This essay explores growing disillusionment with the national Democratic Party in the southern United States, disillusionment that led to third-party movements such as the Dixiecrats and George Wallacism, and eventually southern allegiance to the modern Republican Party. The essay focusses on Alabama during the first half of the 1940s, where a “Great Melding” between economic conservatism and racial conservatism came to maturity. The melding resulted in a cross-class and pan-white alliance in a state that had experienced periodic plain-white challenges to business and planter elite dominance. It also resulted in the use by economic conservatives of white supremacy and allied conservative norms on gender, class, religion, and militaristic hyper-patriotism to suppress future working-class insurgency, and set the stage for a more formal southern disassociation from the Democratic Party and eventual conversion to Republicanism.

Hegel, in the posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), saw America as “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.” Such enthusiasm was reciprocated in a curious and revealing manner both by American philosophers and by the representatives of other American social institutions, as I hope to show in this article. American neo-Hegelianism was, like its British counterpart, belated but significant in its influence on academic or “professional” philosophy. However, in contrast to the story of Anglo-Hegelianism as we know it through the lives and work of such figures as Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley and their followers, academic influence in America was short-lived, while its general cultural significance, as measured through the history of institutions other than the university, was much more profound.

In the bulk of this article I shall try to support these contentions as follows. First, I shall offer a definition of the philosophical position adopted by neo-Hegelian groups in Great Britain and the United States, beginning in the 1860s. Secondly, I shall give an outline of the career of Absolute Idealism (and Hegelianism in particular) in America up to the First World War.

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

Models – economic, mathematical, toys, manikins – are ubiquitous. This article probes one model, the Stettheimer doll's house, in order to understand all models better. The Stettheimers, three wealthy unmarried sisters living in New York in the early the twentieth century, attracted a remarkable melange of Camp artists and writers, identified by Arthur Danto as “the American Bloomsbury.” The Stettheimers were involved in many of New York's happenings, including the Harlem Renaissance and the innovative stage productions of Gertrude Stein. Androgyny, excess, racial mixing and theatricality flourished in the Stettheimer milieu. Carrie Stettheimer's doll's house, now housed in the Museum of the City of New York, captured this life. I consider this model for two related purposes. First, and more narrowly, I document the various effects this eccentric doll's house had on the artistic production of those in its vicinity, most notably on the novels of her sister Ettie and on the paintings both of her sister Florine and Marcel Duchamp. Second, I use the evidence of the doll's house's affect to discuss the agency of models in general.

This article argues that because a center–periphery model has dominated our understanding of postwar suburban growth we have failed to fully understand the rural dimensions of that growth. That misunderstanding resulted from the urban orientation of sociologists who studied the suburbs. As a consequence, we have also not appreciated the extent to which rural political outlooks shaped the postwar backlash against New Deal liberalism in the suburbs.

This essay considers the television series Breaking Bad in light of Nicos Poulantzas's concept of the new petty bourgeoisie and Bruno Latour's notion of the production of “monsters” in modern society as a result of the compartmentalization of science from society. Breaking Bad, which has received near universal praise from the popular press, established itself as the most recent dominant show in the recent wave of serial dramas. As a show that resembles the experimental vacuum chamber described by Latour, Breaking Bad succeeds in naturalizing its own terms so that they go unquestioned by viewers. My article views the character Walter White not as the everyman antihero presented by the show, but rather as a representative of what Poulantzas has termed the new petty bourgeoisie. A contention made in this essay is that the quarantined nature of such serial dramas allows them to work as vehicles for ideologies that go unexamined by their viewers.

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.

This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.

The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.

This essay explores the formative but largely unacknowledged role played by women in shaping the material and intellectual cultural productions of the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City. I argue that women poets used their positions as editors of little magazines to claim space – material, textual, cultural, and metaphorical – in literary and social networks in which they faced gendered marginalization. I suggest that the varied success with which they were able to do so reveals the complexities of editing, the uneven nature of the influences of gender, the determining role of domestic spaces, and the significance of affective labor in relation to the mimeograph revolution.

This article examines the development of two distinct theories of American internationalism in the 1990s – the political humanitarianism of the liberal hawks and the unipolarism of the neoconservatives – and the fundamentally different and opposing grounds on which these two groups supported the 2003 Iraq War. The liberal hawks, however, failed almost completely to examine the motivations of the neoconservative architects of the “war on terror.” Instead, they imposed their own normative schema on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and campaigned for them as wars of liberation. Their almost total failure to engage with the intellectual origins of the war led them to accept uncritically the idealistic rhetoric of the President and to assume that the Bush administration and the neoconservatives were motivated by the same idealism and world view as they were themselves. This led them to dismiss critics of the war as opponents of liberal values. As the situation in Iraq worsened, they continued to view the war as a moral endeavour – just one that had gone wrong, as opposed to a war fought for strategic reasons in which nation building was never a priority.

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.

Discussion of the American Revolution began at the beginning. Contemporaries identified two interactive, though not interlocked, major elements by boasting of the attainment of independence and the founding of a new republic; as Enos Hitchcock insisted in 1788, “A revolution can never be considered as complete till government is firmly established — and without this independency would be a curse instead of a blessing. — These jointly were the great object of the American Revolution.” A third component of the Revolutionary experience was a network of social changes that affected many aspects of American life. Some processes — demographic growth, economic expansion, and western settlement, all of which contributed materially to the context of Revolutionary change — were essentially secular and developmental in effect. Others, such as the emancipation of blacks and women, had barely begun during the Revolutionary era; a few, for example, the disestablishment of religion, were largely complete by the end of the century. Among these many social processes was one that interacted with both other components of the Revolution, was central in function, and had both immediate and long-term effects. Elites were forced to share their power.

By 1800 a critical change had taken place in the fabric of American society. The Revolution had transformed ideological expectations, behaviour patterns and social relationships as well as institutions, and had drastically altered the basis on which social and political authority could be exercised in a manner that transcended the departure of British officials and Loyalist exiles.

On 18 March 1941 Duff Cooper, the British Minister of Information, sent a short but important letter to the President of the Board of Education. In it he discussed the lack of American studies in British schools and universities and called upon the Board urgently to consider ways of improving the situation. On the face of it, the moment was hardly propitious for minor educational reform. Britain was fighting on alone against Germany and Italy, the Battle of the Atlantic had worsened, and new setbacks were about to befall British armies in Libya, Greece and Crete. Yet Duff Cooper's suggestions were adopted with an alacrity that was remarkable by Whitehall standards. An ambitious programme to promote the study of America was quickly set in train for elementary and secondary schools, followed, though more slowly and less successfully, by action at the university level. Throughout, the Ministry of Information and the Board of Education enjoyed the enthusiastic support of other Government departments, particularly the Foreign Office, and of outside bodies including the BBC and Oxford University Press. Also closely involved were the American Ambassador, John Winant, several US Consuls around Britain and distinguished American historians such as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. These developments constitute an important and neglected episode in the story of American studies in Britain. They also offer an interesting sidelight on the place of cultural diplomacy in the foreign policies of the British and US Governments during World War Two.

This paper begins by juxtaposing contemporary discourses on Harlem and the Lower East Side, arguing that the processes of iconization of these two neighborhoods have been very different. Whereas the iconicity of Harlem has always been shot through with ambivalence, the Lower East Side has come to signify a relatively unambivalent sacred space for US Jewry. The second part of the essay then traces the representations of Harlem and the Lower East Side back to early twentieth-century African American and Jewish American novels, claiming that critically analyzing the theme of ambivalence in these texts – and, more specifically, how ambivalence manifests itself differently within each literary tradition – is key to understanding not only why Harlem and the Lower East Side have undergone parallel but divergent processes of iconization, but also the way Jews and blacks have been positioned and have attempted to position themselves in relation to dominant white US society.

Five years after William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow bitterly debated the descent of man before the world's press at the Dayton, Tennessee, “monkey trial,” the New York liberal weekly The Nation brought news to its metropolitan readers that “A new battle on evolution is raging in the South. This time, however,” wrote Harry Schacter, “the issue is not religious but economic… The battle is between the small retailer, taking the fundamentalist position, against the chain store, an exponent of modernism in distribution.” The “chain-store menace” was, Schacter judged, “the question most talked of below the Ohio.” Not just in the South, but from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, hundreds of organizations sprang up in the winter of 1929–1930 to urge all good citizens to “trade-at-home” by boycotting the “foreign-owned, community-wrecking” chain stores. Dozens of anti-chain newspapers were rushed into circulation, while broadcasters emulated the example set by the undisputed leader of the enemies of the chains, Shreveport radio station owner W. K. Henderson. In all, the agitation was carried on “with a virulence which has not been matched in business since those early days in the Pennsylvania oil regions when the ‘independents’ rose up in their wrath against John D. Rockefeller's ‘Anaconda,’” and although the full passion of revivalist fervour lasted but a few months, the agitation proved to be the prelude to a decade of bitter legislative struggle between chains and independents.

A major characteristic of the social and spatial morphology of urban areas in advanced capitalist societies is the residential segregation of different socioeconomic, life style, and ethnic groups. The basic rationale for this segregation is common to most societies, as is its production via the operation of housing markets. In addition, however, each country has its own particular characteristics which accentuate the general processes. One such characteristic in the United States is the nature of the local government system in most States.

The aim of this paper is to identify die main features of that system as they apply to the geography of residential separation. The discussion is set within die context of the general processes of American local government and indicates how these have encouraged segregation. The paper then turns to a discussion of the use of the courts and die Fourteendi Amendment to challenge the amalgam of housing market and local government processes, and evaluates the likely outcome of the series of challenges.

Shortly after the end of World War II, on 11 December 1945, James Webb Young, Chairman of the Advertising Council and Director of the J. Walter Thompson Company, spoke to the annual meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies at the Continental Hotel in Chicago. The title of his speech was, “What Advertising Learned From the War,” and in it Young talked about an immediate post-war period that was, by most accounts, an exuberant time for an America flushed by a victory that finally marked it as a true global power. The American government proclaimed it, the American people believed it, and American business stood ready to sell it through an advertising industry that itself had come of age during, and because of, the war.

Historical and universal issues of love and hate, patriarchy and bigotry prevail in Alice Childress's tragic drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Originally written in the early 1960s, the play was not printed or performed professionally until 1966, despite some interest in producing the play on Broadway. Hence, due to its alleged controversial subject matter, the play remained largely unknown to mainstream audiences. Childress, it seems, unfashionably portrays a long-standing, committed interracial relationship set in 1918 South Carolina. This representation conflictingly juxtaposes with the well-documented fervent civil rights period of the mid-1960s. Additionally, with predominantly black and white male civil rights activists peacefully enforcing laws upholding desegregation in the South, Childress demonstrates segregation's insidious nature primarily through the insightfulness and experience of black women. This perceptiveness introduces what Childress herself penned as “anti-woman laws,” patriarchal norms that made living incredibly difficult for black and white women alike.

It was fate's infallible sense of the ironic which induced Andrew Lang to contact William Dean Howells as a potential contributor to the newly founded Longman's Magazine in October 1882. Ironic, that is, in the light of later events, for the two men barely knew one another at the time, Howells having been introduced to Lang two months previously, at one of Edmund Gosse's celebrated Sunday parties. Had Lang waited for Howells to show his colours, he would, no doubt, have refrained from hauling this Trojan horse into the Longman camp. Indeed, Howells's notorious disparagement of Dickens and Thackeray appeared that same year, in the Century Magazine for November 1882. All but a nonentity to the British public before, the American author thereby achieved fame, almost overnight, as the powerful vindicator of the new American prose and a merciless denunciator of the established British novelists.