We write this editorial on 4 July 2025: 224 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, one day short of eight months after the election of 5 November 2024, and 165 days into the second presidency of Donald Trump. The editorial team began planning this special issue in late autumn 2023, a full year before the election. It is challenging, now, to take our minds back to a moment when Trump, not yet the Republican nominee, seemed beleaguered by four separate sets of criminal charges, which threatened to keep him from the primary ballots in key states. If some in the Democratic Party were raising concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for a second term, substantial doubts about his mental capacity were not yet being voiced, although polls suggested that his age was a concern for voters. The then-recent 7 October attacks, Israel’s subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and the previous year’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggested that foreign policy and reproductive rights, along with economic and social recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, could be key policy areas around which the election might be fought.

As we planned the special issue, we knew that time would be of the essence. We wanted to publish it close enough to November 2024 for its contents to be timely, but with enough distance on the campaign and the result to allow for reflections that went deeper than a “hot take.” We wanted an issue that would have lasting value to the scholars and experts in American studies who make up JAS’s core readership. With an initial plan to publish in late spring 2025, this gave us eighteen months from conception to print. Eighteen months is almost an eternity in politics and world events, but in terms of academic publishing it is a relatively brief period: as editors, we advise potential contributors that eighteen months from submission to publication is probably the minimum that they can expect. Moreover, we were conscious that the pressures on researchers in American studies in universities and other public institutions in the UK and elsewhere – workload, department closures, budget cuts, sectors of the media questioning decisions to teach or not teach particular materials, demands to repeatedly justify the public benefit of one’s work in economic terms – were making it harder for colleagues to find time to write their own research and review that of others.

Our solution was to commission the peer-reviewed articles for the issue in advance of the election, while also allowing authors to revise their conclusions and argument in response to the outcome. To the articles that we commissioned specifically for the issue, we added others that were submitted from late 2023 onwards that seemed to us to speak particularly to prominent issues during the campaign. We did not require authors to write about the 2024 campaign, vote, or result directly – though Richard Johnson does so in his essay on voters of colour and their shifting allegiances. Instead, our intention was for contributors to refract topics, questions, and concerns raised by and in the 2024 presidential election through various interdisciplinary lenses of American studies.

The temporalities of JAS’s publication processes mean that these topics of the peer-reviewed essays speak to the unfolding of the electoral year across 2024 as much as to Election Day in November or to our moment of publication. The choice of topics was also shaped by the interests of the editorial team and the authors themselves, along with contingencies such as contributor availability, peer review, and the research process itself (the alignment between an abstract and the finished paper can often be unpredictable). In the Readers’ Room, where shorter pieces and timelines allowed associate editors Nicole Gipson and Ahmed Honeini to commission more responsively, events on the campaign trail offered particular avenues for reflection. The initial major-party match up of an eighty-one-year-old and a convicted felon – which much of the media and electorate saw as uninspiring at best – prompted the Roundtable on bad presidential candidates in literature. The attempted assassination of Trump at a rally on 13 July 2024 – and Trump’s ability to capitalize on both the event and its mediation in visual, popular, and online culture – inspired a further roundtable on presidential assassinations on film, which ends with Jo Pawlik’s close reading of Evan Vucci’s iconic photograph of Trump’s response within a tradition of images that connect the visual cultures of fascism and the American presidency. To these, we added the series of “Conversations” that took place at various distances from the result itself, in which we brought together scholars from across the discipline of American studies in discussions focused around key themes otherwise absent from the issue: Infrastructures, America in the World, and Climate.

We did not intend for the special issue to offer a targeted analysis of the election campaign or outcome. Nor did we intended for the issue’s coverage to be comprehensive; some areas that were of central importance in 2024’s election cycle – and its immediate aftermath – are not represented in this issue. Although gender is central to Pawlik’s discussion of visual cultures of fascism, and books reviewed in the Readers’ Room consider exciting new work in histories of women and the family, none of the contributions discuss the position or representation of women; this in an election that saw the first Black woman to receive the nomination from a major party, and 53 percent of white women vote for Trump, despite the GOPs dismantling of reproductive rights.Footnote ¹ Johnson’s discussion of voters of colour considers the intersections of race and class, but class in the twenty-first century and its complex relationship to education – as younger, college-educated Americans are struggling to obtain the financial security that their parents’ generation enjoyed – could be a special issue of its own. The article by Bell et al. provides an important interrogation and critique of generative AI as a research tool at a moment when it is being all but forced upon users of search engines and word-processing software, but the place of big tech – and its money – could have received more consideration than the discussions of Elon Musk’s place in Trump’s White House in Iwan Morgan’s introduction. Participants in the Conversation on Infrastructures address the role of the Supreme Court and how its conservative majority might serve Trump’s goals, but its influence on American politics and the lives of Americans and its representations in literature and popular culture might have been another topic. Readers of this issue will find their own gaps in its analysis, and we encourage them to address them, so that we might publish these contributions in future volumes of JAS.

Instead, when we considered the view that JAS might take on the 2024 election, we reflected that the best work in American studies rarely focusses a single subject through one established disciplinary lens. If not deliberately adopting Emily Dickinson’s directive to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” we kept in mind that research in American studies is strongest when it approaches questions via an unusual set of source materials, or applies the methods and questions of one discipline to the traditional objects of another.Footnote ² Across the peer-review section, the Conversations, and the Readers’ Room, we sought out scholarship that would refract the election through the complex prism of American cultures, past and present. As such, the issue considers musical theatre and newspaper cartoons, and analyses both AI-generated writing and literary fiction. It places intellectual history and quantitative demographic analysis alongside Toni Morrison’s discussions of how the methods of fiction can illuminate history, which Eddie Glaude takes as a starting point for his reflections on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in Nicole Gipson's interview with him. Taking up these diverse sources and methods in turn, and converging our focus across diverse pasts, shifting presents, and uncertain futures, the issue offers multiple starting points from which the 2024 election might be understood, now and going forward. The view from American studies that the title of this special issue promises is, therefore, elongated and foreshortened, zoomed in and zoomed out. Moreover, views that are contingent, provisional, or rendered obsolete as history overtakes them retain their value within an American studies “circuit” of knowledge production, to borrow Dickinson’s term from the same poem: the slow process of turning towards and away from, of overturning and re-turning through which comprehension might finally be achieved.

The occasion of the 2024 election, for all the unpredictable and tumultuous events that have followed in its wake, serves also as a prompt to consider the longer timelines of both American studies as a discipline and US political history. The rhythms of US representative democracy have shown a remarkable duration and consistency. Since the foundation of the republic, Americans have voted for a President every four years, a pattern uninterrupted either by the Civil War or the two world wars of the twentieth century, a record which may appear nothing less than miraculous from the perspective of most other countries and continents across the world. The seemingly unchanging rituals of US democracy led the political theorist Judith N. Shklar in 1987 to observe the “puzzle” that “the structure of political discourse has changed so little and that the most characteristic institutions of its representative democracy seem so immune to change.”Footnote ³ Different contributors to this issue have made their own arguments about the balance of historical continuity and change in the recent US political landscape: Pawlik sees Trump’s iconography rhyming with Nixon’s, for example, and Abe sees Trump’s immigration policy as a point of continuity rather than difference from his predecessors. Crothers views contemporary Trumpism as the outcome of a more general reorientation of the Republican Party that pre-dated his first term. The essentially regular rhythm of electoral events provides some kind of stable frame within which to make judgements about the past and the present which might encompass the history of the republic in its totality.

Alexander Hamilton noted in the opening of the Federalist Papers the sense in which the US democratic experiment was to determine the answer to an “important question” of “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”Footnote ⁴ US electoral politics was to be a test case for an Enlightenment aspiration, and the failure of voters to practise the virtues of reason would represent “a general misfortune of mankind.”Footnote ⁵ The 2024 election featured its own manifestations of contingency and violence, of course, not least of which was the assassination attempt on Trump and his survival of it. We might add the deterioration of Biden’s health and all manner of other developments. Nevertheless, the sense in which a failure of the US electorate is a failure for all is evident today in a way that Hamilton’s universalist frame does not seem to anticipate. The United States’ status as a superpower in military and financial terms means that the election of its President is everyone’s business, with tremendous impacts on the global scale which Hamilton could hardly have anticipated (several of these are discussed in this issue’s conversation on America in the World). It is one of the tasks of this issue, then, and of American studies today, to articulate the manifold logics that conjoin the political imaginations of concrete individual voters situated across the United States with vast macro-scale events being realized on various temporal scales – from the decades-long duration of climate collapse to the minutes it takes for a barrage of missiles to leave its silo and reach its target.

The comforting stability of the US electoral cycle offers succour to a particular kind of delusion, however: that each election presents the promise of a historical reset which might cancel the adventures of the previous administration. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History might reverse his trajectory into the wreckage of the future. In the context of the 2024 election cycle, this delusion might have taken the form of a desire to treat the first Trump term as an aberration, and to return to the stable liberal order of the two-party compact which held sway for almost half a century. The choice of the Democratic Party to have an elderly Joe Biden lead the charge against Trump in 2019 now appears a clear manifestation of such a desire – one it attempted to repeat in 2024, until his failing health got in the way. The four-year election cycle and its promise to reset political time thus risks obscuring the longer historical course which led to Trump’s return to power in 2025: the hollowing out of US liberalism since the late 1960s, the decline of its global influence along with its industrial production, the militarization of its police, and the steady increase in its levels of wealth inequality. To rehearse a metaphor used by the late Joshua Clover, Trump’s arrival in the White House appeared to liberals as the catastrophic crash landing of a flight that had been in the air for many years.Footnote ⁶ Historical tendencies that had appeared distant when viewed from altitude suddenly took on a new character as they loomed close. What felt like a sudden event, unforeseeable, was in fact the culmination of a much longer trajectory. And there is no going back to how it was. Writing from the vantage point of summer 2025, this much is surely incontestable.

The institutional and disciplinary history of American studies – both in the US and abroad – has its own place in this temporality of US empire and its decline. American studies was born in the US elite academy of the 1930s and 1940s as a project to identify and bolster the prestige of a distinct national culture for the United States, and in the early years of the Cold War became a key ideological conduit for the justification and maintenance of American global power. Both the Journal of American Studies and the British Association for American Studies were established as part of this large-scale development of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Even if the discipline began to distance itself from this function in the course of the 1960s, and move towards a more critical stance on domestic social injustices and US imperialism, the re-election of Trump and the seemingly abrupt breakdown of the bipolar Cold War world of alliances and liberal democratic norms arrives as a reckoning for American studies. The terrain of political and ideological contestation between the academy and the state is now entering a new phase. This terrain of contestation is only too evident in the new administration’s attacks on American universities, and gutting of state-initiated cultural diplomacy. The BAAS/US Embassy Small Grants Programme, which provided modest funding support for transatlantic research and pedagogy in American studies, has been one small casualty of this, cancelled in early 2025.Footnote ⁷ More evident is the concerted disruption of international student mobility to and from US institutions, and the defunding of US research programmes. In the last six months, the US government has pivoted from cultural and public diplomacy after the Cold War model towards confrontation and coercion, and a concomitant abandonment of consensus building among intellectual workers – including especially educators – and the liberal middle classes more generally.

It would be comforting and not a little self-congratulatory to end this Afterword with a gesture towards American studies in the UK and Europe as a place where work can continue and flourish in areas under attack in the United States: three days ago at the time of writing, colleges of the University of Indiana voted to eliminate or suspend hundreds of degree programmes, including BA and MA programmes in political science, religious studies, art history, labor studies and English, and PhD programmes in African American studies, gender studies, and American studies. But, as we noted above, UK institutions are not immune to similar pressures, though they remain more economic than cultural. Moreover, as the participants in the Climate Conversation noted, leaders and societies globally are yet to find an effective way to respond to, or to resist, the Trump administration’s relentless accelerations, and the narratives and actions that propel them.

One such means of resistance, we would argue, is taking time and taking stock. We might resist through the necessarily slow and often incremental process of research, of moving knowledge forward by devoting our time to the writings of our colleagues and peers, and to the materials that made and are making American politics, history, literature and culture. The value of “slow scholarship” has been articulated before, in particular as a means of resistance to the neoliberal university and its demands for scholarly productivity (or for the appearance and agreed markers of productivity) as a strategy of control.Footnote ⁸ Now, it is also a means of interrogating how the United States has arrived at a politics that seeks to govern and to divide by distraction, and that insists on the need for constant motion and action in order to return America to an always unspecified moment of greatness.

Journals, like elections, mark time through their repetitions. This is a special issue, but it is also a number like the others of JAS, that stretch back across fifty-nine volumes and fifty-nine years. As with democracies, it is foolish to assume that the long and stable history of scholarly publications and practices guarantees their certain continuation. If we believe in the temporalities and recursions through which disciplines evolve and transform, we must invest in them and articulate their importance. We hope that this “View from American Studies” uses this moment not just to reflect on the 2024 election, its histories, its cultural counterpoints, and its consequences, but also to show how scholarly journals can respond to the present and why they must continue to do so.