptions of landing at each of the ports up and down the California coast as they existed then. The ports served (south to north) the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Pueblo de Los Angeles (and Mission San Gabriel Arcángel), Mission Santa Barbara (and Presidio of Santa Barbara), Presidio of Monterey, and Presidio of San Francisco with their very small settlements and surrounding large Mexican land grant ranchos. He also describes the coastal indigenous peoples, the Mexican Californios culture, and the immigrants' and traders' influences from other locales.

The headland bluffs near Mission San Juan Capistrano presented an obstacle to taking the cow hides to the beach for subsequent loading onto the ship. So Dana, along with others of the Pilgrims and later Alerts crews, tosses the hides from the bluffs, which he compared to flying a kite without a string. Some hides get stuck part way down the cliff and Dana is lowered with ropes to retrieve them. The headlands, along with the adjacent present day city, took on Dana's name as Dana Point.

Dana learned Spanish from the Californian Mexicans and became an interpreter for his ship. He befriended Kanaka (native people of the Sandwich Islands—Hawaiian Islands) sailors in the ports, one of whose lives Dana would save when his captain would as soon see him die. He was a witness to two floggings of Pilgrim crew members by Captain Thompson, which he believed to be undeserved and unjustified, but was powerless to do anything about them, as the captain was the law aboard ship. He spent a season on the San Diego shore preparing hides for shipment to Boston, and his journey home. Dana also makes a tellingly accurate prediction of San Francisco's future growth and significance.

Homebound
Of the return trip around Cape Horn, on his new ship the Alert, but with the same Captain Thompson, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, Dana gives the classic account. He describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, which he calls incomparable. The most incredible part perhaps is the weeks and weeks it took to negotiate passage against winds and storms—all the while having to race up and down the ice-covered rigging to furl and unfurl sails. At one point he has an infected tooth, and his face swells up so that he is unable to work for several days, despite the need for all hands. Upon reaching Staten Island (known today as Isla de los Estados), they know they have nearly come around the Horn. After the Horn has been rounded he describes the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew. There is another flogging by the captain, this time of the steward, for fighting and threatening to spill blood, but Dana seems to believe it was more justified than the previous incident in California. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote, "But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle." In his Concluding Chapter, Dana discusses his thoughts on the captain's use of corporal punishment, the possibility of laws to limit the captain's power, contrasting with the necessity of the captain to have complete authority and control of the ship, the rights of seamen, contrasting with their general reputation as a class, and aspects of any legal recourse they might have in bringing an abusive captain to justice. He also advances his ideas of promoting more religious instruction among seamen, Sunday religious observance by captains, and the benefits to be derived by more compassionate captains and religiously disciplined seamen, in bringing the men to more willingness to obey orders, which he believed would greatly reduce the necessity and incidence of punishment.

Afterwards
In 1869, Dana published a new edition which removed some content from the original and added an appendix entitled "Twenty-Four Years After". This appendix recounts his visit to California in 1859, after the Gold Rush, by which time the state had been totally transformed. During this trip, he revisited some of the sites mentioned in the book as well as seeing old friends, including some that had been mentioned in the book, and others he did not like, such as the company agent he had worked with, Alfred Robinson, who by this time was himself an author of a book on California. Dana expressed gratitude to Robinson for being polite to him, despite Dana not being kind to him in his book. He visited the Fremont mining operations in Mariposa County. Along with Jessie Fremont and her party, he went to Yosemite Valley. Stopping along the way at Clark's Station in Wawona, he described Galen Clark as a gracious host.

Dana also included the subsequent personal histories of Captain Thompson and many of the officers and crew members of the Pilgrim and Alert.

A final note records the fate of his ship, the Alert. In 1862 during the Civil War, it was captured by the Confederate commerce raider Alabama, the crew were forced into the boats, and the ship was destroyed.

Publication history
Dana's father first approached Harper and Brothers, as they were his publishers, though the Danas rejected the original offer for 10 percent in royalties after the first 1,000 sold. The manuscript, originally titled Journal, was rejected by four publishing houses after that offer from Harpers in 1839. Two Years Before the Mast was finally published in September 1840 in two versions, without credit to Dana on the title page. Dana had asked for assistance from the poet William Cullen Bryant, whose poem "Thanatopsis" was praised by Dana's father. Bryant again brought the manuscript to Harper's, hoping they would pay $500 to its author, though they ultimately paid Dana only $250 along with 24 complimentary copies. Though the book sold 10,000 copies during its first year, Dana did not receive any royalties from sales of this edition of the book.

In 1911, Dana's son, Richard Henry Dana III, added an introduction detailing the "subsequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the reader is made acquainted."

In 1909 Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot selected Two Years Before the Mast as Volume 23 of the Harvard Classics, a collection of notable literature.

Two Years Before the Mast as literature
Two Years Before the Mast was "conceived as a protest and written to improve the lot of the common sailor". The literary style provides a concrete description of a seaman's life to serve as a practical guide, and not as an adventure novel. His unpolished, laconic style achieved a literary quality, however, that influenced novelist Herman Melville, according to American essayist Wright Morris. In the following excerpt from Dana's diary, the entry expresses not only chronological information, but how a seaman "apprehends time".

"Monday, Nov. 10th. During a part of this day we were hove to, but the rest of the time were driving on, under close-reefed sails, with a heavy sea, a strong gale, and frequent squalls of hail and snow.

Tuesday, Nov. 11th. The same.

Wednesday. The same.

Thursday. The same."

This following passage, describing Dana's first sighting of an iceberg off Cape Horn, "reminds us of Melville" and "other passages seem to anticipate him". (Melville, born in 1819, was exactly four years Dana's junior, and returned from his first tour as a seaman when Two Years Before the Mast was first published in 1840):

"And there lay, floating in the ocean, several miles off, an immense, irregular mass, its top and points covered with snow, and its centre of a deep indigo color.... As far as the eye could reach, the sea in every direction was of a deep blue color, the waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light, and in the midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and valleys thrown into deep shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun....But no description can give any idea of the strangeness, splendor, and, really, the sublimity, of the sight. Its great size... its slow motion, as its base rose and sank in the water, and its high points nodded against the clouds; the dashing of the waves upon it, which, breaking high with foam, lined its base with a white crust; and the thundering sound of the cracking of the mass, and the breaking and tumbling down of huge pieces; together with its nearness and approach, which added a slight element of fear,—all combined to give to it the character of true sublimity."

The following description of the English sailor, Bill Jackson, has literary similarities to Melville's Billy Budd:

"He was tall; but you only perceived it when he was standing by the side of others, for the great breadth of his shoulders and chest made him appear but little above the middle height. His chest was as deep as it was wide; his arm like that of Hercules; and his hand "the fist of a tar—every hair a rope-yarn." With all this he had one of the pleasantest smiles I ever saw. His cheeks were of a handsome brown; his teeth brilliantly white; and his hair, of a raven black, waved in loose curls all over his head, and fine, open forehead; and his eyes he might have sold to a duchess at the price of diamonds, for their brilliancy...Take him with his well-varnished black tarpaulin stuck upon the back of his head; his long locks coming down almost into his eyes; his white duck trousers and shirt; blue jacket; and black kerchief, tied loosely round his neck; and he was a fine specimen of manly beauty... His strength must have been great, and he had the sight of a vulture. It is strange that one should be so minute in the description of an unknown, outcast sailor, whom one may never see again, and whom no one may care to hear about; but so it is. Some people we see under no remarkable circumstances, but whom, for some reason or other, we never forget. He called himself Bill Jackson...."

Writes Morris, "Dana is something more of a poet than either he or his contemporaries were aware; and that his ignorance of this gift was a loss to him as well as to us."

Legacy
A film adaptation was released in 1946.

The story was adapted into comic book form by Classics Illustrated in 1941 and 1947.

In Chapter 7 of his Is Shakespeare Dead?, Mark Twain contrasts passages from Dana's book with a passage from The Tempest to demonstrate Shakespeare's lack of seafaring knowledge, which is then further contrasted with Shakespeare's correct usage of legal terminology.

title: Two Years Before the Mast


text:
Power vacuum

In political science and political history, the term power vacuum, also known as a power void, is an analogy between a physical vacuum to the political condition "when someone in a place of power, has lost control of something and no one has replaced them." The situation can occur when a government has no identifiable central power or authority. The physical analogy suggests that in a power vacuum, other forces will tend to "rush in" to fill the vacuum as soon as it is created, perhaps in the form of an armed militia or insurgents, military coup, warlord or dictator. The term is also often used in organized crime when a crime family becomes vulnerable to competition.

Hereditary or statutory order of succession or effective succession planning are orderly ways to resolve questions of succession to positions of power. When such methods are unavailable, such as in failed dictatorships or civil wars, a power vacuum arises, which prompts a power struggle entailing political competition, violence, or (usually) both. A power vacuum can also occur after a constitutional crisis in which large portions of the government resign or are removed, creating unclear succession.

Historical examples
Historic examples include the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Time of Troubles in the Tsardom of Russia, the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the Mexican Revolution after the Porfiriato, the Russian Civil War in the aftermath of World War I, and the decrease in power of Great Britain and France in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis.

China
China is the first country still existing to have been united, and has had repeated power vacuums throughout its history. China was first unified under emperor Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE, ushering in more than two millennia in which China was governed by one or more imperial dynasties. From the start, China has experienced power vacuums after dynasties have been toppled, usually resulting in civil wars between different factions vying to form the next dynasty or political regime. These have included but are not limited to the Warring States period (475-221 BC), Three Kingdoms (220-280 AD), the Manchu conquest of China (1618-1683 AD), and the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949 AD).

During the course of the Ming treasure voyages (1405–1433), the Chinese Ming empire was the dominant political and military force within the Indian Ocean. However, in 1433, the Chinese government withdrew their treasure fleet and thus left a large void within the Indian Ocean.

Contemporary examples
In 2003, when the United States led a coalition to oust Saddam Hussein in the Iraq War, the absence of an all-out Iraqi opposition force at war with government forces meant that once the Ba'ath Party was removed, no local figures were on hand to immediately assume the now vacant administerial posts. For this reason, Paul Bremer was appointed by the United States government as the interim head of state to oversee the transition.

In other western-led interventions such as in Kosovo (1999) and Libya (2011) where the initial claim of justification in each case was a humanitarian matter, there had been active opposition fighting on the ground to oust the relevant governments (in the case of Kosovo, this meant removal of state forces from the desired territory rather than ousting the government itself). Subsequently, successor entities were immediately effective in Libya and Kosovo.

Power vacuums often occur in failed states sometimes referred to as Fragile states where the state has lost the power to prevent its citizens from forming states within states, such as in post-communist Moldova's Transnistria. The ongoing war in Sudan is an example of a power vacuum in the aftermath of the Sudanese revolution.

title: Power vacuum


text:
Department of Environment and Conservation (Western Australia)

The Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) was a department of the Government of Western Australia that was responsible for implementing the state's conservation and environment legislation and regulations. It was formed on 1 July 2006 by the amalgamation of the Department of Environment and the Department of Conservation and Land Management.

The DEC was separated on 30 June 2013 forming the Department of Parks and Wildlife (DPaW) and the Department of Environment Regulation (DER), which both commenced operations on 1 July 2013.

On 1 July 2017 the DER amalgamated with the Department of Water and the Office of the Environmental Protection Authority, to become the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation, while DPaW was merged with other agencies to form the Department of Parks and Wildlife.

Status (at dissolution, 30 June 2013)
The department was managing more than 285,000 km2, including more than nine per cent of WA's land area: its national parks, marine parks, conservation parks, regional parks, state forests and timber reserves, nature reserves, roadside reserves and marine nature reserves. It provided visitor and recreation facilities at a sustainable level for many of these.

It also supported or worked closely with the following authorities:
 * Environmental Protection Authority
 * Conservation Commission of WA
 * Keep Australia Beautiful
 * Marine Parks and Reserves Authority
 * Swan River Trust
 * Waste Authority

The total reportable visitation to DEC-managed lands and waters during the 2012-13 financial year was 16.02 million, with visitor satisfaction levels of 88%.

4,717 people were registered volunteers with the department in 2012-13 that helped in a range of projects across the state with 564,350 hours contributed.

DEC was responsible from 2007 to 2013 for protecting and conserving the state of Western Australia's environment; this included managing:
 * State forests (1,304,442 ha)
 * 99 national parks (6,246,692 ha)
 * 16 conservation parks (847,578 ha)
 * 13 marine parks (2,206,612 ha)
 * 1 marine nature reserve (132,000 ha)
 * nature reserves (10,244,167 ha)

At 30 June 2013, the total area under Department of Environment and Conservation's care was 28,531,987 ha.

The department's key responsibilities also included roles in managing, regulating and assessing aspects of the use of the state's natural resources and biodiversity, including the regulation of native vegetation clearing and pollution control. The department initiated 14 environmental prosecutions during 2012–13, involving a broad range of charges including pollution, unauthorised clearing of native vegetation and illegal dumping. At 30 June 2013, eight environmental prosecutions remained before the courts. There were an additional 18 pending cases that, subject to the evidentiary standard being met, could result in prosecution or other sanction.

DEC was also responsible for the wildlife conservation project Western Shield.

The department was also in charge of wildfire prevention and suppression on its land as well as fire prevention in unallocated Crown land.

The indicative burn target for 2012–13 in the south-west forest regions was 200,000 hectares. In 2012–13, DEC achieved 23,468 hectares in the south-west forest regions, including about 6,410 hectares that were burnt for pine plantation protection.

The combination of unsuitable weather conditions, fuels remaining dry due to summer conditions extending into autumn, and enhanced requirements in prescribed burn planning and risk management as a result of the 2011 Margaret River bushfire contributed to a significant reduction of the area able to be prescribed burnt this year.

The average area of burning achieved over the past 10 years has been about 163,019 hectares per annum.

A further 6,023,884 hectares was burnt in the Kimberley, Pilbara, Goldfields, Midwest, Wheatbelt and South Coast regions. The burns were carried out on DEC-managed lands as well as on unallocated Crown lands and unmanaged reserves within these regions.

DEC staff attended and monitored 676 bushfires throughout the state in 2012–13, which burnt about 5,477,394 hectares. The causes of these fires were:
 * lightning—28 per cent (above the 10-year average of about 24 per cent)
 * deliberately lit or arson-caused fires—37 per cent (below the 10-year average of about 43 per cent)
 * accidental fires—16 per cent
 * escapes from private burns—4 per cent
 * escapes from DEC burns—0 per cent
 * other causes—4 per cent
 * unknown—11 per cent.

Some of the most severe bushfires the department had to suppress, in chronological order, included:

Preceding agencies
National parks (and the earlier forms) in Western Australia were under:
 * Department of Lands and Surveys: 1 January 1890 – (partly split) 31 December 1895
 * Wood and Forests Department: 1 January 1896 – 31 December 1918
 * Forests Department: 1 January 1919 – 21 March 1985
 * State Gardens Board:   15 December 1920 – 30 April 1957  (Parks and Reserves Act 1895)
 * National Parks Board:   1 May 1957 – 30 July 1977
 * Department of Fisheries and Fauna: 1 October 1964 – 31 December 1973
 * National Parks Authority:      1 August 1977 – 15 April 1985  (National Parks Authority Act 1976)
 * Wildlife section of the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife: 1 January 1974 – 21 March 1985
 * Department of Environment: 1 July 2004 - 30 June 2006
 * Department of Conservation and Land Management:    22 March 1985 – 30 June 2006  (Conservation and Land Management Act 1984)

Vehicles
The department maintained and coordinated a range of specialist equipment and emergency response vehicles. This included pumpers, water bombers and tankers and other equipment relating to operations involving search and rescue and firefighting.