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Sub-Urban or Post-Rural: Suburban Development as a Two-Way Street in the Mid-Twentieth Century Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Steven Conn
This article argues that because a center–periphery model has dominated our understanding of postwar suburban growth we have failed to fully understand the rural dimensions of that growth. That misunderstanding resulted from the urban orientation of sociologists who studied the suburbs. As a consequence, we have also not appreciated the extent to which rural political outlooks shaped the postwar backlash
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Blackface Shakespeare: Thomas D. Rice and the Return of Jim Crow as Otello Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-03-06 ADAM KITZES
Thomas D. Rice's Otello Burlesque represents the first full performance to link Shakespearean burlesque with blackface minstrelsy on the early American stages. This disturbing milestone has its origins in a pressing need, on Rice's part, to expand the range of his signature persona, the “original Jim Crow.” Rice developed his script during an extended hiatus, following a successful tour of England
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Constructions of Racial Savagery in Early Twentieth-Century US Narratives of White Civilization Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-19 MARGARITA ARAGON
This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses
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The White Fraud: White Elephants, Siam, and Comparative Racialization Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-08 ROSS BULLEN
In this paper I examine P. T. Barnum's attempt to bring the first “sacred white elephant” to America, and his subsequent “white elephant war” with rival showman Adam Forepaugh, through the lens of Afro-Asian comparative racialization. I look at several accounts of white elephants that describe their skin color in terms of the US's Black/white race dichotomy and ask why this animal was a popular figure
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The Anarchy of Children's Archives: Citizenship and Empire in the Global 1930s Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-08 EMILY MURPHY
This article considers how the archive, particularly material produced by children, destabilizes the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign, citizenship and empire. Through its analysis of a wave of educational reform in the United States during the 1930s, which encouraged global citizenship among the young, it demonstrates how children not typically associated with global citizenship – those
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Reading America, Reading Rodriguez: Exploring American Literature at an English Prison Book Group Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2024-02-08 JOSEPHINE METCALF, LAURA SKINNER
This article details a cutting-edge Knowledge Exchange initiative which advanced the ongoing partnership between the University of Hull and HMP Hull, and stemmed from the annual BAAS conference, held in Hull in April 2022. The purpose of the article is to explore the value of critiquing US culture in a nonacademic setting and the extent to which a prison reading group presents a productive opportunity
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Ellen Craft's “Spanish” Masquerade: Racially (Mis)Reading Hispanicism in Her Cross-Dressing, Feigning Disability, and Running to Sea Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-12-18 ROSA MARTINEZ
An overlooked advertisement, entitled “An Incident at the South” (1849), calls attention to Ellen Craft's Spanish masquerade during her 1848 escape from American slavery. The author underscores her masculine costume, feigning disability, running to sea, and “a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction.” Despite contemporary criticism, the advertisement asserts Spanish-ness in the production
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“The Best Place to Help the Panthers Is at Home”: Dutch Black Panther Solidarity in Pursuit of a Revolution Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-10-03 DEBBY ESMEÉ DE VLUGT
In 1969, a group of activists in the Netherlands formed the Solidariteitscomité met de Black Panthers, or Black Panther Solidarity Committee, intended to support the Black Panther Party through a platform of public education, fund-raising, and political protest. Their efforts were part of a broader campaign for European solidarity launched by the African Americans themselves earlier that year. This
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The Lake Mohonk Conferences on International Arbitration (1895–1916): Evoking and Mobilizing an “International Mind” Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-30 DANIEL HUCKER
Between 1895 and 1916, a Conference on International Arbitration met annually at Lake Mohonk, New York, seeking to implement arbitration as a substitute for war. This article considers the aims, effects, and limitations of these conferences, including the problematic assumptions underpinning their apparent progressivism. The belief that an enlightened public opinion would play a decisive role in advancing
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“An Itchin ’Roun the Heart You Can't Get at to Scratch”: Exploring the Emotion of Love in Black Enslaved Communities of the Nineteenth Century Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-11 XAVIER READER
Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized
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The Showmen's Culture: Life, Labor, and Negotiated Loyalty among Traveling Entertainment Workers in the Gilded Age Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-08-07 MADELINE STEINER
This article explores the formation of a “showmen's culture” among circus employees in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, a cultural identity which had the effect of diffusing labor conflicts in this developing industry. The showmen's culture created an affective bond between employees of all levels, from manual laborers, to middle managers, to company owners. This article links cultural
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The Latin American Bullring: US Evangelicals and the Reception of Anti-Protestant Violence from Cold War Colombia Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-29 DAVID C. KIRKPATRICK
In the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, American Baptist preacher Billy Graham and US President John F. Kennedy barnstormed South America through overlapping tours in 1961 and 1962. Kennedy's presidency has often been presented as an intermission in the drama of evangelical political power, but grassroots activism provides new angles for analysis at the intersection of the US and Latin America. While
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Wages, Work, and the Industrial Past in Three Contemporary Labor Market Narratives Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-29 JEFFREY GONZALEZ
This article analyzes Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), John Wells's Company Men (2011), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) to limn the place of manufacturing labor in recent US cultural memory. Timelines that focus on labor forms (i.e. “postindustrial”) often reproduce elements of the persistent US mythologizing of industrial labor's virtues. Nottage's and Rivera's works puncture this ideological figuration
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From State Warfare to State Welfare: Family Values in Leonard Freed's Police Work (1980) Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-06-08 KIMBERLY SCHREIBER
This article examines Leonard Freed's 1980 Police Work, a photobook that documents the activities of the New York City Police Department from 1973 to 1979. It contextualizes the photobook within this liminal decade after the fullness of the civil rights movement and before the rise of austerity politics. The photobook, I argue, produces a visual repertoire of policing that resolves the crisis of legitimacy
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Better Intoned Than Read: Sound and Matter in God's Trombones Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-05-04 JIM HILTON
This paper offers close textual readings of poems from James Weldon Johnson's 1927 collection, God's Trombones, uncovering in Johnson's language resonant clues to his thought. In contrast to his disaffected novel The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), Johnson's sermon–poems, through reengagement with the folkways of traditional African American worship, forge out a more potent creative space
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Roberto Clemente on the Black/Brown Color Line Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-10 JOSEPH DARDA
When Afro-Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955, baseball writers identified him as another in a long line of Black stars remaking the game. When he died at the end of 1972, they remembered him as something else: a great Latin athlete. Clemente had traveled from Black to brown. Most historians trace the emergence of a panethnic Latinx identity to a post-civil
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Doom Town, Nevada Test Site, and the Popular Imagination of Atomic Disaster Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-17 JOHN WILLS
This article explores the effect of Doom Town, a civil defense experiment conducted at Nevada Test Site in March 1953 and May 1955, on American attitudes toward the atom. Initially conceived by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) as a means to progress knowledge and understanding of how to survive nuclear attack, the creation and destruction of two “Survival Towns” in the Nevadan desert
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Eat Your Way to Health: A History of Ability in the Progressive Era Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-15 NINA MACKERT
The article introduces the approach of a critical ability history by analyzing Progressive Era diet advice. It shows how calorie counting reframed health as an ability resulting from individuals’ responsible self-conduct. At that time, novel understandings of bodies and health, techniques of measuring them, and hopes of improving them in the name of eugenics and industrial capitalism suggested that
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From Austerity to Disentitlement: The Transformation of Food Stamps in the US, 1969–1984 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-02-08 CAITLIN RATHE
This article traces the changing terrain of the food stamp program in the pivotal decade of the 1970s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to put an end to hunger in America, “for all time.” However, in the fifteen years following this announcement, policymakers erected boundaries around the scope of public food welfare programs. In this article, the author highlights key continuities between
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Moderate Southern Senators, Hunger, and Welfare in the Long 1960s Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-24 DAVID T. BALLANTYNE
This article traces the approach of moderate southern Senators toward domestic hunger and welfare in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Often overlooked in scholarly accounts, these Senators formed a significant minority of the southern delegation. Their behavior demonstrates both the continued possibilities of a more inclusive southern politics after the mid-1960s and the importance of moderate southerners
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Writing the History of Pandemics in the Age of COVID-19 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-20 STEPHEN COLBROOK
Since early 2020, pundits and commentators have scrutinized the history of past pandemics for answers to a series of questions shaped by COVID-19: what strategies have worked in the past to stem the spread of contagion? How long do epidemics typically last? Are vaccines an effective “magic bullet” against infectious diseases? The coronavirus crisis spawned comparisons to diseases as epidemiologically
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Exchange: A Signature Pedagogy for American Studies in the UK Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-20 LYDIA PLATH, ELIZABETH DUCLOS-ORSELLO, HILARY EMMETT, NICOLE KING, GYORGY TOTH, REBECCA STONE, JON WARD
What does it mean to teach American studies in UK higher education? We teach “American” content in our classes, modules, and degree programmes, but do we also conduct our teaching in ways specific to American studies? Lee Shulman describes a “signature pedagogy” as “the forms of instruction that leap to mind when we first think about the preparation of members of particular professions,” encompassing
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Californians and Others: Children's Health, Nutrition, and Welfare in Depression-Era Migrant Camps Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-12-08 JACK HODGSON
This state-level study emphasizes the influence of local administration on welfare provision, even amidst a huge national New Deal effort. It interrogates John Steinbeck's allegation in “Starvation under the Orange Trees” that migrant children died avoidable deaths in Depression-era California because of discriminatory policies and apathetic officials. Steinbeck's reportage was a political vehicle
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The Trouble with Sumner Welles: Sexuality, Race, and the Limits of Mythmaking in Queer History Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-11-14 CHRIS PARKES
Sumner Welles occupies a queer place in American history. Despite his prominence, his reputation among diplomatic historians has been overshadowed by the sex scandal that occasioned his demise. Conversely, he has attracted cursory attention from scholars of the history of sexuality. This article examines that historiographic dialectic. By analyzing literature about Welles, conducting a close reading
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Gossip on Main Street: Visualizing Oral Exchange in Mid-Twentieth-Century Small-Town Photography and Art Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-14 WILL CARROLL
This article explores the visual representation of gossip, rumourmongering, storytelling, and other analogues of oral exchange in mid twentieth-century small-town American visual narrative. I herein examine two key visual artists of the interwar period – photographer Ben Shahn and painter Norman Rockwell – and their place within the small-town narrative form, as well as Life magazine and its institutional
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The Political Uses of Food Protests: Analyzing the 1910 Meat Boycott Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-14 ALICE BÉJA
In 1910, a meat boycott spread through the United States. Tens of thousands of people pledged not to eat meat for thirty days to demand lower prices and protest the practices of the Meat Trust. The movement, though its outcomes were limited, was supported by consumer organizations, labor unions, lawmakers, suffragists, and women's clubs. It thus intersected with struggles that were at the heart of
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The Oppens: Disability, Disease, and the Authorship of Late Work Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-03 JOHN DUNN
Every artist has their last works, but not all are “late works,” as theorized by Edward Said. By revisiting George Oppen’s late poems, I challenge established preconceptions about late-life creativity that have typically emphasized social withdrawal, despair, and finality in his work. Emphasis placed on lateness, I argue, obscures material conditions of textual production, particularly coauthoring
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Sweep the Nation by Song: The Townsend Plan, Old-Age Pensions, and Popular Music Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-10-03 SIMON BUCK
This article unpacks the music of the Townsend Plan, an ambitious Depression-era pension proposal, and the overlooked, yet deeply influential, national movement of its supporters, which aimed to simultaneously eradicate old-age poverty and revive the national economy. As well as providing a musical account of the media strategies, political tactics, and institutional culture of Townsendism, this article
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Rabbi Balfour Brickner, Interreligious Dialogue, and the Ironies of Liberal Zionism in America, 1967‒1980 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-11 DOUG ROSSINOW
After the June 1967 Middle East war, liberal Zionism in the United States was transformed from an assumption into an embattled claim. From the 1940s to the 1960s, most Americans had assumed that liberalism and Zionism went together naturally. Only under pressure of criticism did liberal Zionists emerge as a self-aware faction within American Zionism. Starting in 1967, among the first to question the
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Duck Fights: Walt Disney versus Dudu Geva and the Politics of Americanization in Late Twentieth-Century Israel Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-20 SHAUL MITELPUNKT
In September 1991 Walt Disney's legal representatives in Israel sued prolific Israeli cartoonist Dudu Geva for using the figure of Donald Duck without permission. The case, which worked its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, sparked a broader conversation in Israel about the place of American cultural icons and idioms in Israeli life. While existing treatments emphasize Jewish Israeli optimism with
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Erasing Minds: Behavioral Modification, the Prison Rights Movement, and Psychological Experimentation in America's Prisons, 1962–1983 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-05-16 ZOE COLLEY
This article explores the development of behavioral modification programs inside penitentiaries during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus upon how such tactics were used to crush dissent and silence incarcerated people who challenged the prison regime. First, it explores how psychology became an influential force in the operation of many penitentiaries from the 1950s. Second, it considers the role that
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Global Mass Culture, Mobile Subjectivities, and the Southern Landscape: The Bicycle in the New South, 1887–1920 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-04-21 NATHAN CARDON
At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern safety bicycle and the cultures that surrounded it were global in scale. In tracing the use and adoption of the bicycle in the South, this article reveals the ways in which the everyday experiences of local culture intersected with the world. It argues that the subjectivity of riding a bicycle transformed the ways in which white southerners experienced
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Benjamin Smith Lyman and Cosmopolitan Vegetarianism Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-03-29 CHRISTINE M. E. GUTH
Studies of the development of vegetarianism in the United States between the Civil War and World War I emphasize the distinctly American character the movement assumed during this period. They take a top-down prescriptive perspective that emphasizes celebrated advocates of a meatless diet such as William Metcalfe, Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, and J. H. Kellogg, ignoring the often humdrum reality
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A Celestial Doctrine: James Turrell, Art, and Technology in Cold War Los Angeles Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-03-29 AMANDA C. WATERHOUSE
This article examines sculptor James Turrell's late 1960s Art & Technology residency at Garrett Corporation, an aerospace and defense subcontractor based in Los Angeles. It considers Turrell's early life, his participation in the residency through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his and collaborators’ subsequent production, to show that artists could interact with the Cold War military–industrial
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Making the Third Ghetto: Race, Gender, and Family Homelessness in Washington, DC, 1977–1989 Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-03-07 NICOLE M. GIPSON
This article posits that the emergency shelter system which emerged in the 1970s, first as an informal network of local and faith-based assistance and then institutionalized by the late 1980s, was Washington, DC's third ghetto. Defining this “new,” visible homelessness in the context of the third ghetto exposes its points of convergence with the second ghetto in the increasing use of welfare hotels
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“I Take the Pictures as I See Them”: Doris Derby as Womanist, Activist and Photographer in the Civil Rights Movement Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-02-11 EMILY BRADY
Doris Derby's photographic archive offers a powerful perspective on the civil rights movement that has yet to be critically or academically engaged with. Derby, an activist, photographer, and educator who has appeared in such texts as Hands on the Freedom Plow (2010) and in such collections as Julian Cox's Road to Freedom (2008), is a gateway figure to a richer, more nuanced visual history of the movement
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Horsepower: Animals, Automobiles, and an Ethic of (Car) Care in Early US Road Narratives Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-26 DANIEL BOWMAN
From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described
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Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-19 CRISTINA STANCIU
Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent
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Sleepwalking, Class Mobility, and the Search for the Social Origins of Populism in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2022-01-10 WAYNE M. REED
This paper argues that Brown's sleepwalkers in Edgar Huntly offer us an early figuration for the problems inherent in the phenomenon we now refer to as “populism.” Both populism and sleepwalking function through paradoxical and incongruent forms of expression that appear incoherent. The most prominent explanations that account for this paradoxical form of expression rely on an analysis of the breakdown
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The Post-World War II World Order and the Unresolved Cultural Legacies of the Korean War Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-27 JEEHYUN LIM
The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies
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In Practice: Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-27 EITHNE QUINN, ELSA DEVIENNE, J. T. ROANE, ALEXIS YOUNG, CHRISTINE OKOTH, JOHN WILLS, FRANCES HENDERSON
I have been thinking a lot about environmental pedagogy in American studies, especially since I started teaching a third-year interdisciplinary course, Climate Change & Culture Wars, which focusses on the post-1970s US. I wanted to know more about how others are approaching the topic as we face up to looming climate and ecological collapse. University teachers and learners across disciplines are reckoning
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Gordon Keith Chalmers and the Politics of Advanced Placement Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-20 ANN ABRAMS
This article investigates the role of mid-century conservatism in shaping the College Board's Advanced Placement program. Kenyon president Gordon Keith Chalmers and superintendent of New Trier public schools William Cornog, who led the committee that directly gave rise to the AP Program, understood themselves as classically liberal but socially conservative, and their proposed program was rooted in
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Competing Fantasies and Alternative Realities: Salman Rushdie's The Golden House Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-13 DOLORES RESANO
This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left
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Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, £12.99). Pp. 232. isbn 978 0 1906 2536 8. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 TIM LACY,ADAM Q. STAUFFER,A. KRISTEN FOSTER,JENNIFER RATNER-ROSENHAGEN
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Ery Shin, Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2020, $61.15). Pp. 224. isbn 978 0 8173 2063 8. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 ROBIN STYLES
various texts, and perhaps a little more suggestive looseness in the connections it makes between the many texts it discusses (the tightness of the argument, a strength in terms of the book’s clarity and organization, sometimes feels a little restrictive). As I observed at the start of this review, though, the book itself suggests there is much more to be said on this topic, on environmental justice
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Katharina Donn, The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2021, £34.99). Pp. 160. isbn 978 0 3674 5746 4. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 CATHY DONDELINGER
tivity, queer poetics, and the desert ecology of Sonora (in northwest Mexico) and Arizona. This is a poetic and thought-provoking study, one marked by its expansive cultural and theoretical reference points and by its effort to enact new modes of sensorial solidarity through its own writing practices. The latter comes at the cost of an occasional lack of analytical clarity and consistency. But overall
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Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020, $99.00 cloth, $30.00 paperback). Pp. 233. isbn 978 1 4968 2970 2. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 MATTHEW WYNN SIVILS
executions of plotters only served to terrify those still under investigation to come up with information that might satisfy the courts. Whites had created a feedback loop, whereby whites terrified by the prospect of a bloody insurrection used terror tactics on the enslaved population to confirm their own worst nightmares. Something that Sharples might have addressed in greater depth is the increasing
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Julian Murphet, Faulkner's Media Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, £53.00). Pp. 296. isbn 978 0 1906 6424 4. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 RICHARD GODDEN
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Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales (eds.), We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020, $26.95). Pp. 264. isbn 978 1 4780 1083 8. Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-12-01 WILLIAM D. LOPEZ
example – see and approach issues in a similar fashion. The book addresses interdependence and the reality that, when concerned with campaigns for legitimacy and civil rights – campaigns that shape how the state perceives an individual or a community’s existence – conflict and divisions exist between groups who share a similar oppressed relationship with the state, and that how they address such tension
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“A Sort of Public Living Room”: Ignorance and the Racial Management of Disorder in Postwar Los Angeles Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-29 VINCENT CHABANY-DOUARRE
Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their
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How White Americans Became Irish: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Whiteness Journal of American Studies Pub Date : 2021-11-17 LIAM KENNEDY
The origin stories of Irish America have been core narratives within the “making-of-America” discourse of the nation's founding and development and were especially potent in the cementing, in the mid-twentieth century, of the idea of the US as “a nation of immigrants.” It is an idea that has done significant psychological as well as cultural and political work for white ethnics in the US, glossing