Search

The introduction to this issue provides an overview of the New York Hippodrome's construction, the historical references and symbolic resonances of its exterior and interior theatrical space, and the human and animal performers who contributed to its overall importance in the opening season and beyond. First, we discuss how Thompson and Dundy drew on the vibrant transatlantic theatrical networks of the era to conceptualise the New York Hippodrome as a theatrical space, while at the same time highlighting the uniquely American quality of their venture. This played out in periodical coverage of the venue's construction, where the celebrations of oversized scale and backstage technological innovation took on a nationalistic tone. The boosterism had local resonance as well, since New York City was undergoing a building boom at that time, staking its claim as a world-class city representative of the whole nation. The venue's architecture, interior design, and onstage performances work together in ways that recent scholarship has identified as racialising: we suggest that this overall racialised aesthetic creates a transportive experience where audience members feel part of an exoticised space. We conclude by considering how performing animals develop all these overarching concerns, calling upon local, national, and international resonances in popular performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing post–World War I housing shortages and the prospect of social unrest, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic supported the construction of modern workers' dwellings. Their efforts produced an extraordinary volume of new units, transforming the working-class experience. Yet, architectural and planning historians have overlooked the comparative potential in this body of work, which includes landmarks of modernism and wood-framed bungalows. This article contributes a transatlantic comparison. It explores European and US policies and projects, shedding light on the particularity of the American case, epitomized by Detroit, where in the absence of planned developments workers sought houses as independent consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the transatlantic relationship and the seriousness of the Iranian threat demand that Europe and the US try their utmost to resolve their disagreement over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—also known as the ‘Iran nuclear deal’ or simply the ‘Iran deal’. For the EU this means reviewing the legal and political context of Washington’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal and acknowledging the agreement’s shortcomings. European leaders themselves have identified Iran’s aggression as a major security threat and have also confirmed that the deal is not ‘sufficient’. This being the case, the article argues that, to counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional aggression, the EU ought to cooperate with the US even after the latter’s withdrawal from the deal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opinion formation and issue attention. Analysing multiple waves of Eurobarometer data, I find that views of the two treaty partners, the US and the European Union, shape attitudes towards TTIP and that the largely post-materialist concerns over TTIP resonated specifically in those European countries whose citizens’ attention was less focused on economic issues. In showing how opinions towards concrete real-world trade policy proposals are shaped by the political context, these findings complement previous research on citizens’ general stances towards trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'new mobilities paradigm' set out by Sheller and Urry (2006) and others urges social scientists to centre many interlocking mobilities in their analyses of contemporary social change, challenging taken-for-granted sedentarism. Drawing on the example of Irish women's chain migration from small farms in the West of Ireland to the East coast of the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper explores a longer history of high levels of mobility. Whilst migration lay at the heart of the movement, it encompassed a much wider range of movements of people, information and material goods. The 'moorings' of women in the their workplace-homes on rural farms and in urban domestic service constituted a gendered immobility, but migration also opened up new opportunities for intra-urban moves, circulatory Transatlantic journeys and upward social mobility. The materiality of such 'old' mobility provides an early baseline against which to assess the huge scale of rapidly-changing hypermobility and instantaneous communication in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When George Hill asked W. Bayle Bernard to construct a play for him, the playwright was probably unsure of how to proceed. How was he, an English subject, to write a piece that was American in style and feeling? Bernard's answer to this quandary was brilliant: he turned to travelogues about America. Therein, he found ready source material as well as a means of constructing a sure-fire hit. Bernard took scenes, images, characters and dialogue straight from two travelogues. Moreover, he followed larger trends of the genre as well. He placed all of America on stage; he painted Americans as intrinsically Other, and offered pessimistic views on American notions of liberty and equality. In these ways, Bayle not only reinforced a specific understanding of Americans that was solidifying with each travel account published, but also took part in constructing the American imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1930, Caribbean Airways was founded in colonial Jamaica. A new business in a nascent industry and one of the first airlines in the British West Indies, it suffered a curious demise. In an attempt to save this groundbreaking enterprise, government officials in Jamaica asked the imperial government in Britain to bail out the colonial airline. This essay examines the inception, imagined possibilities, persistence, and forced failure of Caribbean Airways. It explores how people in the Caribbean advanced airline travel and reveals how entrepreneurs in this seemingly peripheral place helped forge lasting networks of transatlantic mobility. The article concludes by considering how the story of Caribbean Airways refines narratives about the formation of international alliances and the limits of colonial allegiance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Dion Boucicault's nearly forgotten 1874 play about the American Civil War, Belle Lamar. It discerns a 'transatlantic imagination' in Belle Lamar, which aptly reflected the New York theatre itself in the mid nineteenth-century. This theatre not only catered for a city of immigrants, but was itself transatlantic, since many of its actors, managers and writers were themselves tourists, migrants, or at least expatriates. The reception of Belle Lamar illustrates both an intense contemporary interest in developing a national drama and international, or cosmopolitan, expectations of the theatre. These were particularly manifested in attention to voice, vocabulary and accents. Although Boucicault is often treated as important to the development of a national drama, this article stresses his transatlanticism. It reveals points of similarity with John Brougham, a fellow Dubliner in New York, who provided a burlesque model for Boucicault's paradoxically transatlantic national drama. Burlesque offered both men strategies for an ironic expression of multiple and conflicted allegiances. Their work directs us to view this period of theatrical history not as insufficiently national, but as fascinatingly and productively fluid in its identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transatlantic relations during the Bush administration sank to the lowest point in the post-war period following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This article provides an analysis of both the current state of that relationship and the academic debate which accompanies it. Arguments over the impact of various factors are analysed to determine the extent of transatlantic divergence. Thus, demographic change in America and Europe, divergence of political values between Europe and America, power differences, post-war geopolitical realignments, European integration and American unilateralism and exceptionalism are all analysed and evaluated. While some of these arguments presented are challenged, the article argues that the process of constructing separate European and American identities from within the transatlantic community is the single most significant contemporary challenge to transatlantic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 9/11, internal security co-operation has grown into a major feature of transatlantic relations. This article seeks to appraise both the achievements of the Bush administration in this field and the prospects for President Obama's period of office. Homeland security has been a new and difficult area of co-operation to foster, yet both sides of the Atlantic have come to recognise their shared interests in working together. The article cautions those European policy-makers who are hoping for a major change in homeland security co-operation under the new president. It is likely that the policies of the new administration will be characterised more by continuity than by change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]