The rise of support for national parks in the United States after 1900 occurred amid a transnational circulation of information on the apparent destruction of – or imminent threat to – nature on a global level. Arguments for creating and protecting national parks included preservation of “wild” areas, proto-ecological ideas, and social reformist and economic utilitarian pressures during the Progressive Era. Advocacy for park protection as it developed to 1916 reflected this complex cluster of ideas rather than any clearly articulated concept of wilderness. It was influenced by international sensibilities on the social construction of nature and its putative preservation at the moment of industrialization in Europe and the American Northeast, the intrusion of mechanization into the countryside and, outside the metropolitan centres of the Euro-American world, high imperialism that exposed widespread destruction of nature in Europe's colonies. The case of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), an elite organization that combined national park, public-park and human-heritage advocacy in a continuum of values, is examined as a transnational conduit for and shaper of these socially constructed ideas in the United States, and as a neglected aspect of Progressive Era development of national parks.

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Multiple uses of the spatial deictic “here” are a notable feature of Robert Creeley's poetry. For example, the Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.” Similarly, Charles Altieri has noted a movement in Creeley's poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here” as a statement of “an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other.” In this essay, I will examine examples of Creeley's “heres” in the early poetry, up to and including Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). I will argue that while some of Creeley's uses of “here” do involve problems of location and ideal presence, other uses speak to problems of agency, form and the body. I will go on to argue that, ultimately, Creeley's “heres” map a search for location that discovers each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation. This reading of Creeley's use of “here” will be informed by a number of other sources including Jonathan Culler's pioneering work on deixis in Structuralist Poetics; J. P. Denny's comparative work on spatial adverbs in English, Eskimo and Kikuyu; Heidegger's discussion of “here” and “yonder”; and the paintings of Barnett Newman which are notable for their deictic titles. Reading these with and back into Creeley's poetry enables a greater understanding of how spatial deixis works in lyric poetry and how it relates to Creeley's reflexive lyric.

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.

Over several decades of interviewing people and crafting their words into published works, Studs Terkel defined, expanded, and challenged the field of oral history. Terkel often described his methods as similar to those of a “prospector for gold” sifting through the statements of his subjects to create essays that reveal each person's “essence.” Drawing on his planning documents, interview transcripts, manuscripts and published texts, I trace Terkel's approach to oral history through two of his best-known works – Hard Times and “The Good War” – and through three stages: his planning and performance of interviews, his editing of the individual transcripts, and his construction of the completed text. I conclude by considering the implications of Terkel's unconventional approach to oral history and the ways in which his methodology may reflect his long history of involvement with progressive political movements. Terkel crafted his subject's narratives into texts I term “documentary memory”; he insisted that his works are subjective “memory books” but also employed a documentary rhetoric of objectivity. Terkel believed telling stories of the past to be a form of social action and he used his texts about the past to comment politically on his present – his “memory books” document earlier periods in American history relevant to the cultural moment in which he published.

This article considers the negotiation of masculinity that takes place within a family context, juxtaposing Raewyn Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity with one that is more aligned with the collective. Taking Philip Roth's 2003 novel The Plot Against America, the article uses the character of Herman Roth as a case study. Despite Roth's reputation as a fundamentally masculine writer, and one who has not always represented the family as a positive force on individual masculine identity, this novel portrays a father who is responsive to circumstance and whose masculinity evolves according to his family's needs.

The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.

For decades now, Oscar Wilde has been celebrated in academic and popular circles as a transgressor of gender boundaries and a devotee of the woman's world and an “appreciative inheritor of women's culture.” What has been underappreciated, however, is that Wilde also acted as an advocate of gender binaries in ways that significantly challenge this reputation. This article argues that Wilde's writings reveal a traditionalist critique of American gender politics that reflects his concern over the management of cultural institutions and values, and the increasingly precarious place of men within them. Rather than locating these anxieties in Britain, Wilde displaced them onto the United States, a country whose cultural institutions he had become intimate with during a year-long lecture tour in the early 1880s. By exposing and problematizing Wilde's response to the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity and his disappointment at the failure of American men to take their place in society as arbiters of taste, this article underscores the need for a nuanced reassessment of Wildean gender politics. At stake here are fundamental questions about how a transgressive politics sits alongside traditionalism, and how a conservative gender bias in transatlantic fin de siècle culture operated even in the period's progressive circles.

In this essay I examine the importance of home within what Peter Brooks has called “the melodramatic imagination.” Arguing that nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama has a long afterlife, I examine the significance of John Howard Payne's song “Home Sweet Home” in two of D. W. Griffith's films, Home Sweet Home (1913) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). I show that home is elevated to a sacred site within melodrama and that, within Griffith's infamous 1915 film, this sacred site is a white southern home which he takes to represent the nation. Melodrama is an ethical drama in which virtue and vice face each other. Home, as a crucial element of melodrama, is often represented as its site of confrontation, indeed is often precisely what is at stake within such confrontations. Given the political potency of home in arguments about nation and identity, the confrontation between virtue and vice over home has powerful potential to articulate issues of belonging and exclusion, desire and longing. The intermingling of representations of home and melodrama, combined with the long afterlife of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, makes understanding and scrutinizing these formations an important critical act.

Bernie Madoff perpetrated a Ponzi scheme on a scale that was gargantuan even compared with the outrageously destructive Enron and Worldcom debacles. A major aspect of the Madoff story is his rise as a specifically American Jewish type, who self-consciously exploited stereotypes to inspire trust and confidence in his counsel. Styling himself as a benefactor and protector of Jews as individuals and institutional Jewish interests, and possibly in the guise of the Jewish historical trope of shtadlan (intercessor), he was willing to threaten the well-being of all those enmeshed in his empire. The license granted to Madoff stemmed in part from the extent to which he appeared to diverge from earlier Jewish financial titans, such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, in that he epitomized an absolute “insider” – as opposed to an “outsider” or marginal figure. In reality he had none of the supposedly humane virtues attributed to Jewish crooks, at least in the realm of popular culture.

John Sayles's Lone Star, released in 1996, repeatedly challenges traditional definitions of the nation as a strictly bounded entity through its depiction of the area that Américo Paredes described as “Greater Mexico” and Gloria Anzaldúa more recently referred to as the Borderlands; the film's promotion of a potentially productive love affair between half-siblings further challenges the status quo. As I argue here, however, while the film undeniably underscores the fragility of the nation in an era of global trade and travel, it also suggests the difficulties of escaping nation-based ideologies and interests. As I will show, Lone Star in fact highlights the ongoing importance of the nation-state through its attention to the institutions and individuals that Louis Althusser associates with state apparatuses, ultimately pointing to the fraught nature of avoiding the influence of the nation as a construct.