The 1890s and the 1930s were periods of intense consumer activism during which organized consumers pressured government to regulate business on behalf of the consuming public. In both periods, however, the heightened awareness of the consumer had an impact that extended beyond the realm of grass-roots activism or government regulation. One of the areas profoundly affected by this heightened awareness was political–economic thought. In both periods, political–economic theorists turned their attention to the consumer, debating such issues as whether humans were fundamentally producers or consumers, whether civic identity should be rooted in the consumer or the producer identity, and whether the “good society” was one based on “producerist” or “consumerist” values.

As Samuel Eliot Morrison had done when he delivered the first Harmsworth lecture eighty-seven years ago, I, too, must begin with a Prologue. “Through the Prologue,” Professor Morrison told his audience, “the author endeavoured to establish a personal relation between himself and his audience, and to arouse their curiosity and interest in the play that followed.”1 I pray he is correct.

The practices of abortion and infanticide seem worthy of at least a fleeting mention in most studies of slave women in the United States, yet few historians mention the use of contraception. Those who do, usually conclude that little is known about the subject, but that it is probably not particularly significant. This article will discuss the use of contraception among slaves and will concentrate, in particular, on the use of cotton roots as a form of birth-control. Evidence that the cotton root was used for this purpose is taken mainly from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, edited by George Rawick.George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972–1979). As yet, the author has come across only a few references to the use of cotton roots as a form of contraception in any other source. The WPA narratives are a controversial source, but, in sifting through every single interview, the multiple references to such an intimate practice were striking and demanded attention. This article forms part of a chapter from a thesis which looks at the work of slave women in the American South.Liese M. Perrin, “Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999).

A thorough reading of the WPA narratives reveals not only that slave women used contraception, but also that it may have been very effective. In the context of slave women and work, this is a significant discovery, as the evidence, which is detailed below, suggests that slave women not only understood that their childbearing capacity was seen in terms of producing extra capital, but that they were sufficiently opposed to this function to actually avoid conception. The use of contraception can be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also, more specifically, as a form of strike, since reproduction was an important work role for most slave women.

Biologist and botanist Reginald Gates is mainly remembered as a staunch scientific conservative, a defender of racial theory and fierce opponent of racial mixing. In post-war Britain and America, Gates's racial views made him something of a pariah. This article explores Gates's post-war career as a micro-historical analysis of racial science and society after the Second World War. It examines the relationship between scientific racists and segregationists in the US, especially concerning the Brown ruling and the establishment of the Mankind Quarterly journal, arguing that science in this period was subsumed into politics as protagonists on both sides of the segregation debate used science to justify ideological positions.

Between 1821 and 1842, Charles Bird King painted a series of portraits of Native American diplomats for Thomas L. McKenney, founding Superintendent of Indian Affairs. These pictures were hung in a gallery in McKenney's office in the War Department in Washington, DC, and were later copied by lithographers for inclusion in McKenney and James Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1836–44). Significantly, the production and circulation of these portraits straddles a period of tremendous change in the diplomatic interactions between the United States and Native tribes. This essay analyzes a selection of these images for their complex messages about the sovereignty of Indian people and their appropriate interactions with European American culture. Paying particular attention to pictures of leaders of southern nations, including the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, I discuss the sitters' strategies of self-fashioning within the context of long-standing cultural exchange in the region. In addition, I offer a reading of the meaning of the Indian gallery as a whole that challenges the conventional wisdom that it is an archive produced exclusively to impose US control on the subjects included, arguing instead for the inclusion of portrait-making within this history of interaction.

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

Recent American experimental fiction, in response to the fictive behaviour of the emerging realities of a technetronic culture, moves beyond the interpretive modernist novel in which the fictionist interpreted the ‘ human condition ’ within the framework of a comprehensive private metaphysics, towards a metamodern narrative with zero degree of interpretation. The mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘ reality ’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.

Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral-history interviews with former girl zine producers, as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this essay explores the significance of the fact that dissident girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty-five years. Some were directly inspired by riot grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened upon zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and as part of their participation in the larger punk underground. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, and public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material, and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, about whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as a secondary effect of the riot grrrl phenomenon of the early 1990s. Building on recent critiques made by punks and zinesters of color of the now-dominant narrative about the history of riot grrrl and the role of zines within it, the essay traces how that narrative developed in the context of a backlash against feminism and how it led, ultimately, to the creation of the genre now known as “girl zines” and the founding of archives designed to ensure their preservation. Though both are seen as significant political achievements for feminism, by considering Mimi Thi Nguyen's recent claim that the dominant narrative and the genealogies it constructs tend to ignore the important but often differently motivated contributions of punks and zinesters of color, the essay explores the question of what it might mean to focus on the varied itineraries that girls pursued into the punk underground and on how those itineraries affected the zines they created for often quite distinct purposes. Ultimately, the essay asks how riot grrrl and girl zine-ing ought to be understood. That is, should they be construed as a singular event, as a coherent social movement, as a fractious discourse, as a complex set of social practices, as a political intervention, or as something else? In the end, the author argues that attending to the disagreements and contestations among girl punks and zinesters who constantly called each other out over their differences suggests that as a youthful cohort profoundly affected by the vast social and cultural change associated with what is now call neoliberalism, these young people were arguing among themselves and with the surrounding culture over how to craft new, more flexible forms of subjectivity and sociality adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

This article explores how Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker's visual essay After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben's “bare life” in order to explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political significance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents that are connected to structural forms of persecution.

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously “Eastern”-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several “journeys to the East”: some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as “raga rock.” Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a “neo-orientalism”: resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West.

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.

Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.

Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.

This article examines the attitudes of leading policymakers in the United States toward the Spanish Empire in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–78). It suggests that while many in the US objected to Spanish imperial practices, concerns about trade alongside ideological predispositions regarding nonintervention and race led the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, under the direction of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, to develop a series of policies that in effect supported colonialism in Cuba while attempting to ensure that the US would benefit from any change in rule there. The article argues that despite an apparent desire for the US to remain neutral during the conflict, the Grant administration in fact formulated its responses based on a narrow conception of Spanish colonial control that demonstrated an increasing sense of moral superiority over both colonizer and colonized.

This article explores competing efforts to make sense of the 9/11 attacks within entries posted on the “Where Were You … September 11th, Two Thousand One” Internet archive. Open to written contributions for one year from 15 September 2001, the archive amassed more than 2,500 responses, with posters writing from over twenty different countries. The article begins by arguing that this repository of vernacular memories has potential to significantly broaden our understanding of how the events of 9/11 were interpreted beyond the dominant discourses of political and other elites. It then attempts to do this via a discursive analysis of three key themes traversing contributions to WhereWereYou. These relate, first, to efforts to position 9/11 within particular temporal horizons; second, to accounts of 9/11's essence and causes; and third, to articulated hopes, fears, and expectations around the attacks' future impacts. The article concludes by locating WhereWereYou within debates over the archive's status in contemporary social and political life. It argues that this specific archive's refusal to foreclose 9/11's meaning renders WhereWereYou a particularly interesting memory project for exploring the events of 11 September 2001, and for thinking through contemporary mnemonic practices more broadly.

This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.

In recent decades, revisionist challenges to the traditional “declension hypothesis” have generated a much more nuanced and positive approach to the Black Power movement. However, attempts to explain the narrative's initial popularity have too often focussed on the latter half of the decade and blamed a media-assisted white backlash or the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power activists. Concentrating instead on the earlier half of the decade, this article examines the media strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and demonstrates how its public approach to nonviolence and interracial organizing purposefully hid developments within the movement that were seen to be at odds with the dominant discourse. By highlighting the ways in which the early media strategies of a militant organization like SNCC strengthened and legitimized a misleading movement narrative, this article challenges scholars to be more critical of early movement rhetoric and re-examine how and why Black Power was portrayed as a fundamental break with the past.

The scope of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which celebrated, albeit a year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, ranged over many centuries, numerous nations and almost every type of human achievement. The 27 million people who came to the five months long Fair were able to see Grace Darling's boat or Spanish galleons of Columbus's time; they could follow the history of transport from coracles to cars; they could see the latest in Krupp's cannon and Bell's telephone in a classically styled Machinery Hall six times the size of the Coliseum. With the exception of Louis Sullivan's golden Transportation Pavilion, the buildings which housed the Fair, covered uniformly with staff, composed a classical ‘White City’, grouped round a complex of lagoons and fountains on Chicago's Lake Front.

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.

During the last decade William Appleman Williams has become one of the most influential of contemporary American historians. In particular, the comprehensive interpretation of United States foreign policy which he originally expounded in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland and New York, 1959; revised edition, New York, 1962) has attracted many adherents in these years of the Vietnam war and the rise of the ‘New Left’. A school has developed and in a number of monographs and articles Williams's interpretative framework has been applied to various episodes and aspects of American foreign policy. Now Williams has edited a volume of essays, largely by members of this school, which ‘can be used as the basic guide for a course in American foreign relations’. Its appearance, following the recent publication in this country of Williams's own substantial work on the background to the Spanish-American War and America's acquisition of the Philippines, provides an appropriate occasion for a general review of the interpretation.

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? I provide an answer to this question by examining the narrative and aesthetic choices through which the problem of oil is framed in three recent “feature” documentaries: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh's H2Oil (2009). My aim is to understand not only the specific politics enacted through the formal and aesthetic choices made in each film, but to map out what these documentaries tell us about the social life of oil today, and the capacity for films such as these to meaningfully intervene in the looming consequences of our dependence on oil. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, by offering readings of the discursive, narrative and aesthetic strategies of these documentaries, I draw out the ways in which each comes to understand the problem of oil. In the second part, I identify the key insights that these films offer regarding the specific social contradictions and political blockages that emerge from their attempt to name and understand oil. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the insights these films provide for addressing the antinomies that define and separate the anticapitalist and environmental movements.