Search

This essay reflects on the materiality of migration with a focus on passports and other kinds of documentary permissions for travel. It argues that throughout the history of the Americas passports have acquired meanings exceeding contemporary associations with national citizenship that are discernible in literary works and in the archival record. It looks to documentary practices in Latin America and the Caribbean to decenter the United States from studies of border crossing and Latinx subjectivities, suggesting intersecting hemispheric practices that delineate the relative importance of being documented or undocumented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the characterization of paper money in the novel `The Gold Bug,' by Edgar Allan Poe. Role of paper as medium and image in American history and literature; Interpretation of the virtual quality of paper in Poe's fiction through the historical debate over the significance of paper; Reception of paper money during the American Revolution.

Analyzes the gap between theory and practice in worker education programs in the U.S. Importance of labor education for trade unions; Features of a standard labor education; Comparison of models of labor education.

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 states banned or restricted abortion access under elective-procedure restrictions. The rationale was preserving hospital capacity and personal protective equipment (PPE); however, abortions commonly take place in clinics and use less PPE than childbirth. This paper investigates the discursive construction of abortions, the people who get them, and the fetuses in this legislation. The authors analyzed 13 antiabortion documents using an iterative process of thematic coding and memo writing. Twenty-three percent of the legislation listed abortion as banned, whereas the remaining laws implied abortion within the terms "elective" or "nonessential." Legislation used common antiabortion tactics, such as the trivialization of abortion, risk discourses, and constructions of motherhood and fetal personhood. Discourses delegitimized abortion providers and used quasi-medical justifications for banning abortion. Finally, legislation constructed abortion clinics as sites of contagion and waste and consequently as risks to public health. The results highlight the vulnerability of abortion and the connection between abortion policy and other conservative policies, and they gesture toward a strategic attempt to ban abortion federally. These findings have several implications for a post-Roe United States and for stakeholders wishing to increase abortion access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay reflects on the conjunctional histories of anti‐black and anti‐trans criminalization in the context of the contemporary moral panic aimed at eradicating transgender life. Within the last couple of years, conservatives have introduced and (and sometimes passed) legislation in thirty‐four states criminalizing trans people (with an emphasis on trans healthcare and bathroom use) and the parents, doctors, and teachers who have sought to serve as trans allies. How is this wave of fascist panic and propaganda linked to broader histories of racial and gendered criminalization in the United States? And how might a more thorough understanding of the carceral dimensions of race and gender aid in solidarity efforts between cis and trans abolitionist organizers? This paper reflects on these questions and their stakes in our current political moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes into consideration Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, a nonfictional work about unaccompanied Central American minors coming to the United States and the immigration questionnaire they must navigate to determine their US admissibility. The essay explores how the Northern Triangle's minor--the outré LatinX child--is made into the word on bureaucratic paper. It probes a genealogy of temporary American beginnings and delves into the expulsed Central American child as a newcomer, a migrant, and the beginning of something else: a LatinX phenomenon of--and in--crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world's largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company's properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company's vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer 's hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black south. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer's circulation from Mississippi's cotton fields to Panama's banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black south. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries. Keywords transnationalism, black geographies, global south, Garveyism, print culture [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Asia as its backdrop, Alfred McCoy's paper gives us a story of the rise of US hegemony after World War II. Using “military bases” rather than wars as a metric of imperial power, the paper traces the geopolitics of imperial expansion (and sometimes retraction) through a close and rich study of the many contestations around US military presence in the Philippines—contestations that occurred in both the United States and the Philippines. In doing so, one of the paper's most profound insights, made with considerable archival documentation, is that colonization and decolonization do not follow a linear trajectory and that its politics, rather than a simple imposition from the colonizer onto the colonized, are instead quite messy, complicated, and perhaps mostly importantly, in a constant state of negotiation. Thus, for instance, the paper shows us that political independence is not a clear rupture from colonization to decolonization, that arguments for the continuation or discontinuation of imperial relations post-independence are complex on both sides of the imperial divide and shift in different directions over time, and that who appears as a “threat” or an “enemy” that mobilizes a national community and nationalist resistance is also complex and inconstant. In other words, McCoy provides us with a historically detailed story of the rise of US hegemony in the latter half of the twentieth century through an account of the complex expansion of the US presence in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Mechanic has been a pioneering leader in the social and behavioral sciences of health, health services, and health and mental health policy for more than fifty years. One of David's most distinctive qualities has been his vision in identifying trends and defining new research areas and perspectives in health care policy. His early work on how methods of physician payment by capitation and fee-for-service in England and the United States affected physicians' responses to patients and patient care addressed present challenges and many ongoing studies of payment mechanisms. His papers on rationing of health care established a framework for examining alternative allocation mechanisms and just decision making. Influential papers dealt with risk selection, policy challenges in managed care, reducing racial disparities, trust relationships between patients, doctors, and the public and health institutions, and the predicaments of health reform. Focusing on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, David explored its opportunities and challenges especially in providing comprehensive and effective behavioral health services. A hallmark of his work has been his redirecting our attention to the most severely ill and those in greatest need. Less visible is the leadership and institution building endeavors and the many honors David has received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversy over patients' access to stem cell interventions is familiar to scholars of the drug regulatory system and the politics of evidence-based medicine. What counts as evidence of a biomedical intervention's safety and effectiveness? Who should define and assess safety and effectiveness, and how? In the first section of the paper we describe the types of stem cells that may be therapeutically effective. We then describe how the US Food and Drug Administration asserted regulatory authority over certain stem cell interventions and the legal challenge to the agency's actions. Next, we place the debate about patients' access to stem cell interventions in the broader context of efforts in the US to promote and implement health technology assessment and the debate about standards of evidence. We then review several proposed initiatives to get stem cell and other new biomedical interventions into the clinic faster and consider the extent to which these policies can resolve the underlying conflicts about evidentiary standards for clinical use. Finally, we consider whether efforts to expedite access to biomedical technologies may undermine countervailing efforts to improve the safety and effectiveness of stem cell interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces the 2013 prize winners of scholarly awards sponsored by the Society for French Historical Studies which included the David H. Pinkney Prize for best book on French history awarded to William Reddy, the William Koren Jr. Prize for best French history article awarded to John Warne Monroe, and the Natalie Zemon Davis Graduate Student Paper Prize for best French history article by a graduate student awarded to Carolyn Purnell.

A Creole social group or estate, primarily the offspring of Russian men and Native women, was established in Alaska by the 1821 Russian-American Company charter. The Creoles enjoyed special rights and privileges in Russian America until the United States took over the jurisdiction of Alaska from Russia in the 1867 Treaty of Cession. Creoles then lost their privileged status and were positioned at the bottom of the American socioeconomic ladder. Many Creoles then began to deny their Native heritage and identify as Russians in attempts to avoid discrimination. Under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, anyone with one quarter Native blood quantum could participate. Most descendants of Creoles met this requirement and enrolled, angering many Natives who had not identified as Russians. This paper examines the history of the Creoles on Kodiak Island through the eyes of the author, a descendant of Creoles, Natives, and Russians of the Russian America era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the experiences of prostitutes in New Orleans, Louisiana during the U.S. Reconstruction era in the nineteenth century. It references the book "Black Reconstruction in America" by W. E. B. Du Bois. According to the author, the experiences of the Creole, black, and white prostitutes detailed in this paper illustrate Du Bois' arguments about the importance of class in Reconstruction and its potential to unite people across racial differences. Details on the role of violence in the experiences of prostitutes Celestine Antoine, Lizzie Johnson, and Laura Smith are presented. It is suggested that some of the most radical social changes of the Reconstruction era may have occurred at the margins of society.

An introduction is presented in which the guest editors discuss essays and papers in the journal's special issue pertaining to real reform in health care systems.

Since 2004, I have used various document sets from the National Security Archive (NSA) to teach students about modern Latin American history at Georgia College and State University, a medium-sized public liberal arts university in central Georgia. The NSA has the largest non-governmental online collection of US national security government documents in the world. Its research staff compiles, introduces, contextualizes, analyzes, and sifts through thousands of declassified materials. These include inter-agency memos, embassy communications, executive directives, confidential correspondence, and other once-classified materials. This essay will critically examine the NSA as a way of teaching the histories of US imperialism and intervention, state suppression of popular dissent, militarism, human rights abuses, and counterinsurgency tactics and training in Latin America from the beginning of the Cold War until today. First, I will provide an explanation of the assignments that I use. These consist mostly of document analysis exercises and larger research papers. I will also share which topics students tend to explore, while noting several potential methodological pitfalls in using the NSA documents. Secondly, I will share testimony on how students' views on US foreign policy have changed. The general consensus at the beginning of the semester is that one of the principal aims of US foreign policy is to promote democracy above all other values. After examining the NSA documents, however, students seriously re-examine this idea. Indeed, introducing students to the 'raw material' provided by the NSA is a powerful pedagogical tool for delivering and teaching radical history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the book "Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language," by Eva Hoffman and on her proposed immigrant rage felt by immigrants in the U.S. This rage coined by Hoffman concerns a "hygienic" immigrant identity, a model sustained by immigrants. In the book, Hoffman narrates about the unspoken expectations embedded in the American imagination of acceptable modes of being for immigrants. In this paper, the author wants to connect alienhood and immigrant rage and its impact on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Dramatic demographic changes are rapidly reshaping the population of the United States in ways that make the research questions that motivated twentieth-century dialectology outmoded. This paper outlines some of the most important demographic changes currently affecting the United States and suggests some research questions that are implicit in those developments. While twentieth-century dialectology was driven by questions regarding the sociospatial structure of the Founder Dialects and their relationships to settlement history and British regional varieties, twenty-first-century dialectology must examine the linguistic consequences of newly emerging demographic divisions, the consequences of widespread urbanization, and the relationships between Anglo dialects and a rapidly growing non-Anglo population. These questions require some fundamental changes in how we do dialectology, but they also position the discipline in a way that will enable it to address fundamental social and educational issues that stand at the center of the intellectual life of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the influence of the newspaper 'The Liberator' on the American literary culture. Publication of slave narratives in the newspaper; Dual relationship of the paper with liberal capitalism and moral suasion; Representation of human body and suffering in the humanitarian narratives; Impact of the humanitarian narratives on the readers.

The health care systems of the United States and the United Kingdom are changing rapidly. After the Thatcher government's 1989 white paper, the formerly unified British National Health Service (NHS) was split into purchaser and provider sides, with the NHS District Health Authorities becoming purchasers, and the NHS hospitals, now reconstructed as independent NHS trusts, becoming providers. The U.S. health care system, driven by market forces rather than government fiat, has been moving rapidly toward integration, with increasingly formalized purchaser and provider relationships. Contracts are found at the purchaser/provider interface in both systems. We reviewed American and British purchaser/provider contracts. The contracts address similar issues but often take disparate approaches. These dissimilarities illuminate the profound, continuing differences between the two systems. They also, however, offer possibilities to transfer contracting "technology" between the two contracting cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the collection of the Country Music Foundation's Library and Media Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. Record collection; Films and videotapes; Print materials; Primary source materials; Scrapbooks and personal papers of key industry figures; Studio logbooks.

Discusses American author William Faulkner's writing of several drafts of an introduction for a limited edition of the book 'The Sound and the Fury' in 1933. Bibliographical evidence suggesting that Faulkner composed the long version rather than the short version of the introduction last; Holograph manuscript fragments in the Rowan Oak Papers.

The article presents news briefs concerning American literature. The article reports that Cecelia Tichi, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, was awarded the 2009 Jay B. Hubbell Medal. Nicholas Gaskill was awarded the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in the "American Literature" journal. The article also discusses the science fiction genre. The author talks about the scientific and technological innovations addressed through science fiction. A call for papers regarding science fiction is also presented.

The author acknowledges the article written by policy analyst Bruce Spitz on health care financing and delivery issues in the U.S. The author says that the paper has resulted from Spitz's fearless enthusiasm for promising new ideas. He admits that having no information to guide states that might be interested in pursuing primary care case management made him distressed, but Spitz suggested that he would assess the limited private-sector experience.

Reports on developments related to American literature as of March 2004. Recipient of the 2003 Norman Foerster Prize; Call for papers on Frederick Douglass' "My Bondage and My Freedom," and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"; Call for nominations for the Modern Language Association Book Publication Prizes.

Features the thirty-second Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History in Lubbock, Texas. Speakers and their topics; Consideration for papers on all topics related to French history, culture and society; Submission of a short description of the proposed paper by prospective participants.

Details Henry David Thoreau's role in the manufacturing of the pencil. Thoreau's discovery that he could combine lead and graphite to make `the best pencil in America,' the basis of a flourishing family business. The story of Thoreau and the pencil is a reminder that innovative and creative engineering was done by those who were interested in a wide variety of subjects beyond the technical.