Benjamin Franklin's autobiography reveals his deep investment in shaping and controlling how both his contemporaries and posterity assessed his life and achievements. This essay explores Franklin's construction and presentation of his pride in his working-class origins and identity, analysing how and why Franklin sought not to hide his poor origins but rather to celebrate them as a virtue. As an extremely successful printer, Franklin had risen from working-class obscurity to the highest ranks of Philadelphia society, yet unlike other self-made men of the era Franklin embraced and celebrated his artisanal roots, and he made deliberate use of his working-class identity during the Seven Years War and the subsequent imperial crisis, thereby consolidating his own reputation and firming up the support of urban workers who considered him one of their own.

This contribution focusses on the close intertwinement of Americanization, neoliberalism, and corporate globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, on the eve of the global economic recession of 2008 and after. Many students of current globalization tend to reject the whole notion of Americanization. It is argued that these theorists have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water, namely an interest in America's strong influence in many domains globally. Yet it is also recognized that one has to move beyond a state-centrist approach in order to adequately grasp the significantly increased influence of transnational corporations over the past few decades. Therefore this article explores the major ways in which transnational corporations – in relation to US-dominated international governance – spread capitalist modernity worldwide. An attempt is made to explain how US business leaders and affiliated political power-holders managed to set the agenda of much of the global economy and why many of their foreign counterparts adopted similar neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a brief overview of major challenges and countermovements to the predominant form of capitalist globalization.

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.

In 1980 Senator Edward Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Kennedy's defeat has often been used as evidence of a philosophical realignment within the American electorate in the late 1970s away from Democratic liberalism, which culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as President. However, Kennedy performed better than this interpretation suggests. His defeat was caused by historical accident: a poor campaign, international crises and Carter's use of the incumbency. The strengths of the Kennedy campaign cast doubt upon the theory of realignment and suggest that liberalism enjoyed greater support among the US electorate than has previously been considered.

This essay explores the responses of conservative political activists to the Nixon administration's policy of “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Conservatives sought to influence the administration by acceptance of Vietnamization, a policy they interpreted as affording a more conventional prosecution of the war, and by pushing for increased aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Divisions over the efficacy of détente derailed a unified conservative position on Vietnam and forced reassessments of the legitimacy of Nixon's promise of “peace with honor.” While highlighting the basic premises of conservative foreign policy during the late 1960s, this essay explores the means by which conservative leaders attempted to forge consensus regarding the Vietnam War and the impact of increased political power on the conservative movement's foreign-policy priorities.

This paper explores the history of the National Women's Committee on Civil Rights (NWCCR). Called into being at the behest of President Kennedy, the NWCCR was an attempt to enlist the support of the organized women of America in the advancement of civil rights. The NWCCR had two main goals: first, to offer support for the passage of Kennedy's civil rights legislation, and second, to encourage their branch membership to work in support of integration. However, whilst the majority of the NWCCR's affiliated organizations had passed resolutions in favour of integration both throughout the United States and within their own organization, in practice they were reluctant to threaten the internal stability of their associations by insisting on either integrated membership or active support of civil rights in the local community. This article will argue that whilst the NWCCR were successful in organizing lobbying for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they were unwilling to throw their weight behind efforts to encourage activism in local communities. Whilst key members of the NWCCR saw an important role for women in the implementation of civil rights at the community level, they were forced to conclude that the organizational structure and ethical inertia of the NWCCR did not make it a suitable medium for furthering racial justice.

Although Audre Lorde calls the narrative of her life Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a “biomythography,” suggesting that the life of an African American lesbian cannot be told in any previously available generic forms of life-writing or self-expression, Zami actually derives from two extant American literary traditions – the African American slave narrative and the lesbian coming out story – rendering it, after all, not a marginal text, but rather a text that falls obviously and firmly in a tradition of American literature. Both traditions turn siginificantly on the trope of “home,” of finding a home where one belongs. In finding the “home” that she is seeking not, ultimately, geographically, but, rather, generically – in the very text she is writing – Lorde's life story also ends up signifying the similarity of these two ostensibly disparate forms: the slave narrative and the coming out story, suggesting a common narrative trajectory of marginal American identities in the tradition of American life-writing.

This article examines George Lippard's portrayal of “queer space” in his 1845 novel The Quaker City. Despite William Penn's meticulous urban grid rooted in the democratic ideals of national space, Lippard presents Philadelphia's landscape as unruly, illogical, and transgressive. The novel's manor of vice, Monk Hall, is as twisted as the city streets, facilitating behaviors and experiences unregulated by hegemonic forces. I argue that by perverting the places of his novel, Lippard creates ruptures in the ideological underpinnings of a national geography. In so doing, he attempts to enact a radical social critique to reconstitute the Philadelphia of Penn's egalitarian plan. Yet while Lippard's exposé reveals Philadelphia's illicit elite, his sensational narrative undercuts any social transformation he may have imagined.