Nations and Communities

This past January, Donald Trump began a second, non-consecutive term in the White House.Having campaigned on an "America First" agenda, the new president immediately began signing executive orders to execute that vision. 1 To many observers, the common thread linking these actions, which ranged from declaring a national border emergency to instructing federal agencies to follow a two-gender policy, was obvious. 2 But to the extent that they may place "America first, " they raise a number of fundamental questions.Which groups, for instance, are being invoked with the use of the word "America"?Roughly half of the American people cast their ballots for a different presidential candidate, and many plan to resist the Trump administration's agenda.Four hundred and thirty languages are spoken in the US, more than a third of which are Indigenous.A majority of US citizens are White, but sometime in the next two decades that will stop being true.Three in ten adults are religiously unaffiliated.So who, exactly, is "America"?And what does it mean to place America "first"?Does that mean retreating from the global community or dissolving relationships between nations?Does it suggest that the interests of the nation and its people can only be advanced at the expense of others?Is the movement to "Make America Great Again" isolationist by its very nature?Is it imperialist or neocolonial?Does it represent some new way of situating the US in the global context?Such questions are currently unanswered.But these kinds of questions are not new.Looking to the past as a storehouse of experiments in living and meaning-making, historians have practiced ways of looking, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing that are particularly useful in a moment such as this.The articles in this issue look at different national communities and international currents-here at home in the US, where HEQ is located, as well as abroad.Collectively, ' America First' in Reviewing Foreign Aid, " Reuters, Jan

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