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The article focuses on the formation of neoconservative anticommunist in America. The issue of communism has led to the presence of anticommunist movement. Arno J. Mayer, of Yale University, found two groups constituting this movement which include the Social Democratic League of America and the Anticommunists of the Anglo-American Right. However, the primary aim of the groups has brought them to unite and form the neoconservative anticommunist, to interfere with communist activities.

The article reports on the massive protests of the labor union against oppressive tactics of J.P. Stevens & Co., a giant textile company in the United States. Thousands of people from across the United States took part in a massive protests against Stevens. Massive protests were witnessed against a giant textile company that was constantly violating the law. The company was reluctant to recognize its workers' right to organize. Many companies across the United States have emulated the tactics that J.P. Stevens had initiated in the 1960s and 1970s.

The interventions of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock into 1870s popular illustrations created some surprising - and largely unintended - consequences. Not only did the man who defined modern American censorship goad into existence the radical free speech movement, but his manipulations of 1870s visual culture also heightened racial stereotyping in public print. His behind-the-scenes negotiations led illustrated newspaper editors to erase white sexuality, which they replaced with stories of interracial rape of white women by black men. In fostering both the rise of the free press movement and the selective racialization of visual culture, Comstock left an indelible mark on modern representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to racial justice and native American rights during the period of President Harry S. Truman, with specific reference to Rice incident in the U.S. Rice incident is associated with Raymond Rice, an eleven-year veteran of the United States army who had been killed in Korean War. Refusal for his burial at Sioux City's Memorial Park Cemetery evoked controversies. The Rice incident is rich in drama and significance, for it illuminates and integrates three larger themes. The first is the character of Truman, a President whose historical reputation has fluctuated over the years. Second, the Rice affair says something about how mid-twentieth-century liberals approached the issue of race. Last and most important, the rice saga resonated among an array of groups within the U.S.

This paper uses some key scholarship on ethnicity, including work by Glazer, Moynihan, Sollors, and Hollinger, as a backdrop for re-examining specific plays by Arthur Miller, especially The Crucible and After the Fall. While looking closely at distinctive expressions of ethnicity related to Miller's Jewish-American status, the paper argues that the playwright should not be thought of as a "pluralist" or "cosmopolitanist" but rather as a "universalist." Miller deserves distinctive credit for his ability to invoke situations where rhetoric transcends the particularities of ethnicity and sheds light not just on American, or Jewish, or Jewish-American history, but also, for example, on the current situation in the Middle East. The playwright also demonstrates how rigid identification with one side of a conflict can blind us to the omnipresence of evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a look at the 1776 revolution in Virginia during the colonization of Great Britain. Categories of the revolution's social conflict; Effects of the 1775 Third Virginia Convention on the state's international trade; Ideological consequences of the Loudoun County uprising.

The article focuses on Ebenezer Smith Platt, a young British colonial, confined in London's infamous Newgate prison during 1777. On February 17, John Wilkes, the controversial politician, pamphleteer, and propagandist, rose to address the British House of Commons to illustrate the oppressive, unwarrantable and alienating effects of the proposed act on Americans by citing the case of Platt. Platt, whom Wilkes identified as an American merchant from Georgia, accused of treason, had allegedly been denied his basic judicial right to habeas corpus, and Wilkes intimated that the notoriety of this case was influencing the American commissioners in Paris to seek a French alliance. Ebenezer Smith Platt was possessed of a prominent family lineage--one that reached back to New England's first Puritan settlements. The travels of Ebenezer began during his Long Island boyhood. By the late 17605 Jonas Platt had taken his family to New York City, leaving his elderly father and half-brother Jeremiah to administer the family's extensive Suffolk County landholdings.

In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the representation of American everyday life and the language of the legal system in the work of Charles Reznikoff. It draws comparisons between Reznikoff's accounts of the lives of immigrants to America in his work, and Jacques Derrida's experience of colonial relationships as described in his book Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. Charles Reznikoff was the son of Russian Jews who moved to America to escape the pogroms of the late nineteenth century. His parents spoke Yiddish and Russian, his grandparents spoke Hebrew, and Reznikoff's first language was English. This familial linguistic complexity was further added to by his associations with experimental modernist poetry and poetics through the “Objectivists,” an environment that provided him with the poetic forms in which to explore relationships between language, experience and its representation. I cite two other linguistic contexts: that of the law, acquired through his legal training, and that of commerce and sales, acquired through working as a hat salesman for his parents' business. Reznikoff therefore had no naturalized relationship between language and either family or national identity, or between language and place. I use Derrida's notion of “a first language that is not my own” to explore the implications for Reznikoff's poetry, and particularly the relationship between the specific accounts of experience in Testimony and the more general notions of nation and justice. While I conclude that a concern of the poems is always language, and what language means in different contexts, the poems also seek to connect with the material consequences of injustice for the fleshly bodies of the victims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, "boat people," and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigrant-friendly USA. This paper will examine the meanings and implications of the appellation "Vietnamese-American" as defined within a body of nonfiction children's literature. It will highlight how these texts negotiate questions related to refugee status, immigration, identity and belonging, contributing in many instances to a bland re-creation of a formerly oppressed but now coherent and increasingly prosperous and Americanized people. The children's literature plays an important role in defining the relatively new community to itself and to mainstream America. In its dissemination of truisms about Confucian heritages and stereotypes of "model minorities" the literature reveals as much about American ideological desires as it does about "the new Americans." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between American studies and affective production? In what specific ways does our scholarship participate in the creation, circulation, and appreciation of affective practices ? These questions provide a foundation for understanding the sometimes obscure connections between academic scholarship and mass culture. I argue that the history of American studies involves a specific and influential imbrication with affective production that has shaped notions of identity and affect since the nineteenth century. Usually this history is understood in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of nativist national identity ; this paper brings the history of this advocacy into new focus by histricizing the relationship between scholarship and affective production in the often-overlooked field of humor studies. The first section traces the invention of an academic tradition that articulated humor practice to national character, and identifies this articulation itself as the affective labor of that scholarship. The second section addresses alternative histories that might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as itself a form of affective labor. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge. These cases gesture, polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, especially as we realize the key role of affective production in our disciplinary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the course of progress for the Afro-American community in Chester, Pennsylvania with the advent of Afro-American employees in the shipyard No. 4 of the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. Treatment of Afro-Americans in Chester; Afro-American employment in shipbuilding; Criticisms raised on the plans of Sun Shipbuilding to staff its shipyard with Afro-Americans; Productivity of the shipyard.

Examines the multi-accentuality of the early comic strips `The Yellow Kid' and `The Katzenjammer Kids'. Interpretation by immigrant readers; Americanization of immigrants; Assimilation conflicts reflected in comic strips; Antiauthoritarianism in the comic strips.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan began the tradition of returning military personnel's salutes. At his inauguration, President Barack Obama returned the salutes of the troops as they paraded by the reviewing stand. Some may suggest these actions are simply a sign of respect by Presidents for the service of the military. Nevertheless, we must also understand how Presidents have used military ritual and symbols to enhance their powers. By embracing military symbols, the President is transformed from a civilian to a military figure. This transformation diminishes Congress's ability to exercise its constitutional war power. Congress is less likely to challenge a President perceived as part of the military than one perceived as the civilian chief executive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though now seen as a key turning point in the Cold War, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act provoked considerable opposition in the United States. The principal line of criticism was that the United States had given away too much in the negotiations and had required little of the Soviets. The Helsinki Final Act initially was unpopular domestically with Eastern European ethnic groups as well as members of Congress due to concerns about its implications for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. At the root of many of these complaints was a larger critique of United States President Gerald Ford's policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Understanding the sources of opposition to the Helsinki Final Act in the United States illuminates the potential conflict between foreign policy formulation and domestic politics, and it reflects the Ford administration's inability to explain his support for the agreement to the American public. Furthermore, the controversy engendered by the Helsinki Final Act illustrates how contentious Cold War politics remained even in an era of supposed détente with the Soviet Union and demonstrates the extent to which the pact's long-term benefits were unforeseen by participants at the time. The Ford administration was never able to counter condemnation of the Helsinki Final Act sufficiently, enhancing existing skepticism about his leadership and policy toward the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the history of the National Women's Committee on Civil Rights (NWCCR). Called into being at the behest of President Kennedy, the NWCCR was an attempt to enlist the support of the organized women of America in the advancement of civil rights. The NWCCR had two main goals : first, to offer support for the passage of Kennedy's civil rights legislation, and second, to encourage their branch membership to work in support of integration. However, whilst the majority of the NWCCR's affiliated organizations had passed resolutions in favour of integration both throughout the United States and within their own organization, in practice they were reluctant to threaten the internal stability of their associations by insisting on either integrated membership or active support of civil rights in the local community. This article will argue that whilst the NWCCR were successful in organizing lobbying for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind efforts to encourage activism in local communities. Whilst key members of the NWCCR saw an important role for women in the implementation of civil rights at the community level, they were forced to conclude that the organizational structure and ethical inertia of the NWCCR did not make it a suitable medium for furthering racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following World War II, Ebony's creator and editor, John H. Johnson, sought to create a popular black magazine in the vein of Life and Look that would reflect the accomplishments and joys, ''the happier side,'' of African American life. Throughout the first four years of its publication, Lena Horne appeared on the magazine's cover three times - the only woman to do so during this period. In this paper, I argue that the fledgling Ebony magazine drew on Lena Horne's wartime status as a beautiful black icon and represented her as a symbol of its ideological project, broadly, and as the Ebony image of postwar black womanhood, specifically. The magazine's representation of Lena Horne acts as a useful trope for understanding how Ebony imaged postwar black femininity in terms of motherhood, work, and civil rights activism; additionally, Ebony's representation of Horne and Ebony readers' letters to the editor reveal central issues of respectability, pinup photography, colorism, hair care, and interracial relationships as they were debated within the magazine's pages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates how former U.S. President George Washington came to realize that slavery was a flawed institution. Washington became a slave-owner in 1743, when he was eleven years old. He inherited ten slaves from his recently deceased father, although he did not gain personal control of them until 1750 when he became eighteen and bought his first lands in Frederick County. It is not easy to pinpoint when Washington began to have his doubts about slavery, but the process was tortuously gradual. A more plausible source of Washington's incipient questioning of slavery is his decision in 1763 to reduce the size of his tobacco crop, which culminated in 1766 when he had stopped growing it altogether.

This article focuses on the existing literature on Martin Luther King, Junior, a U.S. political activist, and assesses what has already been done, as well as points the gap that still need to be filled in what remains important field of study. The article makes specific references to civil right movements in the U.S. The article concludes that despite the attention given to King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by historians of civil rights movement, a number of gaps remain. Although recent works have some way in correcting the neglect of King's later years from 1965 to 68, there is still too little thorough investigation of them and in particular of King's stance on the Vietnam War.

This article focuses on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC)1964 Mississippi summer voter registration project and African American culture in the U.S., with specific reference to reconstruction of education. Initially, intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called "educational and social" programs." Freedom schools were central to SNCC's program. In political terms, the project represents SNCC's Rubicon, during which its staff discovered that American liberalism was not necessarily the movement's ally.

Examines how Christian groups in the United States influenced the social, intellectual and spiritual lives of foreign students before World War II. Importance of education to spread Christian belief in non-western countries; Cases of race discrimination among foreign students in the United States in 1913; Programs developed to meet the needs of foreign students.

Examines the role of the financial structure of the nation on the formation of nationhood in the United States (U.S.). Impact of the adoption of the dollar as a distinctive denomination and the use of decimalization on the establishment of national identity; Problems experienced by the U.S. with currency during its early formation as a nation; Brief history of how the U.S decided to adopt the dollar as its currency.

Traces the gender slurs that appeared in partisan press in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1840s. Why so many anti-images strike at gender identification; How the Democratic press discredited the masculinity of presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison; Efforts made by the Democrats to close the gender gap in 1844; Factor attributed to the waning of gender slurs which distinguished 1844 from 1840.

Discusses the relations between Jews and Afro-Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Views of Martin Luther King Jr. on the reactions of the Jews regarding the fight of Afro-Americans for civil rights equality; Examination on the nature of the relationship between Afro-Americans and Jews.

Provides information on the theory of the post-modern presidency in the United States. Description of the president and the presidency in literature on the executive branch of the United States government.

Focuses on the confrontation between Progressivism and big business in the United States. Focus on Boston, Massachusetts-based lawyer Louis Brandeis' Progressivist views and attacks against trusts; Progressivism's antitrust policy; Brandeis' campaign against corporate giants; Brandeis' indictment of the trusts; Brandeis' campaign against unfair practices.

Examines the perceptions and attitudes in the American government, under the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, regarding Great Britain's Labour government. View of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson as a Soviet asset; Perception of Britain as a country in economic decline and weak morale; Tension between London and Washington known as `The Hessian option.'

Examines how the Garrisonian abolitionists in the United States participated in the making of a political culture of emancipation from 1854-1863. Values and beliefs associated with evangelical Protestantism; Garrisonians' condemnation of America's religious, political and governmental institutions; Debates within the Garrisonian circle over the meaning of sectional politics.

Examines issues on state power in the United States by focusing on the Council on Foreign Relations. Coalition-building efforts of the state to defeat the forces representing the foreign policy status quo; Influence of council in the formulation of foreign policy; Background on the creation of the council.

Discusses issues of controversy among historians of women and welfare through an analysis of the juvenile court movement in the United States. Interpretations on the origins of the welfare state; Concerns of women's historians in the juvenile court movement; Maternalist initiatives in juvenile court legislation.

Discusses the meaning of ethnicity for American writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Amiri Baraka who were associated by critics with the Beat literary movement of the 1950s. Background on the careers of the writers; Efforts to understand a theory of the role of ethnicity in American literature; Effects of ethnicity on writing; Effects of writing on ethnicity; Assertion that ethnic identity has become a political construct that is unable to sustain imagination in a polyphonic state.

This article presents information on the issue of isolationism and the history of the World Court in the U.S. The story of the U.S. and the World Court begins essentially in the Summer of 1920, when an Advisory Committee of Jurists met at the Hague, Netherlands, under the auspices of the League of Nations to draft a statute (or constitution) for the international court of justice envisaged in Article XIV of the Covenant. Leading the unofficial American delegation was the former Secretary of State, Elihu Root, whose presence meant that his compatriots often referred to the new court as the "Root Court."

The article presents information on the American Colonization Society, which was founded in Washington D.C., to encourage the emigration of free Afro-Americans to Africa. The chief organ her and main founder of the Colonization Society was a Virginia Federalists Charles Fenton Mercer. As a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly in 1816, he had introduced and carried through a resolution in support of colonization for free Afro-Americans at federal expense. Virginians had long been uneasy with the status and presence of the free Afro-American population, but it was an extraordinary moment in history when they could be persuaded to ask for federal government assistance.

The article focuses on the progressive view of Americans and Leftist ideology of Europeans. A number of essays then showed that progressivism itself could be regarded as part of an international movement. Peter F. Clarke pointed out that there had been a progressive movement in England which, in fact, predated the American equivalent. While it is clear that progressivism was much more than an American domestic phenomenon, sociologists may have exaggerated the extent of its likeness to European movements. Real differences existed between American and European reform. Treating them as belonging to a generalized tradition of "social democracy" only blurs those differences, it does not eliminate them.

The article comments on a paper written by Owen Dudley, published in the December 1984 issue of "Journal of American Studies," which reviewed a book on the family of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy. In the book written by Gary Wills, the analysis of John Kennedy's "political Catholicism" is by far the best account of the subject the author has come across. It is a matter of public record that Kennedy was the first President to feel the full force of the civil rights movement. Colouring the whole article, in fact, is an attitude which gives it such unity as it has; which has brought Dudley his insights into Kennedy's Catholic political background; but which in the end makes most of his observations curiously unreal.

Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to demonstrate that it is less important to pigeonhole Oppen's poetics within modernism or postmodernism than it is to understand his poetic practice as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. Adopting the framework of the Habermasian transformation of the public sphere allows us to understand the political impact of Oppen's volumes of poetry in the 1960s much more clearly, if we construe them as part of a distinct political engagement that reaches beyond his earlier modernist allegiances. The main argument here is that Oppen's middle and later poetry straddles a larger paradigmatic shift that occurs within the 1960s from a politics of subjectivity that is focussed upon the autonomy of the self to a politics of the self that stresses community and relational ethics. Within this context, it can be seen that a volume like Of Being Numerous addresses itself to the question of how to live as both a unique and yet a social being, and how to retain one's individuality whilst also participating within a community. The urgency and pressure of that question characterizes all three volumes of his poetry published in the 1960s, and is explored through a comparative analysis of the discourse of individuality and community in Oppen's poems and various documents of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early 1840s, as the right to rule the continent found a slogan in manifest destiny, nothing was seen as a greater barrier to expansion than the region, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, known as the Great American Desert. As a rhetorical figure, it was nearly ubiquitous – shaping everything from the expedition reports of Zebulon Pike and Edwin James to the western narratives of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. The first serious challenge to this image was a report John Charles Frémont presented to Congress after leading an Army expedition to South Pass. Frémont knew that his report had to refute the empirical evidence for a Great Desert to strike it down it as a rhetorical barrier to emigration. Thus he developed a distinctive mode of description that focussed on “topographic geology” while utilizing an aesthetic of the picturesque. This allowed him to create a rocky specificity and contrast where once a grassy and arid uniformity had reigned supreme. In the process, he began to create a nexus between scenery and science that would make both more deliberate and exacting – and the American landscape as a whole more uniquely “western.” By the end of the report, Frémont's ardent impressions of the West were so multiple and intense that the Great American Desert suddenly seemed without significance as a place or a name. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study attempts to find out the reasons for the emergence of blogging in the contemporary media scene and for its widespread acceptance. First, it delineates the various events that contributed to the notoriety of political blogs. In a second stage, it traces the origins of contemporary blogging back to the history of early journalistic forms, from the penny press to the muckraking movement. After identifying the characteristics linking blogs to the American journalistic tradition, it focusses on what differentiates blogging from other forms of journalistic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Jefferson Davis Highway (JDH) is a controversial Confederate memorial. Since 1913 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have placed markers along roadsides across America to commemorate the Confederate President. The women's organization claims that the JDH stretches over four thousand miles from Alexandria, Virginia to the Pacific coast and the Canadian border. In 2002, conflict ensued in the Pacific northwestern state of Washington when a local politician initiated a campaign to remove a granite JDH marker from a state park where it had been erected by the UDC sixty years previously. This led to dispute over whether Jefferson Davis should, or should not, be honoured by a commemorative marker on Washington's border with Canada. Drawing on contemporary secondary sources to interrogate these contests over the meaning of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate legacy, we argue that behind the veneer of heritage and genealogical celebration forwarded by groups such as the UDC there is a neo-Confederate nationalism that works to maintain white supremacy as a dominant interpretation of US history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 2002 to 2004, the children's animated series Liberty's Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States' public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with the American Revolution that most young people in the United States are likely to have encountered, and is appropriately patriotic and questioning, celebratory and chastening. Although children certainly learn a great deal about multiculturalism from popular culture, the tropes and limitations of depicting history on television trend toward personification, toward reduced complexity and, for children, toward resisting examining the darker sides of human experience. As this essay suggests, the genre's limits match the limits of a multicultural history in its attempt to show diversity and agency during a time when “liberty and justice for all” proved to be more apt as an aspiration at best and an empty slogan at worst than as an accurate depiction of the society that proclaimed it. This essay is not an effort to be, as Robert Sklar put it, a “historian cop,” policing the accuracy of the series by patrolling for inaccuracies. Rather, it is a consideration of the inherent difficulties of trying to apply a multicultural sensibility to a portrayal of the American Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the appearance of D. W. Griffith's 1915 racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, the six-year-old NAACP reluctantly organized a campaign to ban the film entirely or at least to censor its most offensive elements. Although this struggle was a failure, it helped transform the association in ways no one could have imagined at the outset. Up to this point, the issues the NAACP had taken up, such as housing segregation and lynching, focussed primarily on southern or border states. The Birth of a Nation, however, was a national event. As the film moved from major population centers to smaller ones throughout the country, so too did the protests and countless meetings between local NAACP leaders and mayors, city councils, censors, and governors. In the end, this failed campaign had the effect of providing local association members with invaluable political experience and of elevating the NAACP to a position of national stature and indeed prominence in the struggle for civil rights in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As an outsider with a mysterious childhood, Alexander Hamilton is, as psychologists say, a good “hook” for a projective identification. For his admirers Hamilton is a source of political capital. His ideas and proposals about the debt, protectionism, and an American manufacturing base are in the news in the early twenty-first century. Although the Old Left saw Hamilton as an elitist, possibly a monarchist, and a promoter of industrial capitalism, contemporary American progressives have called attention to his explicit support for habeas corpus, his efforts on behalf of banking, and his surprisingly enlightened attitudes about race and slavery. As one of the founders of a new republic, Hamilton knew he would be in the history books, but his image, representations of his physical presence, and speculation about his private life circulate on the Internet in ways that would surely astonish him. Alexander Hamilton not only has admirers in the fields of politics and history; he also has fans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines forty years of historical writing on the Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that this historiography has now reached maturity. It evaluates key publications on the BPP, splitting the historiography into three periods. The first phase, the article asserts, was dominated by accounts written by participants and observers of the BPP in action. These offered insight into the personalities of the BPP leadership but included relatively little on other BPP members. They were supplemented by a collection of friendly academic studies, a number of which emphasized the role of the FBI in precipitating the BPP's decline. The article identifies the 1994 publication of Hugh Pearson's biographical study of Huey P. Newton as the beginning of a second phase. Pearson's work, which built on a collection of accounts written by observers and right-wing writers during the first phase, precipitated an outpouring of new studies that opposed its conclusions. These works overwhelmingly focussed on individual BPP chapters and the experiences of the BPP rank and file ; they were generally friendly towards the party and often appraised the BPP's actions through the 1970s. A second wave of participant accounts also emerged in this period which offered a more personal interpretation of the BPP's decline. A third period emerged in the early 2000s that abandoned the obsession with Pearson's study and focussed instead on the BPP's contribution to African American and American culture beyond its political program and violent image. The article reveals the paradox at the heart of the local approach, one which recent studies addressed in their focus on the BPP's Oakland chapter and their return to a tight chronological approach that focussed on the BPP's peak years. It concludes by noting the remaining omissions in the BPP's historical record and anticipating further studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are three kinds of gangbanger autobiography: those told from inside the life, those told from outside the life, and those told by those who are outside the life but whose sense of self is still inextricably connected with gangbanger deeds and the respect/status won by those deeds. Stanley ''Tookie'' Williams's autobiographical writing provides a telling example of the third kind. To understand Williams's autobiographical writings we need to look at them in relation to the whole range of gangbanger autobiography - and the wide range of autobiographies that come to us from tribal warrior cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A frequency survey of Google Books and other digital sources indicates that in political terminology the use of the phrase ''American socialism '' yielded to ''American left '' in the course of the twentieth century. Reasons for this include the tactical and personal ambitions of reformers who saw advantage in dropping the socialist tag in the face of domestic antisocialism. In mid-century, domestic antisocialism revived both in extremist rhetoric and in mainstream Republican charges of ''creeping socialism. '' The Cold War also played a role in changing the nomenclature balance, as it led to the identification of American socialism with the creed of the Soviet adversary. At the same time, a broadening in the left's agenda beyond the election platforms of the Socialist Party of America contributed to the change. The nomenclative ''-ism'' failure is significant as an indicator of left tendencies because it relates to perceptions of the failure of socialism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Created in 1944, Americans United for World Organization was a private internationalist organization promoting US entry into the United Nations, and although it has been overlooked by historians it deserves re-evaluation. This is less a result of its contributions to the public and congressional debates over UN ratification, and more closely related to the internal ideological and bureaucratic divisions that afflicted the organization from its very beginning. Americans United for World Organization was in fact anything but united, and it foreshadowed the divisions of the internationalist movement in the early years of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]