Recent accounts of Anglo-American relations in the mid-1960s revolve around the supposed existence of “deals” made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The memoir of Edward Short, Wilson's Chief Whip, goes so far as to describe a “deal” done before the 1964 general election, whereby the US would support the pound in return for an undertaking not to devalue if a Labour Government were to be returned. Clive Ponting, Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott all accept that a “deal” or “secret agreement” — Pimlott's phrase — had been made by the early summer of 1965. The US would organise a multilateral rescue for the sinking pound, in return for British policies of deflation at home, retention of overseas military commitments, and (limited) support for the Vietnam war. The 1965 “deal” appears to have been reinforced during the sterling crisis of July 1966, only to come adrift in 1967. Wilson's own account has him rejecting the excessive demands accompanying an American sterling rescue in 1967, and devaluing as — in effect — an assertion of British sovereignty.

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 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.

Reinhold Niebuhr's “Christian realism” had a favorable and lasting impact on the eminent political theorist Hans J. Morgenthau. The two men developed a lasting friendship and, on Morgenthau's lead, came to oppose America's war in Vietnam. This article explores the relationship between Niebuhr and Morgenthau, giving special attention to the role of Niebuhr's theology in shaping his own version of political realism. The dialectical relation between love and justice that gave Niebuhrian realism its distinctive quality and differentiated Niebuhr from realists such as Morgenthau and George Kennan is also examined. Finally, the unresolved problem that fellow realist Kenneth Thompson saw in Niebuhr's dialectic is considered.

“We've some splendid old point-lace in our family, yellow and fragrant … all tags and tangles and fibrous and bewildering” (7). This is the way that Giorgione (Yone) Willoughby opens her tale, “The Amber Gods”; instead of “beginn[ing] at the beginning” (7) she offers a luxuriant description of a type of old lace, rich in sense impressions. Bewilderingly, like her point lace, her story's introductory proprieties are delayed until the second paragraph. Such improper sensuality disconcerted many of her Protestant New England readers when her story appeared in the Atlantic in 1860. Yet also, hypocritically, at this time, a rising bourgeoisie, secure in its socioeconomic position, was increasingly embracing a phase of conspicuous leisure and consumption. It is with this embrace, and its dark origins and dark legacies, that “The Amber Gods” engages.

In 1875, a year from the upcoming centennial celebrations, Frederick Douglass commemorated the African American presence in the nation's revolutionary past and Reconstruction present. “If … any man should ask me what colored people have to do with the Fourth of July, my answer is ready,” he proclaimed to a black audience in Washington, DC. “Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital importance in the life and progress of this great country” from its beginnings in 1776 to its greatest test in 1861 and beyond. Douglass drew upon the Revolution's legacies of liberty and democracy, urging his listeners to meet the challenge of incorporating themselves into the nation's citizenry despite sustained white resistance. Albeit a tall order, he placed this agenda in a broader perspective: “The fathers of this Republic … had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic are about to have their trial now.” The moment was full of possibilities: African Americans, he emphasized, faced comparable obstacles and hardships much like the founders themselves. Implied too within Douglass's invocation of the revolutionaries was the potential heroism and accomplishments of which African Americans were similarly capable, just as they had proven in the past.

During the past fifty years few subjects of historical consequence have been more controversial than that of the population history of the American Indian. At one extreme, in 1939 Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the population of pre-Columbian North America at about 900,000. At the other extreme, in 1983 Henry F. Dobyns estimated it at about 18,000,000. Since the total North American Indian population by the early twentieth century was no more than 350,000 to 450,000, the human question concealed in the statistical controversy is staggering: did the North American Indian population decline by a ratio of about 2 to 1 between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century – or did it decline by 50 to 1 ? Or more?

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.

This article theorizes a new periodization for film noir through a prewar category of “emergent noir”: seven films released between 1940 and 1942 – including The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane – that defined the genre's thematics, aesthetics, visual style, and moral ambiguity. Using archival research and trauma theory, the article analyzes High Sierra and This Gun for Hire as case studies of “failure narratives”: each film resonated with American audiences by validating the recent suffering of the Great Depression, allowing for a vicarious sense of revenge, and creating new ideals of individuality and masculinity. Both films were surprise box-office hits and created new film icons for the 1940s: Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake. All three were embodiments of “cool,” a concept herein theorized as a public mask of stoicism.

“American Monsters” analyzes the satanic panic, an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout the 1980s. It involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California, still the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. This article explores how the panic both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives. Their ideology was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through tabloid media. Infotainment expanded dramatically in the 1980s, selling conservative-defined threats as news. The panic unfolded mostly through infotainment, lending appeal to subgenres like talk shows. In the 1990s, judges overturned the life sentences of defendants in most major cases, and several prominent journalists and lawyers condemned the phenomenon as a witch hunt. They analyzed it as a powerful delusion, or what contemporary cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a “hyperreality,” in which audiences confuse the media universe for real life. Integral to the development, influence, and success of tabloid television, the panic was a manifestation of the hyperreal.

Avery Brundage liked to say that revolutionaries were not bred on the playing field. That theme neatly expressed Brundage's distrust of any challenge to the established political and social order he cherished and garnished his speeches to countless audiences during the forty years in which he was the single most powerful figure in both the American and international Olympic movements, first as president of the American Olympic Committee (1929–1953), and then as president of the International Olympic Committee (1952–1972). Although the Iron Chancellor of amateur sport regarded himself as the last true defender of the strict separation of sport and politics, he also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake in shielding sport from political manipulation. Upon sport for sport's sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life. Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were in Brundage's view essential for the continued success of American capitalism at home and abroad. Though he never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics, he regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values in the continuing ideological battle between Communism and the American way of life.

Because it dramatizes victory, defeat, struggle against nature and other competitors, sport is a potent symbol constantly under pressure to lend its emotional power to other causes.

“ Tranquility is the first duty of every citizen ” has never been an American motto. “ What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence,” Richard Hofstadter once remarked, is its “ extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast with our pretensions to singular national virtue.” If, as Hofstadter complains, violence has been overlooked in American history, the maintenance of peace, particularly the significant role of the militia in public disorders — “ the most important single form of domestic violence in American history ” — has been almost totally ignored by historians. For example, Marcus Cunliffe's otherwise excellent study of the military mind in ante-bellum United States devotes two sentences to the subject, a rather surprising omission in view of the, quite correct, contemporary opinion that “the Militia are, after all … neither more nor less than an Auxiliary Police Force, and for the last forty-odd years that is the only duty they have ever been called on to perform.”

This article argues that far from marking a break in recent literary development, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made less of an impact on American fiction than we often think. Critics have often accused writers after 9/11 of “retreating” into the domestic; in fact, domestic and individual narratives, often set against sweeping historical backgrounds, already dominated American writing in the late 1990s. At first, therefore, novelists handling the events of 9/11 framed them within the personal and the small-scale. In the last two years, however, writers such as Adam Haslett and Jonathan Franzen have begun publishing broader, more ambitious state-of-the-nation novels, explicitly addressing the United States' relationship with the Middle East and the impact of globalization. Yet in these novels, too, the global and the personal are tightly intertwined; again and again, writers are drawn to the domestic themes that have so often dominated American literature.

The Bethune Memorial, in Washington, DC's Lincoln Park, was erected to celebrate the life and achievements of civil rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune. When it was dedicated in 1974 it became the first monument to an African American, and the first to a woman, on federal land in the capital. This article interprets the monument and its accompanying discourses. It examines how race and gender are constructed in the memorial, and what this suggests about the creation of a collective memory and identity. Bethune was remembered as an American, a black American, and a black American woman. The article explores the racial and gendered tensions in the commemoration, and how the statue both reinforced and challenged a national American memory.

In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.

With the appearance of D. W. Griffith's 1915 racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, the six-year-old NAACP reluctantly organized a campaign to ban the film entirely or at least to censor its most offensive elements. Although this struggle was a failure, it helped transform the association in ways no one could have imagined at the outset. Up to this point, the issues the NAACP had taken up, such as housing segregation and lynching, focussed primarily on southern or border states. The Birth of a Nation, however, was a national event. As the film moved from major population centers to smaller ones throughout the country, so too did the protests and countless meetings between local NAACP leaders and mayors, city councils, censors, and governors. In the end, this failed campaign had the effect of providing local association members with invaluable political experience and of elevating the NAACP to a position of national stature and indeed prominence in the struggle for civil rights in America.

The American conservatives of the 1960s have arrived at last. Not in Washington, not in positions of power – they did that during the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s and the Republican Congresses of the 1990s. No, it is in history itself, the record of events, that the right is finally appearing. Now that the elephant has occupied the parlor, scholars are inquiring whence it came.

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an “oil wizard” reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of “practical spiritualism” and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern “scientific” oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.

With the emergence of black nationalism in the late sixties, the delineation of a new black aesthetic became an urgent issue: it was first and most persistently raised by Hoyt Fuller in Negro Digest, and soon became the staple of radical black little magazines across America. In 1971, the appearance of a collection of essays entitled The Black Aesthetic and edited by Addison Gayle brought some coherence to the debate, and sanctified its assumptions. In his own contributions to that book, Gayle recorded the passing of the myth of the American melting pot and the consequent need to repudiate assimilationism. He argued that black nationalism implied the development of a black aesthetic in direct opposition to prevailing aesthetic criteria, in which white cultural concerns were privileged under a guise of “universalism”: this bogus universalism actually depended upon the marginalization of black perspectives and black writers by a white literary establishment. Such observations established the need for a new black aesthetic, and prescriptions for its form proliferated. These blueprints were handed down at a series of conferences at which black writers past and present stood trial against the new criteria. The emergent consensus was for writing that directly recreated the black experience out of which it arose; that found its style in the forms of “black folk expression”; that was socially progressive in effect – according to a very literal concept of functional literature; that addressed itself to the common readership of black people; and that assiduously cultivated positive black characters.