For American trade unions and labour organizations, immigration was a constant source of concern and anxiety during the second half of the nineteenth century. In their attempts to eliminate the more harmful consequences to their members of this flood of foreigners, they adopted and promoted a series of remedial measures, ranging from informal co-operation with the First International in the late 1860s, to attempts to strengthen the immigration law in the 1880s and early 1890s. None proved satisfactory. Pressure for further restriction built up and in 1897 the American Federation of Labor, to which most trade unions were affiliated, approved by a massive five-to-one majority a relatively new restrictive measure, the literacy test. This test was the central feature of an immigration bill sponsored by Senator Lodge, which had been approved by both houses of Congress in 1896 but vetoed by President Cleveland. The test was intended to discriminate against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of literacy were low. For Lodge, who had opposed a general head tax because it was insufficiently discriminatory, the literacy test “ would tell exclusively on the most undesirable portions of immigration.”

The phenomenon of the precipitate decline in popular and critical favour of writers immensely successful in their own day is a familiar one. In due course, however, it often happens that decline is halted, and replaced by some degree of renewed interest. Nowhere has this pattern been more clearly revealed than in the case of the eminent Victorians: and Macaulay is an obvious example. In the present flourishing state of Victorian studies it is hardly surprising that the great liberal historian should be once again receiving at least some fraction of the attention he was accorded in his nineteenth-century heyday. Two book-length studies have recently appeared: Jane Millgate's Macaulay (1973), in the Routledge Author Guides series, mainly concerned with Macaulay's status as a literary artist, and John Clive's highly praised biographical study, Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (1973). Somewhat earlier, George Levine's The Boundaries of Fiction (1968) had included extended treatment of Macaulay along with Carlyle and Newman, and the early volumes of Thomas Pinney's collected edition of Macaulay's letters were published in 1974. It is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been paid to the evidence for Macaulay's widely-acknowledged, extraordinary American vogue and to the reasons for it.

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

In former years there existed a widespread assumption that, throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was an isolationist power. Its policy, according to this thesis, had been articulated in Washington's Farewell Address, was accorded bipartisan acquiescence in Jefferson's First Inaugural, and was reaffirmed in the Monroe Doctrine. Until the Spanish–American war of 1898 isolationism prevailed, confident and more or less unchallenged; and then it suddenly collapsed, virtually without a struggle, leaving the Americans free to enter without inhibition on their new status of world power.

With these apocryphal words from the proverbial doughboy, Charles Homer Haskins lightened his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1922. Haskins's theme was the historical and historiographical relevance of Europe to Americans, two subjects on which he could speak authoritatively. Dean of the Harvard Graduate School, an outstanding scholar of medievalism and the Mediterranean, Haskins was best known to his contemporaries as a member of Woodrow Wilson's research team at the Paris Peace Conference, the so-called Inquiry. In the course of his address Haskins surveyed the current state of American writing on European history and pronounced it moderately satisfying; but his underlying anxiety could not be disguised. Since he believed that all the “great European wars” had been “in every instance…American wars” and therefore “world wars,” Haskins feared the consequences of any American political and academic neglect of Europe. In Haskins's ambiguous formulation: “European history [was] of profound importance to Americans.”

The American poet Susan Howe is perhaps the best-known of the generation of poets that came to attention under the banner of “language poetry.” Her work has been widely anthologized and it has drawn a considerable amount of critical commentary. The “language” label, like most such tags, was unpalatable to most of the poets who came under it. It did after all mask a diverse range of poets. But, even given such reservations, it was clear from the start that Howe's poetry was out of step with certain general tendencies within language poetry. We know from the correspondence that Ron Silliman was criticized by some language poets for including Howe in his influential 1986 anthology In the American Tree. In a 1985 letter to Howe, Silliman expresses his reading of the relation between her work and language poetry:I do think one of the most important aspects of this writing [i.e. language writing], from the perspective of literary history if nothing else, is that it is anti-romantic, anti-mystical and anti-lyric (tho there are exceptions …) And your writing does seem to me to be at odds with this larger tendency. How you work with this tension in your poetry seems to me one of its most compelling dimensions.

This paper is an abbreviated version of one of the three annual Edinburgh University “Town and Gown” lectures. It was given in the City Chambers, Edinburgh, on 3rd March 1964. The deleted material was largely references to Negroes in Scotland. The oratorical overtones, however, have been faithfully preserved. Because of its extensive range, documentation has not been added, but any readers who would like specific references should write to Professor Shepperson at the History Department, Edinburgh University, Scotland.

Amateur talent shows were among the most popular programs on mid-1930s network radio, but for African Americans they had an importance that went beyond entertainment. These shows attracted considerable attention in the black press and from black audiences because they held out the promise of escape from the constraints of Jim Crow into a colour-blind national public sphere. This article explores the participation of African American performers on the most popular of the radio amateur shows, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour. It focusses particularly on two black classical performers on the Amateur Hour – singers Otis Holley and La Julia Rhea – contrasting their success on the radio show with the obstacles they encountered in the segregated world outside the studio. Radio did stimulate hope about the possibility of a race-free sound world, a new sense that such a thing could be possible. That the first generation to test the idea – gifted performers such as Holley and Rhea – often failed to translate radio success into mainstream acceptance, should not lead us to neglect the increase in hope that the early mass media provoked among African Americans.

Political scientists in the United States have in recent years become concerned with analysis of the rights and responsibilities of political opposition. This interest was initially stimulated by the much-quoted, and much-maligned, report of the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association in 1950 entitled Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. It has been supplemented by the volume edited by Robert Dahl, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. Academic rationale for this interest is reflected in the paradox posed by Dahl, who, having cited ‘ the right of an organized opposition to appeal for votes against the government in elections and parliament’ as being one of ‘the three great milestones in the development of democratic institutions’, is then obliged to admit that in the United States ‘it is never easy to distinguish “opposition” from “government”’, and that ‘it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to identify the opposition’. Opposition in the United States political system is nonstructural because of the multiple access points for influence, and opportunities for preventing or inhibiting governmental action are numerous. No single institution illustrates this fact better than Congress. In speaking of Congress, commentators do not talk about ‘the opposition’. They may refer to ‘the minority party’ (and ‘the majority party’), yet even these terms cannot be used at times when the Senate and House are not controlled by the same party. Moreover, internal organizational and procedural patterns in the contemporary Congress allow many opportunities for minority coalitions to check executive policies favoured by a majority coalition in Congress, and such coalitions are often bipartisan.

This article reconsiders Richard Wright's Native Son by comparing divergences between the published novel and an earlier typeset manuscript. It argues that such revisions render protagonist Bigger Thomas an icon of global class conflict rather than a national figure of racial tension. By revealing the continuities among critical essays that bookend the writing of Native Son, this essay also reveals how the novel's restructuring further elaborates Wright's globalism – highlighting his desire to produce work that transcended both national and racial categories. Finally, it considers Native Son as a work of “world literature” and a model for global minoritarian discourse. By examining “translations” of the novel into postcolonial contexts, it argues that the global afterlife of Native Son is no departure from the localized vision of the novel, but rather the recapitulation of its explicit globalism. This article thereby challenges critical convention dividing Wright's career cleanly into two phases: his American period and later self-exile. It emphasizes rather that Wright's worldliness should be traced back through his revision of Native Son and earlier critical essays – ultimately finding his globalism not a late-stage development, but actually the single theme that unifies his oeuvre.

The Swiss architectural critic and historian of technology, Siegfried Giedion, was born in 1893 and died in 1968. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) are his two most well-known books and both came out of time spent in the United States between 1938 and 1945. World War Two kept Giedion in America though he, unlike many other German-speaking European intellectuals, came home and in 1946 took up a teaching position at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he later became professor of art history. While in the United States he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1938–39), saw them in print as Space, Time and Architecture, and also completed most of the research in industrial archives and patent offices for Mechanization Takes Command. These two books are an important but, for the past twenty years, a mostly neglected, analysis of American material culture by a European intellectual, whose interests in Modernism included painting — notably Cubism and Constructivism — as well as architecture and planning. The period which saw the publication of Giedion's key works is, itself, an overlooked phase in the trans-Atlantic relationship between Modernism and modernization.

The critical appraisal of the 1950s organised society is well established in such now-classic texts such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). These works exposed the group-orientated, “other-directed” corporate personality, motivated by an extreme desire to belong, as a precarious foundation for individual security. If not considered from an explicitly masculine perspective, the emasculating connotations of this model of occupational identity were nevertheless evident in Mills's conception of the white-collar “little man,” Riesman's definition of the “limp” and “exceptionally sensitive” other-directed personality and Whyte's characterisation of the organisation man as the unobtrusive “man in the middle.” Collectively, the depiction of white-collar masculinity in these texts helped create the context for the stereotypical perception of 1950s business enterprise as a breeding ground for conformity and troubled male identity. Less appreciated, however, is the business community's response to this critical appraisal.