When Abraham Minis, merchant and tavern keeper, of Savannah, Georgia sat down to draw up his last will and testament he faced a heart-wrenching dilemma: how would he successfully provide for all of his eight children and also ensure that his beloved wife Abigail would have enough to live out the rest of her days in widowhood in comfort? Three years later, in spring 1757, Abraham died. When his will was read, there were thankfully no surprises for Abigail and their children – Abraham had followed Low Country custom regarding the division of family wealth. He gave his three sons his horses and mares and left five daughters all of his black cattle. It was Abigail, he explained, who was to inherit “all the rest of my Estate both real and personal” to be “enjoyed by her” so that she would be able to “maintain educate and bring up our children.” He sealed his love, approval, and trust in his wife's abilities to meet this request by nominating her his sole executrix. Any help that she might need when settling the affairs of his estate, he observed, would be provided by his loyal friends Joseph Phillips and Benjamin Sheftall, who would assist and advise her.

When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996, it brought to an end the much vilified sixty-one-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programme. Although few mourned the passing of AFDCper se many liberals were alarmed by the nature of the changes. AFDC had effectively been a cash maintenance programme for poor single-parent families with the costs shared between federal and state governments. The PRWORA repealed AFDC and some smaller related programmes, with Washington giving its former share of funding to the states in the form of a new block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The existing entitlement nature of AFDC was ended with the states given new discretion in determining TANF eligibility. Overall considerable responsibility for the implementation of welfare policy was devolved to the states. The bill, however, did set a maximum time limit for individual receipt of federal TANF funds. After two years, welfare recipients must engage in a recognized work effort to continue to receive help, with a total five-year limit on TANF money. Opposition to these measures was overwhelmed by the demand for significant reform of the welfare system. Previously this demand had been thwarted through a combination of Washington gridlock and the limited scale of those changes which were enacted. In 1996, however, the dam holding back reform was breached at the high tide of anti-welfare sentiment. The despair this provoked among liberals should perhaps have caused them to reflect on their part in blocking previous attempts at an overhaul of AFDC. In particular, the elder statespersons of liberalism might regret their role in helping defeat President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP).

Nearly a decade ago, historian Alan Dawley proclaimed the idea of American exceptionalism to be dead and buried. Dawley's pronouncement proved premature given the subsequent publication of books by Byron Shafer and Seymour Martin Lipset reaffirming the concept, as well as studies by Ian Tyrell, George Fredrickson, and others addressing the issue. However, the motion of American uniqueness so widely accepted a generation ago has come under serious challenge, and new conceptions of American “distinctiveness” or “variability” have emerged in recent scholarship.

Against a historiography that too often considers domestic policy apart from foreign policy, this essay suggests connections based on two cultural/political archetypes, the cowboy and the welfare queen, which were or are simultaneously gendered and racialized. The cowboy as a symbol of white male individualism has represented worthy American manhood; the welfare queen has stood for a despised black womanhood. Behind the image of the cowboy stands the workings of empire; behind the portrait of the welfare queen lies the punishment of poor women, often African American or Latina, for their motherhood, sexuality, and lack of dependence on husbands. The problem with the welfare queen is that she parlayed her dependence on the state into independence from men and employment (that is, work as commonly understood.) Like the enemies without, who would make the nation dependent through withholding a vital resource – oil – and require disciplining through “cowboy diplomacy,” welfare dependents have become the primitive other, politically assaulted, responsible for national decline, who need taming through cowboy social policy. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, blogs, speeches, and iconographic representations, this essay traces the ways that modern Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II, deployed these icons to push independence as a national virtue in spite of their apparently different political positions. The languages of independence and dependence provided an easy vocabulary for policymaking that aspires to moral heights, leading to a performativity that traps those who utter the tropes of their predecessors into policy grooves not necessarily of their own choosing.

This article examines the construction of gender and race in the television series The Shield (FX 2002–). The article argues that while The Shield seems to offer an ostensibly progressive vision of a multi-cultural society in which race and gender represent no barrier to the possession of legitimate authority, the series premises the possibility of such access to power on the continuing possession of “real” power by a paternalistic white, male figure, thus presenting a regressive conservative vision of gender and race relations in contemporary US society.

Unlike Beloved (1987), the first volume in Toni Morrison's loose trilogy of novels charting the history of African Americans – and an instant entrant to the contemporary canon – the third volume, Paradise (1998), has not been given the hagiographic reception the Pulitzer-Prize-winning earlier novel was treated to. Nor, as yet, has it received the critical attention devoted to both Beloved and the second volume, Jazz (1992). Apart from some heavyweight early reviews, especially in the American press (not all favourable, by any means), and a few scrambled “first-off” essays since, a novel which strikes the present – admittedly white, male, English – critic as raising contentious historical and political issues in a most powerful and complex way has been met with relative disregard. Why?

There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a key-stroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end amen … Everything is connected in the end.

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.

The origin stories of Irish America have been core narratives within the “making-of-America” discourse of the nation's founding and development and were especially potent in the cementing, in the mid-twentieth century, of the idea of the US as “a nation of immigrants.” It is an idea that has done significant psychological as well as cultural and political work for white ethnics in the US, glossing important elements of whiteness as a racial formation, mystifying its oppressive qualities and its particularistic claims to identity and values. It has informed the complex ways in which Irish Americans have reconciled their identities in the present with prejudice and discrimination in the past. The story of “how the Irish became white” has been popularly glossed as an ethnic achievement, periodically reclaiming otherness, while eliding the politics of racial power and privilege. Today, as ethnonationalism surges through the mainstream of American politics and culture, unsettling the hegemony of liberal whiteness, Irishness has become a floating signifier of white anger and angst. Perhaps the story we need to tell now is not how the Irish became white but how white folks in the US have become Irish.

The first play I attended at my all-boys secondary school was Marlowe's Dr Faustus. The lower boys crammed in the gallery were not wholly engaged by grandiloquent Elizabethan cadences, nor by the laboriously unfolding plot. What stopped the whispering and fidgeting and then brought the house down was the scene in which Faustus, as reward for selling his soul, is allowed to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. In this production the hell-bent Doctor had to make do with the prettiest boy in the school. Wild whoops, mating calls, indecent suggestions for further action rained down from the gallery. At the curtain call Helen again stole the show. Next morning, the Headmaster, a Scottish Presbyterian whose zeal for the Lord was second only to his zeal for rugby football, rebuked the school for the shameful scenes and prescribed a three-mile run to cool our ardour.

Bureaucrats, female or male, have never been popular, a fact which may, in part, explain neglect of their role by the growing band of students of women and politics. Theories of bureaucracy predict that this will be the least promising of settings for the empowerment of women. Max Weber's classic account depicts bureaucratic activity as a routinized and sterile process of technical determinations and rules of procedure. Some feminists argue that such modes of action epitomize the masculine. Each model portrays a rational, depersonalized, technocratic sphere of activity, hierarchical in structure, rule-bound both in what is done and how. In addition, the state itself has sometimes been presented as wholly oppressive to women, adding public power to private power to create a comprehensive system of male domination.

As a lifelong homosexual and sometime heroin addict born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914, Burroughs' formative experiences led him to focus in his work both on the repressive social control of sexuality, and on the direct metabolic control of the body associated with heroin. Burroughs' work, developing the American Libertarian tradition rather than any form of Anarchism, let alone revolutionary collectivism, maps a quest for physical and spiritual freedom from a range of repressive forces including, finally, death itself.

From long experience and wide observation I have come to have little patience with the science of ethnology that consigns a man, or race of men, to generations of slow development.

Richard Henry Pratt, Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1895, 763

These people, who are with us and with whom we share a common fate, are a thousand years behind us in moral and mental development. Substantially the two races, {Negro and Indian} are in the same condition, and the question as to what education is best for them, and how such education is to be put within their reach, is pressing itself closely upon all thinking men and women.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Proceedings of the Department of Superintendence, Circulars of Information, No. 3, Bureau of Education, 1883, 139.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans built an extensive system of Indian schools, largely financed by Congress and increasingly controlled from Washington. These schools were principally residential, boarding institutions. Their goal was to indoctrinate Indian children in white ways: to eradicate native tribal cultures. This campaign to transform native children into American citizens appeared to represent a clear declaration of faith in the equality and educability of the Indian. Today, its aggressive and misguided nature is recognized and the long-term consequences for all the tribes are beginning to be understood. But, while scholars acknowledge the blinkered ethnocentricism of Indian policy, they have not questioned that its goal was rapid Indian assimilation. Historians argue over the impact of pseudo-scientific racist ideas on the formulation of Indian policy; disagreements focus on the pre-Civil War period and the early twentieth century. However, it is generally accepted that, in the late nineteenth century, Indian affairs were dominated by a group of Christian reformers and their universalist, Christian ideals. These self-styled “Friends of the Indian” worked for legislative reforms to bring individual land ownership and citizenship to all adult Indians and schooling to their children. Their reform programme, historians have consistently argued, was driven by a single overriding assumption: Indians, once having discarded their savage lifestyle, were capable of joining American society as the white man's equal.

“How much longer,” Edith Wharton lamented in a July 1919 letter to Barrett Wendell, “are we going to think it necessary to be ‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?” She was having her publishers send him her most recent book, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), a collection of essays written in large part to instruct her compatriots in the ways of an exemplary civilization. Wharton's complaint found its way into her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, which she began working on soon after French Ways was published; though in this instance it was voiced from a different quarter and had potentially radical implications.

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

One of the most talked about moments of Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War (1990) was the dramatic reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, Sarah, in which the Union officer anticipates his own death in the First Battle of Bull Run. This moving conclusion to the series' first episode and the sensation it caused underscore the persistence of a gendered model of wartime literacy: the ideal war-text is an eyewitness account written by a man, and read by a woman at home. Women, the Ballou letter sequence suggests, are consumers, not producers of war-texts. As innovative as Burns's documentary was, however, the dramatization of a personal letter from the front has a long history. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), for example, climaxes with Marmee's recitation of a letter from Mr. March, absent at the war. “Very few letters,” the narrator tells us, “were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home.” Both Burns's original script for the Ballou segment and Alcott's earlier writing about the war reveal the artificiality of the normative model of literacy presented by The Civil War and Little Women; in order to maintain exclusively male control over the production of wartime texts, documentary and novel must repress or radically circumscribe female voices. Burns originally planned to have an actress, reading as Sarah Ballou, finish the letter, but decided against it; the effect of a woman reading would have been “so emotional [ctdot ] just too much” – as if even a female audience for the male wartime text can only be hinted at, not represented.

For adventurous young men, the experience of the gold rush was one of transformation. The most keenly-sought transformation was from “not wealthy” to “fabulously wealthy, ” but the literature, histories and memoirs of the era point toward a much more general sense of change and disorientation. One writer noted of the new arrivals to Sacramento that as “each one steps on shore, he seems to have entered a magic circle, in which he is under the influence of new impulses. The wills of all seem under the control of some strong and hidden agency.” Joining the rush may have promised an escape from the restraints of home, but the writer here suggests an altogether more complex exchange. The “new arrival” may have been active in leaving home, but he is placed in a passive position as he is welcomed into the brotherhood of a “magic circle,” seduced or enchanted by a regulatory power of which he is scarcely aware. The experience, it seems, was familiarly fraternal, but also unsettling.

If Susan Sontag is not a writer behind whom a school or substantial following has gathered, this has much to do with the unsystematic nature of her work. Her studies of thought and culture are not the work of a systematic theorist; they are too much involved with personal taste and response, too free-ranging and open-ended to attract disciplined followers. Sontag's writings receive little direct critical attention at present, though she is often quoted on photography or film, or used to support various theses on post-modernism. Her writings reward more rigorous analysis, especially as the work of this American critic would seem to complement and yet significantly depart from the theorizing of more commonly acknowledged European thinkers – structuralist and post-structuralist – with whom she is contemporary.

At a recent conference of historians, one of the few participants with a literary background confessed that he was surprised to hear such frequent and confident reference to “facts.” His reaction reflects the fact that contemporary literary theorists have become as wary of speaking of facts, (without inverted commas) as avant-garde theologians are of adverting to “God.” Indeed to critical theorists, most historians seem theoretical dolts; unlike Molière's famous character, they don't even realize they are talking (bad) theory all the time. Moreover to a novelist such as Gore Vidal, historians seem pettifoggers and without an imaginative bone in their body. Whatever else they are confident of, novelists automatically assume that they can do justice to the past with more verve and authenticity than historians.