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The article looks at the role of fire and arson in the final period and ending of slavery in the United States. It discusses the historical evidence for slaves setting many fires in the southern states as a form of rebellion against slavery, looking closely at fires in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in the period 1830-1860. Fire as a weapon of war in the U.S. Civil War is also discussed.

The author discusses the relationship between early modern Europe and the U.S. He mentions the impact of the Protestant Reformation on the development of a consumer culture, the interaction of capitalism and imperialism, and the influence of the Great Awakening in the 1790s on U.S. society.

Transnational circuits, as social practices, are not immaterial or virtual, but they do not depend on traditional understandings of one territorial location. Rather than fully and singularly determining the lives of its inhabitants, these local spaces belong now to a transterritory established by the physical, cultural, and imaginative labor ofmigrants connecting two such spaces, beyond the boundaries of one nation-state. Transnationalism, as a field of studies, has focused on these dynamics. Here they are used to address the question of a possible transnational politics inside the United States, connecting the lives of those who have the most and those who have the least, whether they are US nationals or foreign immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding long-run patterns in the incarceration of Black Americans requires integrating the study of racial inequality with the study of political economy. I offer a parsimonious framework describing how the Black incarceration rate has been affected by the dynamics of exploitation and exclusion over time and across space. This framework helps to explain otherwise puzzling facts, like why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century, why it was lowest in the SouthÕs cotton belt, and why it began to tick upward when it did. It also enables us to better understand recent changes in racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Review, we assess how mass incarceration, a monumental American policy experiment, has affected families over the past five decades. We reach four conclusions. First, family member incarceration is now common for American families. Second, individuals who will eventually have a family member incarcerated are worse off than those who never will, even before the incarceration takes place. Third, family member incarceration has negative effects on families above and beyond these preexisting disadvantages. And finally, policy interventions that address the precursors to family member incarceration and seek to minimize family member incarceration would best enhance family well-being. If the goal is to help all American families thrive, then the importance of simultaneous changes in social and criminal justice policy cannot be overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a long history of critical engagement in local justice movements, the efforts of U.S. Women of Color activists remain understudied. In the present study we examine the manifestations of opposition and care that Women of Color utilize in exercising and sustaining their activism as they work to build justice-oriented change in their communities. We specifically explore how oppositional consciousness and ethics of care shape the perspectives and actions of local Women of Color activists. Qualitative data were collected via oral history interviews with eight local Women of Color activists in Cincinnati, Ohio. Using thematic narrative analysis, we identified three overarching thematic phases: building awareness of inequity, conscious interdependence, and putting awareness into action. These three phases aid in understanding how the women developed their commitment to social justice activism both as individuals and in consideration of their relationships with others in the community. Furthermore, we consider theories of oppositional consciousness and ethics of care and how they manifest in each phase. We then discuss how these findings contribute to understanding the experiences and efforts of local Women of Color activists. Findings from our research suggest timely incentives for broader inclusion of underrepresented voices to better inform decision-making bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the Barry Farm case to discuss how historic preservation law in the U.S. allegedly failed to protect and preserve properties related to poor and nonwhite communities, and offers possible solutions to safeguard underserved and marginalized communities.

The article discusses the significance of an anecdote in a letter written by 19th century Vermont 1st lieutenant Stephen Spalding to his University of Vermont roommate, James Peck in which Spalding tells a racially-charged joke about an African American servant. The article examines 19th century racial sensitivities and mores, the portrayal of African Americans among whites, and the concept of white supremacy. It also discusses the differences between power as opposed to literal racism exposed in Spalding's anecdote

Research continues to examine the barriers to and facilitators of positive fathering behaviors. One area recently addressed by researchers focuses on the relationship between masculine norm adherence and father involvement. Yet, little work has examined cross-national variability in this relationship—despite differences in gender norms, fathering expectations, and social policies across countries. The present study considers possible differences in the relationship between masculine norm adherence and fathering behaviors in the United States and Canada—two rich, multiethnic countries with many similarities but some distinct policy and family support differences. Using data from fathers in Canada (n = 2057) and the United States (n = 2207), our results show that fathers in Canada are warmer, more involved, provide more care, and use harsh discipline less than their American counterparts. Furthermore, the negative association between masculine norm adherence and positive fathering behaviors is stronger among American fathers than Canadian fathers. Overall, our findings indicate the importance of social context for understanding how gender norms shape men's parenting, given that the association between masculine norms and fathering varies in two culturally similar countries with different social policies around family life. Implications for social policy in the two countries and within institutional contexts are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the "New History" that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the "cultural turn" of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, American society experienced a number of crises. They involved raced relations precipitated by the Black Lives Matter movement, the Covid 19 pandemic with its huge loss of life and rates of illness, the economic recession that accompanied the pandemic and efforts to control it, and the tensions of the national political campaign, followed by the refusal of President Trump to acknowledge his defeat. Each of these crises led to cleavages in the relationships of solidarity in the societal community subsystem of American society. The cleavages may prove to be the most enduring of the crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low. In this article, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940, constructing a large linked sample of twin brothers to account for differences in unobserved ability and family background. We find that each additional year of schooling increased labor earnings by approximately 4 percent, about half the return found for more recent cohorts in twins studies. These returns were evident both within and across occupations and were higher for sons from lower socio-economic status families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay talks about the challenges facing the U.S. amid the global coronavirus pandemic, the crash of the global economy, and the insidious efforts of President Donald J. Trump to undercut constitutional government in an effort to win the 2020 presidential election. Topics covered include the growing Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, and the need for the Back Lives Matter and allied groups to define freedom, liberation and justice to put an end to racism.

Women's rights are a core part of a global consensus on human rights. However, we are currently experiencing an increasing popularity of anti-feminist and misogynist politics threatening to override feminist gains. In order to help explain this current revival and appeal, in this article I analyse how anti-feminist communities construct their collective identities at the intersection of local and global trends and affiliations. Through an in-depth analysis of representations in the collective identities of six popular online anti-feminist communities based in India, Russia and the United States, I shed light on how anti-feminists discursively construct their anti-feminist 'self' and the feminist 'other' between narratives of localized resistance to change and backlash against the results of broader societal developments associated with globalization. The results expose a complex set of global–local dynamics, which provide a nuanced understanding of the differences and commonalities of anti-feminist collective identity-building and mobilization processes across contexts. By explicitly focusing on the role of discursively produced locations for anti-feminist identity-building and providing new evidence on anti-feminist communities across three different continents, the article contributes to current discussions on transnational anti-feminist mobilizations in both social movement studies and feminist International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. western travels of U.S. author Washington Irving and the concepts of masculinity and race in the U.S. West. According to the article, Irving began his voyage into Native American territory in October 1832. The article discusses Irving's travel guides, Irving's interactions with Osage Indians, and cultural images of Native Americans in the U.S. in the early-to-mid-19th century.

In his photobook American Night (2003), the photographer Paul Graham evokes the passage of a walker who draws the outline of a composite and dialectic map of the American city. This article will examine how the book's structure and its division into zones is symptomatic of the explosion of the city and of its spatial, social and racial inequalities. These zones are also spaces of invisibility and visibility, of over-/perfect/under-exposure, illuminating the social/racial contrasts that underpin the urban environment and the mechanisms of their perpetuation. In this sense, American Night ultimately exposes the biopolitical struggle that underscores the American city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead White Americans to express more or less prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through changing norms around racial prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a thirteen-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, White Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after Trump's political emergence, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among White Americans overall. They also indicate that rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can shift by reacting against changing presidential rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines three "American" magazines published in mid-nineteenth-century London: the American Miscellany (1839–40), the Great Western (1842), and the American Magazine (1851–52). These magazines staged a fantasy of a unified, national and white American culture that regional print cultures and sectional tensions over slavery rendered impossible within the United States itself. They fashioned this fantasy through dialogue with Yankee comedy (an American form constructed through transatlantic circulation); through the theatricality, materiality and composite form of the magazine; and by transforming regional texts into national culture through transatlantic reprinting. Through histories of these magazines, this essay theorizes magazine reprinting as performance, arguing that performance theory helps to conceptualize transatlantic reprinting and its cultural work, and to understand why these magazines ultimately failed as organs of national culture. Additionally, it suggests that magazines published outside the United States illuminate the relationship between periodical circulation and the development of American nationhood in the antebellum era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students in the United States learn about the history of enslavement throughout their educational experiences. Yet our understanding of what students from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds know about this difficult period in American history is limited. In this study, we use mixed methods to examine written narratives of students' understanding of the history of enslavement in the United States. As a whole, narratives about enslavement were most commonly associated with its end (the Civil War and abolition) and with its violence (general brutality). Differences were found by race and ethnicity as well as by gender. Understanding how students narrate what they know can help educational researchers and teachers better serve diverse educational needs by designing curricula that relate to students' multiple social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to start a fresh conversation about how political campaigns are best judged. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little research on this topic, with most scholars operating on implicit norms of what a good campaign looks like, featuring such republican criteria as ballot integrity, regime support, cognitive gains, press oversight and policy signaling. Focusing on the 2016 presidential campaign, I offer a contrarian set of criteria for judging campaign quality, including the expansion of communication networks, partisan rumination, moral interrogation, subaltern activism, economic evangelism, and more. Despite its noisiness, despite its fractiousness, I argue, the 2016 presidential campaign accomplished a great deal, but only if we look at it with fresh eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the 1925 U.S. exhibition tour conducted by Finnish Olympic runner Paavo Nurmi. It examines Nurmi's fame and athletic renown during the 1920s and how Americans responded to Nurmi's tour, as well as media portrayals of his track exploits during the tour. The article briefly reviews Nurmi's life prior to his Olympic victories and attempts to explain the context within which Nurmi's fame grew, particularly in the wake of the popularity of sports in the early 20th century. According to the article, Nurmi set several world records during his tour of the U.S. and had an audience with then-U.S. president Calvin Coolidge. The article also discusses controversy surrounding Nurmi's compensation for his appearances.

The article discusses the rise of the political, social, and economic power of the U.S. through a comparison to the birth and rise of basketball. It describes the idea of "Muscular Christianity" that emphasized masculinity, physicality, and practical religion, the role of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in popularizing a Christian cultural identity and work ethic, and the ways in which basketball symbolized the ideals of Muscular Christianity and practical religion. Other subjects under discussion include basketball inventor James Naismith, the characteristics of American identity in the early 20th century, and the International Training School in Springfield, Missouri.

This article presents an examination of the poetry collection "Bellocq's Ophelia," by Natasha Trethewey and its influences from the photography of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1912 by E. J. Bellocq. The author presents the biographical and ideological perspectives of both artists along with a synthesis of their collective works on the final portrayal of New Orleans culture.

This article focuses on the depiction of African Americans in song and photography in the post-Civil War United States. Several popular stereotypical black-face minstrel songs are compared with the psychological nature of photography and the tendency to pose and present a certain expected image. The author presents comments regarding the popular image of African Americans and their actual perception by white culture.

Features writer Charlotte Smith. Reputation of Smith in the field of literature; Characterization of her works; Description of the U.S. society from the perspective of Smith.

While there is a widespread belief that stable employment is important for social integration, stable employment careers have become less common in America's increasingly complex labor market. Job tenure has dropped, precarious work arrangements have gained prominence, long-term unemployment has spiked, and an increasing share of the jobless are not looking for work. Against this background, we investigate the linkages between labor market experiences and volunteer activities, as an indicator of people's involvement in civic life. We outline a theory on how transitions between labor market states—within, into, and out of the labor force—bring about changes in civic engagement and test our predictions using panel data from the Current Population Survey 2002–2015. Contrary to what much previous research suggests, we find that people who become unemployed are more likely to start volunteering and no more likely to stop. We additionally show that people who leave the labor force altogether (i.e. not having a job nor looking for one) are more likely to stop volunteering. Conversely, entering the labor force, either by securing or searching for a job, is associated with an increase in volunteer activities. We explore the role of motivation and time resources in accounting for these patterns, finding among other things that moving into or out of the most detached labor market state—outside the labor force without any intention to find work—is most consequential for civic engagement. We discuss the implications of our findings for civic democracy in light of ongoing labor market trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on discrimination consistently shows that non‐Whites are at a disadvantage in obtaining goods and services relative to Whites. To a lesser extent, recent work has asked whether or not place of residence may also affect individuals' chances in economic markets. In this study, we use a field experiment in an online market for second‐hand goods to examine transactional opportunities for White, Black, Asian, and Latino residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods. Our results show that sellers prefer transactional partners who live in advantaged neighborhoods to those who live in neighborhoods that are majority non‐White and have higher rates of poverty. This was true across all four racial/ethnic groups, revealing that neighborhood stigma exists independently of racial stigma. We discuss the implications for scholarship on neighborhood effects and we outline how future research using experiments can leverage various types of markets to better specify when characteristics like race trigger discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the strategy and rhetoric of the National Federation of Settlements' 1928 project on unemployment. During the Hoover years, settlement workers assembled an extensive catalog of case studies, which offer a glimpse into the home life of the jobless and their families at the beginning of the Great Depression. From their research, the NFS Committee on Unemployment published a series of books and articles that depicted the unemployed as the undeserving victims of economic change and called for policies to protect them. Throughout, settlement workers focused on the families of the unemployed, drawing on gendered notions of work and family and supporting policies that protected male-breadwinner households. Thus, settlement leaders recast unemployment as a social, rather than an economic, problem. In all, settlement research, writing, and reception presented a skeptical voting public with a palatable argument for social insurance that brought the experiences of the jobless to the voting public and policymakers, demonstrating a process of "policymaking from the middle." In so doing, they redeemed the newly unemployed and the insurance plans intended to protect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article systematically assesses U.S.-Native relations today and their historical foundations in light of a narrow, empirical definition of colonial empire. Examining three core elements of colonial empire—the formal impairment of sovereignty, the intensive practical impairment of sovereignty through practices of governance and administration, and the continuing otherness of the dominated and dominant groups—we compare contemporary U.S.-Native political relations to canonical instances of formal colonial indirect rule empires. Based on this analysis, we argue that the United States today is a paradigmatic case of formal colonial empire in the narrow, traditional sense, one that should be better integrated into the comparative, historical, and sociological study of such formal empires. Furthermore, this prominent contemporary case stands against the idea that the era of formal colonial empire is over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of white privilege and whether the term privilege applies to poor white people, particularly focusing upon the U.S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and disabled who were deemed capable of passing their genes through their children. The article also examines the eugenics movement.

The transformation of U.S. foreign intelligence in recent years has led to increasing privacy concerns. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) traditionally regulated foreign intelligence surveillance by authorizing warrant-based searches of U.S. and non-U.S. persons. Individualized court orders under traditional FISA were intended to protect U.S. persons and limit the scope of intelligence collection. In a post-9/11 world, however, the intelligence community cited concerns regarding the speed and efficiency of collection under traditional methods. The intelligence and law enforcement communities recognized the "wall" preventing information sharing between the communities as a central failure leading to the 9/11 attacks. In response, the scope and authorizations of foreign intelligence collection were expanded with numerous statutory measures, culminating in the passage of Section 702. Under Section 702, only non-U.S. persons located abroad may be surveillance targets, but no warrant is required for the intelligence collection. Since its passage, the intelligence community and privacy advocates have intensely debated the implications of incidental collection of U.S. person communications, including the use of U.S. person queries. Despite the significant expansion of surveillance authorized in the shift from traditional FISA to Section 702, minimization and targeting procedures regulated by the new statute are designed to protect U.S. persons and balance national security and privacy interests. This Comment addresses the uncomfortable question of whether the U.S. Constitution permits the minor intrusion of a few to protect national security and argues that Section 702 queries are searches under the Fourth Amendment that require a justification independent from the overall surveillance to be constitutional. Nonetheless, the Fourth Amendment protects against only unreasonable searches or seizures by the government, and U.S. person queries are reasonable searches characterized by critical foreign intelligence interests and robust safeguards that outweigh limited impacts on privacy. While the Fourth Amendment does require probable cause warrants for U.S. person queries conducted for criminal investigative purposes, such queries are rare. Striking the proper balance between privacy and security, particularly in the modern technological era, is a complex and challenging legal question. In this context, considerations must include policy and value-laden choices that weigh the statute's own regulatory measures against the rights protected by the Fourth Amendment. Such an approach renders U.S. person queries reasonable Fourth Amendment searches, albeit subject to more stringent requirements than courts and the government have previously found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essays in this forum mark the 250th anniversary of Andrew Jackson's birth by reassessing the meaning and legacy of "Jacksonian Democracy." Some scholars have challenged this once-popular concept, while these contributors find that "Jacksonian Democracy" often combined the celebration of majority rule with racial supremacy for white men. Most Jacksonians sought power for white men while denying it to people of color, yet some promoted the interests of all laborers, including the enslaved, and granted citizenship and political rights to Native Americans. Racial democracy did not always function in straightforward ways. Jacksonian political culture also included distinct gender relations and household patriarchy, with mastery at home empowering white men in public. Jacksonian Democracy shaped more than politics, as Jacksonian notions of egalitarianism and democracy influenced religious, economic, and legal thought. This forum underscores the complexity of Jacksonian Democracy, a political ideology and a cultural worldview with a lasting legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is more violent than Canada and it always has been. Even in the face of mass shootings, most Americans remain culturally and politically resistant to the sorts of gun control measures that have long existed in Canada. America's unique gun culture is embedded in the history, imagery, and especially the mythology of the American frontier. Canada had its own frontier experience and has its own history of gun ownership, but it does not have a parallel gun culture. This article presents a comparative analysis of post-Civil War/post-Confederation frontier history and mythology, and examines the construction of contrasting cultural narratives of America's "Wild West" and Canada's "Mild West." It suggests that US–Canadian differences in gun laws and gun culture—even in the borderlands region of Alberta/Montana—are better explained by the countries' two different frontier mythologies than by their actual western histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the symbolic and practical relationships of U.S. President Donald Trump to sexism and capitalism as displayed in his 2016 presidential campaign. Topics include the implication of Trump's presidency for women, immigrants and Muslims, arguments on the relationship of capitalism to kinship and patriarchy in the context of sociologist Emile Durkheim's concept of social facts, and Trump's alleged exploitation of both aspects of kinship and patriarchy as a capitalist-in-chief.

The article explores the works of literature that illustrate poor Southern farmers' perception of time to draw some conclusions about temporal heterogeneity in modem America. Topics discussed include ways in which literary works dramatize the tension between diverging perceptions of temporality; and representation of clocks and time in James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and "Richard Wright's short story "Long Black Song" that demonstrates the processes of uneven modernization.