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The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examines New York Times reporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming "Indian" products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as "Indian" shifted from an elite art collectors' activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless, Times reporting shows that throughout this era shopping for "Indian" items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines an overlooked dimension of the American literary preoccupation with slavery since the 1970s – the mass-market genre of alternate histories of the Civil War that began to proliferate after the end of the civil rights movement. Focussing on the genre's unique blend of historical realism and counterfactual speculation, the essay argues that these novels turn to the Civil War in order to reevaluate the trajectory of US racial history and to reckon with the dramatic racial realignments of the post-civil rights period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2010 to 2015, Pocket Guide to Hell, a series of public history projects in Chicago, produced site-specific, participatory historical reenactments with the intention of treating the past as if it were a public space – an inhabitable site where multiple voices can be heard, meanings contested, and alliances forged. This paper narrates the process behind the production of the final Pocket Guide to Hell project, which marked the centennial of the Arts Club of Chicago, in order to reflect upon the origins of creative acts, the challenges of cocreation, and the possibilities and limitations of the reenactment form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) might seem an unlikely candidate for intervening in Hollywood's civil rights genre, given both its nationalistic ending and its recuperation of iconic styles and images. This paper argues, however, that the film's pastiche interrogates past cinematic tropes for race and space; in this sense, it proves counterhistorical, a term indicating not a lack of accuracy but a commitment to illuminating the role of visual media in shaping contemporary understandings of history and to encouraging fresh perspectives on the past. Examining the many forms of constraint produced by iconic images of black and gendered personhood, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of these figures are associated – the southern plantation. Both exposing and challenging the ways in which spectacular accounts of southern racism occlude the geographic and political reach of African American movements against oppression, the film inconsistently insists on the importance of thinking across conventional demarcations of space and time. At these moments, it suggests possibilities for how even commercial cinema might contribute to new conceptions of black political history and possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demise of American slavery in 1865 put black Americans in motion to an unprecedented degree. Freed slaves and their descendants migrated from the plantations in the rural South to destinations around the globe. Travelling in a variety of new roles – as missionaries, journalists, agronomists, scientists, athletes, performers, entrepreneurs and political activists – African Americans gained international visibility, inspiring other oppressed populations in the colonial world to struggle for their liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The longevity of the lyric belies persisting difficulties in terms of its definition and categorization, particularly given the form's evolution in the face of philosophical, sociopolitical and cultural transformations. In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the lyric is powerfully refashioned in response to the historical and contemporary tribulations of being a black citizen in America. Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury caused by microaggressions registers in the body leads her to an adoption and adaptation of the lyric form, with Citizen aptly subtitled “An American Lyric.” Citizen is an urgent and timely book that sustains America's conversation on race and racial injustice on a level of national grief, even as Rankine brings it to the level of personal intimacy by asking, “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” I contend that Citizen is a work that extends the lyric's possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine's project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the battles over “Americanism” and “un-Americanism” that swirled around the People's Bicentennial Commission (PBC) – a radical, populist organization that sought to promote fundamental economic change during the mid-1970s. Although it was founded by 1960s veterans, the PBC was sharply critical of what it saw as the New Left's abandonment of Americanism. As the nation prepared to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, the PBC sought to present itself, and its radical programme, as representing the “true” spirit of the American Revolution. For its conservative critics, though, the PBC's patriotism was little more than a ruse, designed to trick ordinary Americans into supporting what was, essentially, a dangerous (and un-American) force. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the crucial role that print media played in the global expansion of American evangelicalism during the late 1890s: a moment when the United States was exercising new forms of military, economic, and cultural power to extend its influence in world affairs. Analyzing the strategies that publicists employed to make the popular press an effective medium of spreading American evangelicalism sheds light on the theological and social factors that influenced – and circumscribed – the ways in which evangelicals imagined, fostered, and undermined the creation of a global Christian community in this increasingly imperial era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sharing of Ministries Abroad (SOMA) was formed in the late 1970s as an international organization for the cultivation of charismatic renewal amongst leaderships within the global Anglican Communion. This article explores the ethos and activities of its American national body. It argues that its short term, cross-cultural missions increasingly displayed mutuality and long-term partnership rather than one-directional American influence, and thus reflected a developing shift in the understanding and practice of global mission in the late twentieth century. The organiztion shaped awareness of the global Church amongst some US Episcopalians and constructed an influential transnational network within charismatic Anglicanism. Furthermore, SOMA's network was one context for the emergence of global North–South conservative solidarity in the politics of the Anglican Communion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introduction embeds the Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism special issue into current historiographical debates in the field of US evangelicalism and globalization. It lays out the methodological framework and thematic scope of the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The resurgence of American evangelicalism since the 1940s unfolded in conjunction with efforts by policymakers to instrumentalize religion for the assertion of empire. Missions and foreign aid are two key areas where these dynamics intersected. They show that evangelicals were both at home in the “American century” and deeply critical of global power. Rather than being a weakness, however, these tensions enabled the movement to become a crucial arbiter at a time when the country's new role was not yet firmly legitimized at home. In particular, evangelicalism helped reconcile isolationist, antistatist, and antimilitarist sentiments with hegemonic aspirations, the national security state, and the military–industrial complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the broad and understudied contributions of pioneer American anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1865-1914), who earned America's first PhD in anthropology at Clark University under the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas. Before his untimely death on the eve of World War I, and Boas's rise as a leading scientific spokesman of antiracism at Columbia University, Chamberlain contributed as significantly as Boas to the fields of linguistic and cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, child development, comparative folklore, and Native American and African American culture, and to the cause of equality and justice for all humans. Chamberlain subscribed to an antiracist cultural evolutionism, frequently and passionately condemning ethnocentrism and insisting on the "generic humanity" of all persons, of all races. Close reading of Chamberlain's work suggests not that Boas's work mattered less, but rather that both men participated in an emerging debate on the nature and meaning of race that informed social policy and shaped academic interests during the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any African American who fought for the British cause against the colonial rebels in his province. Dunmore's plan to reconquer Virginia with his "Ethiopian Regiment" ended in failure, not due to a lack of willing volunteers but because of a familiar eighteenth-century killer: smallpox. Five years later, similar proclamations were issued in South Carolina. Yet smallpox again hindered British designs, devastating the eager African Americans who flooded to their lines. This paper uses primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War. Focussing on the differing regions of Virginia and South Carolina this paper will assess the impact of smallpox on British military designs for runaway slaves while also evaluating the reasons why the disease had such a devastating effect on African Americans during the period. Overall, this paper will show how smallpox, so common in eighteenth-century Europe, put a fatal end to the first widespread push for emancipation on the American continent and helped derail one of Britain's best hopes for turning the tide in the Revolutionary War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Richard M. Nixon and his staff intended his 3 November 1969 Address to the Nation on Vietnam to counteract the growing strength of the antiwar movement. Its appeal to a "Silent Majority" of Americans inspired an impressive outpouring of support, but this response owed as much to White House planning as to public opinion. Drawing on internal White House documents, this article traces administration efforts to secure this response and, then, to claim and promote this new Silent Majority. It demonstrates that White House public-opinion campaigns were designed to maximize control, and not necessarily to change attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Billy the Kid spoke his last words in Spanish. Calling out "¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?" before he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the young outlaw's final moments signal his diverse ethnic context. This article examines the Kid's close contact with the Southwest's communities of color - New Mexico's Mescalero Apache Indians, African American soldiers, and Hispano farmers - and why these communities have been removed from countless popular representations of the Kid's story. Their omission has helped to perpetuate a uniquely Western and white American ideal of individualism and served to legitimize a libertarian and ahistorical ideal of violence: the rebellion of an outlaw who defies the rest of his society and his times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a popular tourist vehicle in early twentieth-century Florida: the Afromobile. Beginning in the 1890s, Afromobiling referred to the white tourist experience in south Florida of travelling in a wheelchair propelled by an African American hotel employee. Most prominent in Palm Beach, these wheelchairs developed into a heavily promoted tourist activity in the region. Using promotional imagery and travel literature this paper traces the development of Afromobiling as a tourist vehicle that played upon south Florida's tropical environs. It argues that the vehicle's popularity related to its enactment of benign racial hierarchy and controlled black mobility. Moreover, the Afromobile infused US fantasies about south Florida as a tropical and "oriental" paradise for white leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to the issue article "The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship" by Deborah Willis. Topics include the significance of Willis' archival research for the article and the photographs included in it, the author's research on black U.S. soldiers in World War II, and expressions of U.S. patriotism by African American military personnel. Portrayals of World War II African American military personnel by poet Gwendolyn Brooks are noted.

The article responds to the issue article "The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship" by Deborah Willis. Topics include the nature of photography in relation to African American history, the role of service in the war in changing social norms related to slavery, and the use of sources such as photographs and letters by Willis.

The article discusses the service of African American military personnel in the U.S. Civil War, noting photographs and letters depicting their service. Topics include the role of racism in erasing the memories of black soldiers who took part in the war, the roles of slaves and free men as soldiers, and the 1900 exhibition "Exhibit of American Negroes" as part of the Universelle de Paris exposition at the Palace of Social Economy and Congresses in Paris, France.

This essay explores the relationship between welfare, eugenics and documentary photography during the New Deal in order to explain how a set of government photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein in the Shenandoah became entwined in the rhetorical structure of eugenic ideology. The photographs discussed portray victims of forced sterilization before their incarceration, yet there is no evidence to show that the photographer was aware of, or complicit with, this fact. This essay responds to the questions this raises about the images: what historical and social contingencies were behind their production? What is the relationship between the photographer, the photographs, the New Deal and the subjects depicted? How did efforts to help America's poorest lead to their incarceration and sterilization? Why is the full picture impossible to see? And how do we read and understand them today? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interdisciplinary scholarship on the era of the American Civil War has invigorated a well-trodden field. This essay addresses recent scholarship on the history of emotions, medicine, and the environment in the Civil War era, analyzing key themes and suggesting areas for future research. Together, these fields have added nuance to the “dark turn” in Civil War studies, historicized concepts often treated ahistorically, and allowed Civil War historians to engage in meaningful conversations with scholars in other fields and disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the cultural significance of the garbage panics of the 1980s, including the voyage of the infamous Mobro 4000 “garbage barge.” The article argues that the trash at the centre of these panics is important to our understanding of both the 1980s and the present because it demanded – and still demands – that Americans see and understand it as a class of matter unmoored from temporal as well as spatial boundaries. The alarming durability of the supposedly ephemeral refuse of a culture of mass consumption invoked an “archaeological consciousness” prone to muse upon the longevity of material remains. This consciousness was expressed in various cultural and discursive arenas throughout the 1980s, revealing that durable detritus was not just a pressing public policy issue but a marker of cultural anxieties emerging out of the operations of archaeological consciousness. From concerns about contingency of the mass-consuming culture of the late twentieth-century United States to reflections on trash's own epistemological complexity, trash spoke in unexpected ways throughout the 1980s, raising important questions about the relationship between producers of culture and their audience, whose receptiveness to the urgencies of archaeological consciousness suffers from a frustrating transience as far as trash is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses what is referred to as the transnationalization of U.S. religious history and how the transnationalization of European religious history advances learning and scholarship beyond the regional narrative of linear secularization. The article discusses the significance of U.S. evangelicalism and how it flourished in cultural exchange with Europe and elsewhere.

The author discusses the state of religion and literature in 19th century U.S. studies as of the early 21st century. The article discusses the significance of the book "The Altar at Home" by Claudia Stokes, the meaning of the word evangelical, and the books "Postmodern Belief" by Amy Hungerford and "Partial Faiths" by John McClure.

The article identifies trends in the historiography of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. as of the early 21st century. It discusses the booklets the "Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth," the book "Fundamentalism and American Culture" by George Marsden, and "Guaranteed Pure" by Timothy E.W. Gloege.

The article discusses the significance of the centrality of the themes of religion and race in the study of U.S. history, particularly concerning the concepts of the paradox of religious freedom and equality and religiously-sanctioned inequality. The article discusses the role of Christianity in what the author calls racialization, the role of the Bible in and the importance of religion in the U.S. civil rights movement.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the Beatles’ invasion of America as a moment of cultural globalization. Paying attention to the political economy underpinning the Beatles’ success, the international hybridity at the heart of their cultural work, and the diverse ways in which Americans interpreted the Beatles, the article argues that the band was a primary vector of pop culture's increasing globality in the 1960s. More broadly, the article argues that the Beatles’ trajectory reveals that cultural globalization cannot be understood as a process either of homogenization or of creolization. Rather, the Beatles represented an increasingly unified and commodified culture that simultaneously served to reproduce cultural differences when different social formations projected their own meanings onto the hybridized group. The article therefore provides new perspectives on the historical significance of the iconic band and on the intersections between global and domestic cultural history in the 1960s, as well as suggesting a new framework for thinking about both the history and the contradictions of cultural globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1951, the CIA secretly funded the creation of an ostensibly private group of US citizens called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Pro-Arab and anti-Zionist in orientation, AFME was repeatedly attacked by pro-Israel groups before seeing its links to the CIA exposed by investigative journalists in 1967. Drawing on recent scholarship about “state–private networks” and the cultural history of US–Middle East relations, this article examines the origins of AFME, its characteristic values and relations with the CIA, and the reasons for the decline of its influence vis-à-vis the emergent “Israel lobby.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs are among the best-known social-documentary photographs ever taken, yet historians have neglected his photography of children working on the streets of America's cities. This paper explores the disputed symbolism of Hine's street-labour photographs. Far from simply depicting another appalling form of child labour, Hine's child street labourers, and the newsboys he photographed in particular, represented a range of ideas from masculinity and entrepreneurial spirit to the dangers of the new urban life and the apparent ignorance of immigrant parents. The symbolic newsboy was often far removed from the reality of child street labour, but he became an important figure in discourse surrounding the nature of childhood and the organization of public space in the United States of the early twentieth century. In exploring these subjects, this article takes on a neglected part of American history, yet an important one. Studying child street labourers reveals much about children, their choices, and the urban environment in the United States during the Progressive Era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An unusual kind of community existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters in the American Mid-west – known as radio homemakers – and their listeners, one that depended on mutual trust. Radio homemakers established this trust via the concept of “visiting,” where the broadcasters used the familiar notion of informal social interaction to establish an ostensibly intimate relationship with their audience. Through playing with their listeners' understanding of visiting, radio homemakers made public the professionalization of domestic work that emerged from the Progressive Era's home economics movement. Because their shows primarily addressed domesticity, radio homemakers linked the conventions of domestic work to modernity through the technology of radio, drawing attention to women's frequently invisible household work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the long and antagonistic fashioning of the National Recovery Adminstration's code of practice for the film industry during 1933. The NRA code process publicly exposed resentful fissions within Hollywood, and the oligarchic, if not monopolistic, way in which the major film studios had set up their vertically integrated consolidation of the motion-picture industry in terms of production, distribution and exhibition on a national scale. A media spotlight flooded onto their soundstages and executive suites, and many, including President Franklin Roosevelt, were not pleased with what they saw. The NRA, signed into law in 1933 by Roosevelt, implemented an unprecedented reorganization of the American economy to restore employment to combat the Great Depression. Perhaps most controversially, especially for the union-averse film industry, the NRA established collective bargaining. Though they supported it initially, the major studios would not long abide by the NRA. Throughout 1933, they violated the spirit and letter of the code, ensuring as much as possible that the economic pain and sacrifice of the Great Depression in Hollywood was visited upon artists and technicians, not studio heads and executives. They used the making of the code to attempt to cement and further the advantages they enjoyed while offering little to other interests in the film industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past thirty years or so the study of American fraternity has been used to explore a variety of phenomena in the nation's evolution, especially around the turn of the twentieth century. Fraternities have been used to understand the exploration, taming and exploitation of the West. They have been shown to represent proof of the various turn-of-the century crises of gender, race and ethnicity. They have been seen as the very embodiment of bygone caring, sharing, communities. However, among the aspects to have escaped attention is the importance of fraternity in criminal organizations. Given that crime, then as now, was seen as one of the most pressing of social issues, and given that over these years there was a deep suspicion that there were a variety of ultra-secret fraternities organizing, facilitating and manipulating wide-ranging criminal activities, this may be considered a little odd. This article investigates the idea that there was really such a thing as a genuine criminal “fraternity.” Looking at three of the most famous of such organizations – the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Molly Maguires and the Mafia – it demonstrates that not only were ideas of fraternity central to their very existence, but they are also crucial to our understanding both of them and of the period in which they were situated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a Bush administration official memorably explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, “when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality … we'll act again … We're history's actors … and you … will be left to … study what we do.” This comment was taken both as the administration's assessment of the intellectual left, and as a window into Bush's executive philosophy. Then many believed then that a different President – a liberal or progressive President – would renounce such unilateralism. But these arguments didn't evidence the peculiarity of George W. Bush's Machtpolitik. Rather, they draw on a deep and relatively unnoticed tradition in US political history and government, of the ever more aggressive executive expansion of presidential powers. That expansion has come through the ambitions, machinations, and moxie of individual Presidents – some of them impressively gifted leaders. It has also come through the active and passive consent of citizens, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The President has come to symbolize both our democratic process and our national power: citizens see him simultaneously as democracy's heart and its avenging sword. That trust, trained into US citizens from our earliest days in school, reinforced by popular culture and by the media, makes citizens want to give the President more power, regardless of the Constitutional checks and balances we also learn to treasure as schoolchildren. Over time, this accumulating consent to ever-increasing presidential power means that Presidents are free to act – even in ways that upset the Constitution's balance of power – and that citizens by and large approve, and those who don't are left studying what they did. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas in 1915 Theodore Roosevelt could proclaim with great conviction that there was no room in the United States for hyphenated Americans, today it is common for Americans to identify precisely as hyphenated Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage. And whilst in 2015 the debate on undocumented immigration is perceived to have reached crisis point, the US continues to project itself as a “nation of immigrants.” These reversals and contradictions in American political discourse are scrutinized here in a historical survey of the Americanization movement of a hundred years ago and the concept of the “nation of immigrants” that originated with John F. Kennedy in the Cold War sixty years later. In the analysis of primary and key historiographical sources on twentieth-century American immigration, a change from ethnic shame to ethnic pride is tracked down, revealing both the long-term effects of Americanization as a programme of social engineering and the ongoing ideological work that the “nation of immigrants” slogan performs for American national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the debates around anarchist restriction that shaped the eventual passage of the Immigration Act of 1903 and argues that domestically oriented conceptions of national security are both challenged and constituted by transnational and international processes and currents. While discussions of transnational immigration control became important features of both scholarly discourse and popular debate in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, these discussions were not new. Similar debates about immigration policy, security, and civil liberties shaped discussions between the mid-1880s and early 1900s, when an unprecedented wave of attacks against heads of state fed rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies, and reports of anarchist outrages in cities far and wide spread fear. Anarchist exclusion was far more than an example of a rising nativist tide raising all boats and excluding a widening spectrum of undesirable aliens. Such measures set the foundation for restriction based on political beliefs and associations that, over subsequent decades, would become critical to suppressing political dissent. Consequently, understanding how the fear of anarchist violence helped shape the contours of the domestic and diplomatic debates over anarchist restriction is critical as these old questions of transnational immigration control reemerge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay focusses on two music videos that filmmaker Alex Rivera directed in conjunction with the #Not1More campaign of the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON). In creating these music videos, Rivera uses visual strategies to portray the “undocumented everyday,” which involves the documentation of the mundane details of existence, such as representation of the indispensability of undocumented Latina/o migrants to everyday economies in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Australian responses to the imposition of stringent national origins quotas in the United States during the 1920s. Following the introduction of the American quota system, many Australians worried that large numbers of undesirable southern and eastern European migrants would make their way toward Australian ports. Widespread calls for preemptive restrictions forced the Australian government to finally implement a range of measures designed to limit immigration from Italy, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Malta. More broadly, this article argues that American quotas often inadvertently engendered a wide range of indirect and unintentional consequences around the world that scholars of migration and American foreign relations might explore in greater depth. It concludes by suggesting some opportunities for individual and collaborative research into the international effects of the United States’ notorious national origins quota system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Afong Moy came to the United States in 1834 as a popular attraction, and remained in the public spotlight until 1850. Her very presence as the first recorded Chinese woman on American soil prompted a heated national discussion regarding how to accommodate the Chinese living among Americans. A two-tiered paradigm that emerged from this dialogue disparaged Chinese culture while extending paternalistic care to Moy, pushing her toward acculturation, which was to be realized in a symbolic way after her disappearance from the exhibition stage. The pattern was not exclusive to Moy; rather, it was a general strategy that Americans had adopted to deal with the small but growing number of Chinese present in the United States prior to the widespread and virulent anti-Chinese sentiment that later engulfed American society. This study therefore sheds light on the oft-neglected early stage of Sino-American relations occurring within American borders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the 1960s, the United States military was rocked by race-related violence and riots. Growing fears of black “militancy” eventually compelled the military's largely white leadership to implement policies aimed at ameliorating racial disparities. One of the most significant changes was the establishment of the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) and the requirement that all troops partake in race relations education. Largely overlooked in histories of military race relations and rarely viewed in terms of its place in the larger landscape of US race relations, DRRI was founded to train the military's race relations educators. Its original curriculum and methodology, during the years 1971–74, represented a radical response to the problems of racism in the military, and central to its framework was a critique of whiteness as a nexus of racialized power. This paper attempts to present a complex understanding of the motivations involved in the founding of the DRRI as it historicizes the military's quest to contain race “militancy” through the establishment of DRRI. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines contrasting but complementary narrative and filmic representations of the Guadeloupean resistance to Napoleon's attempt to reimpose a slavery regime in the French colonies. This underrepresented and under-analyzed event, one of landmark importance in the Caribbean tradition of rebellion and self-liberation, focuses our attention more closely on the extended arc of liberatory acts – inscribed in a variety of locations but always espousing the same goal – that mark the identitarian activities of Caribbean slaves almost from the inception of the colonial moment to the act of emancipation. In a large sense, the resistance to Napoleon's invading forces, although ultimately doomed to failure in Guadeloupe, emerged from and was shaped by the specificities of social, economic, and political structures that transformed Guadeloupe during this critical period, and was driven by principles of liberation and self-emancipation emerging from the path adopted by Guadeloupe's governor, Victor Hugues, and the various communities over which he presided. Resistance in Guadeloupe was a fight to preserve a way of life. Analyzing this resistance compels us to acknowledge individual and collective expressions of the idea and practice of freedom that were originally erased by those charged with constructing the colonial script, and draws attention to the still-marginal inscription of these events in contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]