Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized, and have perhaps been taken at face or written value. In some contrast to previous historical scholarship, this article argues that the love, as expressed and experienced within Black enslaved communities, was complex, contentious, and far from monolithic.

This article explores the formation of a “showmen's culture” among circus employees in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, a cultural identity which had the effect of diffusing labor conflicts in this developing industry. The showmen's culture created an affective bond between employees of all levels, from manual laborers, to middle managers, to company owners. This article links cultural history and labor history and provides an example of how workers outside traditional manual-labor industries coped with the challenges of industrialization, and how proprietors used the same cultural identity to their own advantage.

In the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, American Baptist preacher Billy Graham and US President John F. Kennedy barnstormed South America through overlapping tours in 1961 and 1962. Kennedy's presidency has often been presented as an intermission in the drama of evangelical political power, but grassroots activism provides new angles for analysis at the intersection of the US and Latin America. While claiming an apolitical stance, Graham worked alongside the US State Department, planting spiritual seeds on the tilled ground of foreign policy. Graham – and Protestant leaders orbiting him – curated acts of violence, painting a picture of persecution for a watching public. This narrative employed violence to draw lines of worldwide spiritual affiliation and political obligation. US evangelicals placed themselves as custodians of America's most sacred values at home and abroad, responsible for upholding democratic values, including religious tolerance, the rule of law, and anticommunism. Graham's tactics created an entangled relationship with Kennedy, where Graham arose as a metaphorical matador, fighting for persecuted Christians. Here, American evangelicals could flex their growing political muscle, while operating as an imagined religious minority community. Narratives, discourses, and representations of violence circulated transnationally and acquired differing meanings depending on the political interests of those mobilizing them.

This article examines Leonard Freed's 1980 Police Work, a photobook that documents the activities of the New York City Police Department from 1973 to 1979. It contextualizes the photobook within this liminal decade after the fullness of the civil rights movement and before the rise of austerity politics. The photobook, I argue, produces a visual repertoire of policing that resolves the crisis of legitimacy faced by the NYPD during this decade, remaking the meaning of the police in the public imaginary from an agent of state warfare into an institution of state welfare. Far from simply creating photographs of policing as community care, Police Work engages in a process by which police violence is visually recoded as police benevolence. The visual politics of the family are central to this process by which we are made not to see police brutality, even when it is placed vividly on display. Ultimately, I show how, even as the camera moves between public and private, Police Work produces an ideology of separate spheres in which the expansion of policing can find its rationalization. Ultimately, this article reveals Police Work as a site through which to examine the intimate, yet often disavowed, entanglements between the domestic and the carceral.

This article analyzes Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), John Wells's Company Men (2011), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) to limn the place of manufacturing labor in recent US cultural memory. Timelines that focus on labor forms (i.e. “postindustrial”) often reproduce elements of the persistent US mythologizing of industrial labor's virtues. Nottage's and Rivera's works puncture this ideological figuration by showing the dangers and precarity of industrial work, while Company Men presents industrial labor as a means for masculine, moral renewal. I compare these takes on economic restructuring across the last several decades to scrutinize a crucial element of American self-mythologizing.