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This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eve of World War II saw the development of direct connections between public relations experts and issues of foreign affairs in the United States. Public relations professionals assisted both internationalists and noninterventionists to spread their arguments across the nation, helping them to hone their messages, to organize, and to raise money. All of the main citizens' organizations created during this period sought public relations assistance in the face of growing popular awareness of global events, and with an awareness of the need for public relations counsel in the face of an increasingly measurable concept of public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) stands alongside Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960) as one of the most notable Hollywood films to center on the founding of Israel. In this paper I argue that Cast a Giant Shadow is less concerned with the peculiarities of the nascent stages of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and instead functions as an unabashed endorsement of American military interventionism in foreign conflicts at a time in which the United States was dramatically escalating its military presence in Vietnam. The film is positioned as the second installment in an unofficial trilogy of overtly propagandistic pro-interventionist cinema produced by John Wayne's production company Batjac in the 1960s, alongside The Alamo (1960), Wayne's directing debut, and the notoriously jingoistic pro-Vietnam War film The Green Berets (1968). My analysis of this largely overlooked entry in the Wayne oeuvre ultimately reveals how Israel enabled Wayne to effectively put his art at the service of his political beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration. [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]

The eleven-week dispute at the Amsterdam News in Harlem was the first time in US history that black workers were successful in a labour dispute with black management. Some contemporaries argued that the event represented a triumph for the class-inspired activism of the left, an interpretation in line with the historiography of the long civil rights movement. This article argues that the dispute actually demonstrated the challenges inherent in pursuing labour-based protest strategies. Success was achieved by a concentrated group of workers who used their collective power and propitious geographical and social standing to harness the support of a cross-section of leadership groups. This moment of apparent unity concealed enduring divides over interracial activism, not only between nationalist groups and the radical left but also within mainstream groups like the NAACP. Temporary success could be achieved when workers like the Amsterdam News staff managed to bridge these divides. Supporters, however, proved unable to avoid the subsequent dismissal of union instigators by the newspaper's new owners. More broadly, the problems of coordinating activism to target the different groups who controlled black employment continued to bedevil subsequent protests during the transformative era of the New Deal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorina's Culture War?, has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions : first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions — indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning — that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry ; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966 to explore the cultural dimensions of US leadership in the world of global evangelism post-World War II. It shows how a close alliance with technology and business, as well as traditional anticommunism and belief in Western civilization, spurred US evangelicals to assume global leadership. A closer examination of the cultural and spiritual atmosphere of the congress reveals, however, that beneath the apparent American leadership tensions emerged around race and social issues, expressed forcefully by new theological and political voices from the developing world. These tensions were negotiated through common practices and behaviours, such as during prayer sessions, dinner conversations, and discussions groups, and allowed a genuine transnational evangelical community to arise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In September 1991 Walt Disney's legal representatives in Israel sued prolific Israeli cartoonist Dudu Geva for using the figure of Donald Duck without permission. The case, which worked its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, sparked a broader conversation in Israel about the place of American cultural icons and idioms in Israeli life. While existing treatments emphasize Jewish Israeli optimism with American influence on their lives, the article demonstrates that some Jewish Israelis had a conflicted relationship with American hegemony, even as their state enjoyed unparalleled privilege under American patronage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanning from the 1890s to the 1980s, this special issue presents six essays addressing complementary topics relating to food, health and welfare during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the late twentieth century, three key periods of transition in American welfare provision. Beyond seeking to reduce program expenditures, his administration further denied the role of the federal government in eliminating hunger among food stamp recipients. These politicians well understood the medical rationales for reducing malnutrition and also their states' often racially fraught welfare politics, leading several to present antihunger spending as a way of reducing future welfare expenses. [Extracted from the article]

William Gibbs McAdoo is best known as the other half of the great Democratic Party meltdown at the party's national convention in 1924, when he and Alfred E. Smith fought for the presidential nomination over nine days and 102 ballots. We know much about Smith, but much less about what McAdoo stood for and what constituencies he appealed to during his unsuccessful campaign for that nomination. This article puts some flesh on the bones of McAdoo's candidacy in 1924 by looking more closely at his nomination platform and strategy, and by showing how his term as director general of the United States Railroad Administration (USRRA) in 1918 was pivotal in his campaign for the presidential nomination in 1924. At the USRRA McAdoo used federal control not only to rationalize the railroads but also to create an electoral constituency for his presidential ambitions. Although his time at the helm of the USRRA finished at the end of 1918, McAdoo remained prominent in the debate over its fate and then assiduous in his attempts to cash in the political chips he had accumulated through his work with it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, revisionist challenges to the traditional “declension hypothesis” have generated a much more nuanced and positive approach to the Black Power movement. However, attempts to explain the narrative's initial popularity have too often focussed on the latter half of the decade and blamed a media-assisted white backlash or the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power activists. Concentrating instead on the earlier half of the decade, this article examines the media strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and demonstrates how its public approach to nonviolence and interracial organizing purposefully hid developments within the movement that were seen to be at odds with the dominant discourse. By highlighting the ways in which the early media strategies of a militant organization like SNCC strengthened and legitimized a misleading movement narrative, this article challenges scholars to be more critical of early movement rhetoric and re-examine how and why Black Power was portrayed as a fundamental break with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early twentieth century – when the United States was receiving an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, and "standardization" was a dominant, yet polarizing, concept – having a single national language that unified Americans became a controversial topic in public discourse. In The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Ruth Suckow, like many authors at the time, used immigrant language as a foil for midwestern speech to demonstrate its "standard" Americanness. But, as this essay will show, by using other regional American dialects in a similar manner, she questioned how "Americanness" was being understood and recognized during this period in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reinhold Niebuhr's "Christian realism" had a favorable and lasting impact on the eminent political theorist Hans J. Morgenthau. The two men developed a lasting friendship and, on Morgenthau's lead, came to oppose America's war in Vietnam. This article explores the relationship between Niebuhr and Morgenthau, giving special attention to the role of Niebuhr's theology in shaping his own version of political realism. The dialectical relation between love and justice that gave Niebuhrian realism its distinctive quality and differentiated Niebuhr from realists such as Morgenthau and George Kennan is also examined. Finally, the unresolved problem that fellow realist Kenneth Thompson saw in Niebuhr's dialectic is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its reclamation in the 1970s, Edward S. Curtis's project to exhaustively photograph and describe American Indian cultures in the early twentieth century has invited shifting critical assessments. Complicating earlier arguments that it represents a nostalgic and inauthentic drama of a "vanishing" race, in which Indians functioned merely as props, recent scholars seek to recover his sitters' agency or contemporary artists' acts of reclamation. This article contributes to those efforts, but by exploring the temporal ambiguities inherent in the notion – then common among ethnographic photographers – of "preserving" a people for future viewers. It thus examines a photograph that Curtis contributed in 1913 to the Modern Historic Records Association, a short-lived organization that intended to assemble time capsules and archival vaults for historians in the distant future. Focussing on this single photograph – "The Oath – Apsaroke" (1908) – also allows us to track the way that Curtis's images could break free from his book project and resonate unpredictably across multiple domains, such as debates over the existence and meaning of Indian oaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1950s and 1960s, conservative intellectuals in the United States described African decolonization and the civil rights movement as symptoms of a global threat to white, Western civilization. In the most influential conservative journal of the period, National Review , writers such as William F. Buckley grouped these events together as dangerous contributors to civilizational decline. In the crucible of transnational black revolt, some conservative intellectuals embraced scientific racism in the 1960s. These often-ignored features of conservative intellectual thought provided space for white supremacist ideals to continue to ferment on the American right into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973 made abortion legal in the United States, it has consistently been subject to attempts to limit its reach, to make abortions harder to access, and thus to restrict their availability or frequency. In recent years, both pro-life and pro-choice groups have been reenergized, through calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Congress in 2015, and the 2016 Supreme Court ruling which prohibited a Texas “clinic-shutdown” law, for obstructing women's legal access to abortion under Roe. An era where this law was particularly contested, however, was the 1980s, which saw the Christian right crystallize and rally together to support the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in the hopes that he would promote their goals. Though extra-governmental pro-life groups and antiabortion individuals within the federal government were not ultimately able to do away with Roe, and would eventually become disappointed with Reagan's efforts in securing this, a series of measures over the course of the administration saw abortion access limited for one group of women in particular: teenage girls. This essay follows these legislative moves over the course of the 1980s, which include the first federal abstinence-only education bill, the Adolescent Family Life Act, a series of laws that allowed states to enact parental notification or consent clauses for minors’ abortions, and a “squeal rule” for doctors who treated sexually active teenagers. It analyses the discourse of and around each of these measures in order to understand how young women's sexual conduct mobilized abortion policy in this era. In doing so, it offers new perspectives on the significance of adolescent female sexuality to Reagan, to the Christian right, and to progressives involved in the heated debates over abortion and related battles of the 1980s culture wars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After World War II, American evangelicals realized that the European religious landscape had been seriously damaged, causing them to begin to include Europe in their mission programs. Their initiatives reversed the established direction of things, changing the pattern of who sent and who received missionary support. The religious aid flowing from the US fell almost entirely within the masculine framing of the American state, which had so recently exerted its influence in Europe in the military, economic, and cultural spheres. This essay explains how, as a result of practical experience and general social change, gender relations in American missions came to embrace greater inclusivity. European evangelicals, in turn, were both empowered by working with the American missionaries and impacted by the American debate over the separation of male and female roles in the mission field. [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]

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 was the largest global gathering of evangelical Christians in the latter half of the twentieth century. Lausanne was significant, in part because of the struggle between two sets of evangelical leaders: those, led by the US, who wanted to retain a focus on “evangelism,” and the young radicals, led by Latin Americans, who demanded a broader attention to “social concern.” This essay traces the impact of the liberalizing faction, while also following the “evangelism-first” movement and its role in the rise of the religious right in the US in the 1980s. [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]

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 engages the controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters. A minute sifting of all evidence and claims, augmented by new findings, yields strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts. If set in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, these acts position him not as a "homosexual lover," as has been asserted, but in the pattern of "straight trade" - heterosexual men open to sex with homosexuals - an understanding that in turn affords insights into the black revolutionary's mature masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"American Monsters" analyzes the satanic panic, an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout the 1980s. It involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California, still the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. This article explores how the panic both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives. Their ideology was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through tabloid media. Infotainment expanded dramatically in the 1980s, selling conservative-defined threats as news. The panic unfolded mostly through infotainment, lending appeal to subgenres like talk shows. In the 1990s, judges overturned the life sentences of defendants in most major cases, and several prominent journalists and lawyers condemned the phenomenon as a witch hunt. They analyzed it as a powerful delusion, or what contemporary cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a "hyperreality," in which audiences confuse the media universe for real life. Integral to the development, influence, and success of tabloid television, the panic was a manifestation of the hyperreal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It took years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for the National Zoo to capture Rocky Mountain sheep. The split hooves and remarkable eyesight of bighorns made these animals virtually impossible to catch alive. This is a story about a national government chasing sheep for the purpose of zoological display. This is also a story about the construction of knowledge, the ironies of conservation, and the building of the American West. More important, this is a story about storytelling. The following tale will call attention to the opportunities that zoological parks, animal history, and narrative history offer the historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

From 1968 to 1975, Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar traveled a turbulent personal path toward self-discovery. His journey had profound implications for the larger cultural landscape of race, sport, politics, and religion. As he became professional basketball's chief superstar, he was framed by the press as sullen and solitary, and he served as the villain in a media-driven storyline informed by popular prejudices. Yet for many African Americans and other progressive fans, he exemplified the ideals that made black power uplifting and affirmative, rather than threatening. His conversion to Islam and his name change further shaped new cultural and political territory for the black athlete. It highlighted a personal struggle within Abdul-Jabbar – he sought a kind of personal freedom, even as he revealed a tendency to subsume himself before strong authority figures. He nevertheless stood, in this period, as the nation's most prominent face of classical Islam. His religious conversion further distanced him from much of the American public, but over time he presented an effective, progressive narrative about the place of Islam in American life. [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]

Commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia reveal the relationship of form and content in Confederate memory. Atlanta monuments announced civic rejuvenation to national audiences, particularly tourists. Columbia ruins lamented the fracture of local elites' political dominance. The divergent cultures informed Margaret Mitchell's fabrication of Lost Cause myth in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker's excavation of Lost Cause legend in La Belle (1959). The decline of monuments and ruins contributed to the transformation of the Lost Cause into a different configuration of Confederate memory during the decade of the Civil War centennial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Worker correspondence was a form of found poetry employed by radical left writers during the 1930s. Readers' letters to publications such as New Masses and the Daily Worker were reworked with end stops and presented as free verse. This essay examines the practice of worker correspondence as a form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and “high” culture. This examination is put forward as a reflection on current thinking on the literary left of the Depression decade and – along the way – suggests points of contact with the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how a city remembered a national event that took place before its own existence. To this end, two public works of art in the city of Chicago that have American Revolutionary War participants as their subjects are examined. Particular attention is paid to the historical context surrounding Revolutionary War-themed public art in Chicago as well as to the two men who were responsible for erecting the sculptures – Robert R. McCormick and Barnet Hodes. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Tribune, chose to immortalize the doomed Revolutionary spy, Nathan Hale, while Hodes, an attorney for the city of Chicago, centered his attention on a monument that included representations of General George Washington and immigrant financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. By doing so, this article considers what motivated Chicagoans during the 1930s and 1940s to remember the American Revolutionary War. The general consensus that surrounded these acts of remembrance suggests the limitations of otherwise useful and important approaches that focus on conflict and healing in public memory formation. [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]

This article investigates David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest in terms of the links between Cold Containment, the reconfigured United States energy system and the Cold War. The essay focusses on the Reconfiguration's defensive mechanisms against waste as a retooled version of Ronald Reagan's SDI, both of which are fantasy systems imagined as constructions of glass, mirror and plastic. The materiality of these “defensive” arrangements is, then, of paramount importance: it is this trinity of substances that forms the subject of this essay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The defeat of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in 1922 was a turning point in relations between black Americans and the Republican Party. Little is understood, however, about the role played in the debates by President Warren Harding. This article contends that Harding's conflicted views on presidential leadership caused him to badly mishandle the bill. The President's inability to choose between a restrained and consensual “Whig” approach and a more active “stewardship” role on a wide range of issues resulted in an erratic and ultimately unsustainable style of leadership. The Dyer bill's failure was affected by this dilemma as the hopes of black and white reformers were alternately raised and dashed by Harding's apparent indecisiveness. Black resentment at the bill's ultimate defeat was thus heightened still further, with severe consequences for the Republican Party's long-term electoral relationship with black voters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]