Stanley E. Hilton: um grande historiador, uma bela homenagem (Fort Polk, LA)

Homenagem a um amigo:

LSU professors receive Commander’s Award

Fort Polk, 5.09.2014

Story by Maj. Gabriel Ramirez

From left to right: Louisiana State University Drs. Stanley E. Hilton, Karl Roider and William A. Clark receive the Commander's Award for Public Service May 9 at Fort Polk. The professors received the award for their commitment and dedication to the Master of Arts in liberal arts program at Fort Polk

FORT POLK, La. - Three Louisiana State University professors, who have long supported Fort Polk and the Joint Readiness Training Center, were awarded the Commander’s Award for Public Service during a ceremony May 9 at Fort Polk.
Drs. Karl Roider, William A. Clark and Stanley E. Hilton received the award from Col. Timothy J. McAteer, commander of Operations Group at the JRTC.
The three professors were recognized for their commitment to continued education for service and family members stationed at Fort Polk. Collectively the professors have been making the three-hour drive from Baton Rouge to Fort Polk since 1993.
“It was just a really wonderful program. It never would have happened if it were not for these gentlemen and what they did. They would drive here on Friday night … they would drive all the way up here, teach the class, drive back on Sunday night and then go teach,” said McAteer. 
The LSU program offered a graduate degree of Master of Arts in liberal arts and has graduated 217 students during its tenure. Notable alumni from the program went on to achieve high ranking within the U.S. military to include a U.S. Army general and numerous U.S. Army colonels.
Roider has been teaching at for LSU for 46 years and was the creator of the LSU Master of Arts in liberal arts graduate program here at Fort Polk. The program ran for 21 years starting in 1993 and will graduate its last alumnus with one final student waiting to take his final exam. Accompanying Roider, was Hilton who became director of the program in 1998 and had been with the university for 38 years. Hilton retired from the university last year.
True to their dedication to teaching, the professors gave a leader professional development class to the leaders of operations group prior to the awards ceremony. The purpose of the class was to discuss Eastern and Western European history, culture and their impact to current international politics. The class was coordinated by the Operations Group as several members of the unit are alumni of this program. 
The LPD was conducted by Roider and Clark. Clark has been with the university for 23 years and has been teaching at the Fort Polk campus for the last 15 years. All three men expressed their pride in having been associated with the program at Fort Polk. 
The Commander's Award for Public Service is awarded to recognize service or achievements that contribute significantly to the accomplishment of the mission of an Army activity, command or staff agency.

Read more: http://www.dvidshub.net/news/130089/lsu-professors-receive-commanders-award#.U7IxnI1dXyJ#ixzz36BaX7HdO

Leis no mundo luso-hispanico, e no mundo anglo-saxao: Stanley Hilton

Discutindo pela internet com meu amigo Stanley Hilton, brasilianista e professor de história da América Latina na Universidade da Louisiana, em Baton Rouge, sobre as diferenças entre o respeito à lei no mundo ibérico e no mundo inglês e americano, ele me forneceu toda uma explicação, na verdade uma aula completa, que me permito transcrever aqui para deleite dos leitores deste blog:

In my Latin American history courses, I used to tell students that the difference between law in Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic countries was that, in the Latin tradition dating back to the Romans, law was normative, i.e., it posited an ideal situation, whereas in A-S countries it reflected custom or social practice. So the US Constitution, for example, reflected deeply-rooted “democratic” traditions and, therefore, it endured; in Latin American countries, the constitutions drawn up during the era of independence from Spain/Portugal reflected an ideal—and, hence, they proved unworkable in most cases.  The symbol of this phenomenon, in the colonial period, was the Consejo de las Indias –a body that sat in Spain, thousands of miles away from the New World, and hence thousands of miles away from the geographic and social reality of the colonies, and drew up detailed laws governing all aspects of colonial life.  The laws were unworkable, so people disobeyed the law on a daily basis.  In Luso-Brazilian terms, they found a “jeito” of circumventing laws and regulations.  As you know, there was the vice-regal mechanism, in Spanish America, of obedezco-pero-no-cumplo.  If a law reaching, say, New Spain, was so impractical, a viceroy could proclaim his loyalty and obedience (“obedezco”), but suspend implementation of the new law (“pero no cumplo”) until the Consejo could consider the reasons (which he would put in petition form) why he thought the law was not a good one.  It was used rarely because  thousands of laws were churned out by the Consejo.  Down through the generations, Latin Americans were socialized to think that disobeying laws was not necessarily immoral because they were so out of harmony with local conditions. I remember a Mexican acquaintance humorously saying to me in a car fifty years ago, as he ran traffic light after traffic light and noticed how nervous I had become,  “Las leyes, como las mujeres, fueron hechas para ser violadas”—this itself shows how, in popular custom, the attitude toward law was not “Anglo-Saxon.”  And, of course, an extensively corrupt public bureaucracy was one outgrowth of that (Hispanic) attitude toward law.  It is no coincidence that the most corrupt state in the U.S. is Louisiana, whose legal tradition in rooted in Spanish and Naopoleonic concepts of law.

Eu mesmo costumo dizer que a diferença básica entre um mundo e outro se situa no seguinte plano:
No mundo anglo-saxão, tudo o que não estiver expressamente proibido por leis, ou por alguma disposição qualquer do sistema legal, está ipso-facto permitido aos espíritos empreendedores, que podem formar rapidamente uma empresa para explorar alguma atividade econômica qualquer.
No mundo português -- e era assim também no mundo ibérico e hispano-americano, e suponho que continue sendo assim -- tudo o que não fosse especialmente concedido pelo poder real, por meio de um alvará régio, um ordenamento qualquer do soberano, estava literalmente proibido a todo e qualquer súdito da Coroa.
Creio que não deixamos de ser súditos do Estado, e estamos proibidos de fazer qualquer coisa, antes de conseguir uma permissão qualquer.
Segundo o último Doing Business Brazil, leva mais ou menos 120 dias (talvez mais) para conseguir constituir uma empresa e o empresário começa pagando antes de ganhar qualquer coisa (e depois ainda costuma entregar quase a metade do que ganha para o Estado, sob diversas formas de impostos, tributos, taxas, contribuições, propinas, etc.).
Como é que vocês querem o Brasil crescendo dessa forma?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A frase do dia: com pontuacao e sem... - Stanley Hilton

Um amigo historiador, ou um historiador amigo, depende da ordem e da pontuação, me envia duas frases, que evidenciam a importância da pontuação.
Concordo inteiramente com a segunda frase, menos, ou nada, com a primeira...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A WOMAN WITHOUT HER MAN IS NOTHING.

A WOMAN--WITHOUT HER, MAN IS NOTHING.

Enviado por Stanley Hilton

Baton Rouge, August 12, 2013

Uma frase da politica, e da Historia - Oswaldo Aranha

"Em política não há moral, não há amizade, não há lealdade. Ela destrói tudo, quando o interesse exige."

Oswaldo Aranha, 11 de janeiro de 1934

Cf. Stanley Hilton, Oswaldo Aranha, uma biografia

Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 1994, p. 176.