I want you to have power because I will have power.

Roscoe Conkling Simmons (1881–1951) was an African American journalist and lifelong Republican, frequently acclaimed as the greatest orator of his day. He wrote for the Chicago Defender, the nation's largest black paper, and was later a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. A sometime advisor on black affairs to Republican administrations during the 1920s, Simmons seconded the re-nomination of Herbert Hoover for president in 1932, where “His exit from the platform was blocked by senators, committeemen, governors and others high in the public life who sought to touch ‘the hem of his garment.’” Throughout his career, the Colonel, as Simmons was often called, forged close links with black organizations. On regular speaking tours, he participated in the affairs of fraternities, churches, and educational institutions nationwide. Simmons was a social chameleon, on familiar terms with black America's most powerful businessmen and editors, entertainers and mobsters, but equally comfortable among the working men and women with whom he gossiped in barber shops and at church picnics. Senators, mayors, and aldermen admired his talent on the speaking platform and valued his connections to the black community. When white Republicans needed help in rallying northern black voters, Simmons was the fixer they summoned. He gladly obliged, out of loyalty to the Grand Old Party and in anticipation of reciprocal dispensations.

John Sayles's Lone Star, released in 1996, repeatedly challenges traditional definitions of the nation as a strictly bounded entity through its depiction of the area that Américo Paredes described as “Greater Mexico” and Gloria Anzaldúa more recently referred to as the Borderlands; the film's promotion of a potentially productive love affair between half-siblings further challenges the status quo. As I argue here, however, while the film undeniably underscores the fragility of the nation in an era of global trade and travel, it also suggests the difficulties of escaping nation-based ideologies and interests. As I will show, Lone Star in fact highlights the ongoing importance of the nation-state through its attention to the institutions and individuals that Louis Althusser associates with state apparatuses, ultimately pointing to the fraught nature of avoiding the influence of the nation as a construct.

To reconsider the affective turn in American literary studies, this essay reads Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), with reference to “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857), as an anti-affect story. By shedding light on silent characters in these works – Bartleby, Babo, and Black Guinea – it argues that Melville endeavors to adumbrate, not articulate, their private interiorities through language. Calling the inner recesses of his silent characters “secret emotions,” Melville probes into the boundaries between the effable and the ineffable by testing the limits of literary language. If “affect” refers to the kind of emotion that eludes signification through language, reading Melville in this manner encourages a reappraisal of the relationship between affect as a non-linguistic emotion and literature as a linguistic construct.

(As the work of the Survey nears completion, its officers have little time to spare for tasks other than those that are necessary to bring this pioneering project to a conclusion. We are, therefore, indebted to Dr. Bernard Crick, Assistant-Director of the Survey, now in the throes of the last round-up, for the following letter from the field. We notice that Dr. Crick has strayed a little outside his province in his admonitions to some historians. But as he and his assistants have had a unique opportunity of examining local historical sources in this country, his opinion deserves a hearing, and we hope that his advice to historians whoso footsteps are led almost magnetically to Chancery Lane will not pass unnoticed.)

For many years, Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, the American colonists were too occupied with living the present to explore their own past. Such historical works as were written generally confined themselves to a single province. Perhaps the most important intercolonial work of the early eighteenth century was compiled by an Englishman: Daniel Neal's History of New-England (1720). In the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature the entry for Neal is immediately preceded by that for John Oldmixon (1673–1742), miscellaneous Whig compiler and butt of the Tory wits. This may serve as a reminder that Oldmixon, too, wrote a pioneering work of colonial history – a flawed, prolix but deeply interesting book which merits more scrupulous attention than it generally gets.

This article examines representations of the road in the work of independent Florida-born film director Kelly Reichardt. Reading Reichardt's so-called Oregon trilogy, Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Meek's Cutoff (2010), alongside radical anti-freeway and anti-automobile movements from the Pacific Northwest, I argue that Reichardt's films offer critical engagements with the subject of the American road, interrogating the freedom and emancipation from social constraint it purportedly offers.

During the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when most observers thought they were in decline, parties were in fact transformed in the US. At the center of this change, scholars argue, was the development, at the national level, of a more centralized and professionally oriented “service” model of party organization within the Republican Party. What the emphasis on the national level obscures, however, is the important role that state parties played in the development of a service style of party organization prior to the 1960s. Nowhere was this more evident than in Ohio, where the postwar Republican Party, led by Ray Bliss, had a significant impact on the development of this new, more centralized “service” approach to party organization. The Bliss model represented one of the most fully developed examples to date, at any level, of the service party, as demonstrated by its organizational continuity over time, and its influence on the subsequent institutionalization of a similar structure within the Republican Party nationally in the 1960s and 1970s.

Students of the Socialist Party of America are well-acquainted with the extensive and persistent support it received from poor farmers, many of them tenants, in Oklahoma and Texas. David Shannon and, more recently, James Weinstein have both noted that the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had a more active and widespread membership than any other state branch of the Party. Both writers have also given proper emphasis to the shattering impact of repression upon the widely scattered and vulnerable Socialist locals in the rural areas of the Southwest after the United States entered World War I. Weinstein especially has suggested that the Socialist Party was a broadly-based and effective political organization, not only ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world of American workers and small farmers. Pointing to the vigour of the Socialist Party's support in the North and East after it opposed American participation in the war, Weinstein argues that an American Socialism attuned to American conditions and needs had much potential vitality and could have been a significant political force in the country. For this assertion Weinstein was sharply criticized by a reviewer who argued that he exaggerated the depth of the Party's support after 1912 and that he specifically failed to perceive the German ethnic origin of much of the Party's ‘new’ support for its anti-war position.

Kipling's ripest comments on the United States are to be found in the late (1926) short story, ‘The Prophet and the Country’. The tale begins with the breakdown of the narrator's car on the Great North Road late one summer night. A passing American offers shelter in his trailer, and a tow in the morning: which offers are accepted. The generous fellow-traveller is Mr Tarworth, a former realtor from Omaha, Nebraska, five years a widower. He drops a few hints about the Collective Outlook of Democracy, the Herd Impulse, and ‘the counterbalancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression’ and then launches artlessly into the story of his life. His own Primal Urge for Individual Self-Expression, we learn, came to him on his way home from his wife's funeral, when he had a Revelation qua Prohibition. Prohibition is the sin of Presumption, foisted on the American male by the American female. The sin will be duly punished, because to protect any race from the ‘ natural and God-given bacteria’ of civilization is to induce a condition of virginity which is terrifyingly vulnerable. ‘Immunise, or virg'nise, the Cit'zen of the United States to alcohol, an' you as surely redooce him to the mental status an' outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition.’ Such had been Mr Tarworth's Revelation. The next question was, how to convey it to his fellow-countrymen. He decided to make a movie, even if ‘the Movies wasn't a business I'd ever been interested in, though a regular attendant’.

In his autobiographical introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, looking back on the novel as completed process, Kurt Vonnegut writes, ‘I've finished my war book now. The next I write is going to be fun.’ This ‘war book’ marked, in many ways, though, the culmination of Vonnegut's fiction up to that point of time.

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

Ante-bellum southern history has undergone extensive revision in recent decades. Now that the hoary myths of Cavalier aristocracies, monolithic sectionalism, and Confederate chauvinism have receded, historians are better able to evaluate the ante-bellum political history of the South. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to examine the question of party formation in the Jacksonian South, a development of the 1830s, without the conceptual blinders of economic or sectional determinism. In this essay on party formation and development in Jacksonian America, the political structure in four Southern states will be emphasized. I shall present both an institutional view, which stresses party structure, organization and leadership, and a behavioural view, which emphasizes the politics of masses of voters and the interaction of social groups.

The American West has traditionally held a special appeal for the imagination of the citizens of the United States because it has come to represent so much for them. Not only has the vast expanse of land lying roughly to the west of the Mississippi River been the home of a number of America's most celebrated figures — Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and General Custer — and many of the country's national symbols — the six-gun and the Stetson hat, the homesteader and the pioneer, the cowboy and the Indian — but the “ western experience ” itself has also been looked upon as a basic theme in American life. From Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous essay of 1893, which served to move discussions of Western America into academic circles, to Henry Nash Smith's analysis of 1950, which examined the mythical and symbolic dimensions of America's “ virgin land,” the story of the West has been viewed as one of the most enduring organizing concepts for understanding America's development and the characteristics of its people. While much of this matter is well-known today and common to the study of the United States, it is but little known that the cluster of ideas associated with the American West has also had implications for what might seem, at first mention, a somewhat unlikely place: Africa.

The subject of this article is the foreign policy views of singer and songwriter Bob Dylan: a personality whose footprints during the 1960s were so impressive that a whole generation followed his lead. Today, after thirty years of recording, the number of devoted Dylan disciples is reduced but he is still very much present on the rock scene. His political influence having been considerable, his policy views deserve scrutiny. My thesis is that Dylan's foreign policy views are best characterized as “isolationist.’ More specifically: Dylan's foreign policy message is what so-called progressive isolationists from the Midwest would have advocated, had they been transferred into the United States of the 1960s or later. I shall argue that Bob Dylan is just that kind of personified anachronism, seeing the contemporary world through a set of cognitive lenses made in the Midwest before the Second World War – to a large extent even before the First (or, indeed, before the American Civil War).