During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of right-wing intellectuals, sparked by the New Deal, mounted a sustained critique of American democracy and inherited democratic principles. Believing that the progressive democratization of the state had resulted in a decadent, inefficient and morally coarse society, they attacked democracy as the root cause of the nation's problems. Examining the reactionary conservative, libertarian and fascist critiques of democracy, this article suggests that each borrowed ideas from the other, and that their beliefs in autocratic rule or a broadly countermajoritarian politics have not been adequately studied by scholars.

This article examines the rhizomatic approach to political organizing developed by the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA, founded in 1968 in Berkeley, CA, is an organization of historical significance, having introduced the term “Asian American” to signify a new political identity and developed the first pan-Asian nationwide social movement. Yet the scholarly treatment of AAPA has been rather cursory. This article is one of the the most extensively researched studies of AAPA. In three parts, it examines AAPA's (a) rhizomatic approach to political organizing, (b) model of collective leadership, and (c) community-centered pedagogy. First, the article conceptualizes AAPA's rhizomatic mode, which fostered the decentralized, interconnected participation of many people. AAPA prioritized a participatory model that also created space for women to have influence. Second, examining AAPA's activities shows an approach to community-based organizing that affirmed the knowledge produced by ordinary people gained through their lived experiences. Third, the article explores the importance of relationship building and rhizomatic networks in AAPA's growth across the nation. While not exclusive of vertical structures, AAPA's focus on egalitarian, collaborative organizing infused the national movement and helped to make collective leadership a hallmark of the broader Asian American movement.

Historians have treated the counterculture largely as a white phenomenon and drawn sharp boundaries between its escapism and the political engagement of the Black freedom struggle. A look at the counterculture's origins and growth in the late 1950s and the 1960s reveals that the counterculture intersected with Black culture in many ways. White beats, hipsters, and hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's support for equality and nonviolence, but sometimes scoffed at its effort to gain integration into American society. Hippies considered themselves outsiders from society and imagined that they shared affinity with Black Americans. Blacks’ responses to the counterculture ranged from contempt to curiosity to embrace. Some Blacks despised the hippies’ lifestyle and political apathy, but others considered the counterculture an important challenge to “the System.” American culture, style, literature, and music were all affected by the counterculture's experimentalism. The counterculture changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture. Drawing boundaries between cultural forms proves less instructive than focussing on the connections between them.

During World War II, Germany and the United States fought it out on the battlefields, but once the Allies were victorious, American attention quickly turned to the playing fields. Despite recent enmity, in the spirit of amity GIs quickly started recreational games with German youngsters. This seemingly natural development was at odds with both American expectations of the Germans and vice versa. Reeducation of Germany, and especially its Nazi-indoctrinated youth, was viewed as essential to peace, and the army, through sports, became perhaps unlikely early reeducators. This article outlines sports’ inherent Americanness, this impromptu playing, and its relationship to the formal army program of youth activities.

Recent research on the far right has remained surprisingly silent on the question of capitalism. This article takes another approach. It suggests that we must understand the far right emerging out of the economic: out of the dynamics of capitalism itself. It does so through an intellectual portrait of the financial journalist Peter Brimelow, one of the most influential proponents of far-right nativist politics and a self-described “godfather of the Alt Right.” It follows his passage from financial journalist to anti-immigrant firebrand through his encounters with neoliberal luminaries Peter Bauer, Julian Simon, and Milton Friedman. Rather than for an ethnostate, I argue Brimelow is best seen as making the case for an “ethno-economy,” with immigration determined by a racialized hierarchy of human capital.

This article traces a speculative and critical engagement with histories of health care disparity and medical exploitation shared across fictions by Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, and the artwork of Ellen Gallagher. It argues that insistent returns to racialized experimentation and scientific modes of looking form a significant interrogation of a wider set of US promises and attritions. Specifically, it asks how postwar African American culture takes up scopic questions to address dominant accounts of progress and the modern, both via reference to visual orders and technologies, and via formal choices regarding iteration, perspective and scale.

From the early 1960s to the early 1990s, a range of concerns about “brainwashing” in youth reeducation programs obfuscated professional and political discourse, influencing key outcomes that shaped the development of the troubled-teen industry in the United States. The most significant historical developments related to this controversy involved three different youth programs. In response to accusations of “brainwashing,” program executives created elaborate counterarguments and public-relations campaigns. Instead of working to address inherent risks associated with therapeutic reeducation, the brainwashing label obscured the potential for harm and enabled an unethical teen program industry.

From the beginning of King Leopold II's endeavours to secure the Congo Free State (CFS) as his personal domain, through to the legitimization of his rule at the Berlin Conference in 1884–85, the United States has played an important role in the tragic history of the CFS. This article seeks to explore the complex relationship between humanitarianism and race in the story of the American connection with the CFS and subsequent Congo reform movement. It will unpack the role of key individuals involved and their relationship with American humanitarians in the reform movement, arguing that while pursuing reform in the CFS, American humanitarians established close relationships and collaborated with notable racists who shared their beliefs on race and colonialism. By examining these alliances, it becomes evident that their efforts for reform were entangled with individuals who contradicted the supposed humanitarian goals. This article will also examine the reception of this activism in the African American press, showing that the response to the reform campaign was ambivalent at best, with questions raised as to why key African American activists involved in the movement focussed their efforts abroad in the era of Jim Crow in the US.

This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses circulating in this period that imagined that the world's savage peoples were destined to recede in the march of civilization. Here, I examine white Americans’ narratives of African American degeneration through two other imagined hemispheric encounters between white civilization and savagery. In the article's first half, I consider images of Haiti employed in cultural and political texts to signify the durability of innate Black savagery and the apocalyptic potential of Black freedom. In the second half, I consider discourses of Black degeneration in freedom alongside the genocidal construction of the “vanishing Indian.” I focus on two memorial projects: the 1931 monument to the Faithful Slave erected in Harpers Ferry and the never-completed National American Indian Memorial, for which ground was broken in 1913 at Fort Wadsworth.

This virtual special issue is the outcome of a project entitled Women and JAS, which was launched by the coeditors of the Journal of American Studies in October 2019 to document the involvement of women in the journal's day-to-day business from its inception in 1956 as the Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies. The project arises out of – and will hopefully contribute to – larger conversations about the progression of women scholars in academia. While the UK and US higher-education contexts (the contexts most pertinent to this discussion) differ, there are notable similarities in terms of the relationship between gender and career advancement. Both witness attrition of women from academia as they progress from undergraduate studies to PhD and beyond; both see disproportionate numbers of women scholars employed in precarious, part-time and/or teaching-only roles; both see a very low proportion of women in senior professorial roles; fewer women in both locations apply for (and are, therefore, awarded) major grants. In the UK, specifically, recent conversations around gender inequality in higher education have revolved around issues (and initiatives) such as the gender pay gap, Athena SWAN, sexual harassment and the effects of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), caring responsibilities and affective labour.