Our nation has been founded in what we may call our American religion, baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well enough together if left free to try.

William James, “Robert Gould Shaw Oration,” 1897

[T]he civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets … centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal … You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.

Richard Rorty, “A Cultural Left,” 1997

James and Rorty refer here to what sociologists used to call the American civil religion. In 1967, Robert N. Bellah coined this phrase to suggest how Americans, shaped by the complex interplay of republican and Christian traditions, believe they have an obligation “to carry out God's will on earth.” Since the 1970s, though, it has been historians like J. G. A. Pocock who have shown how republicans throughout the modern West have for the last five centuries blended the millennialist beliefs of Christianity with the ancient conviction that humans realize their political nature through the virtuous acts required to sustain republics in a cosmos ruled by fortune. As James once said of pragmatism, republicanism is a new name for an old way of thinking.

Interest in the historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American black nationalism has been inspired by the revival of nationalist modes of thought among blacks since the 1950s. Because the placing of post-Second World War Pan-Africanism or the American Black Power movement within a historical context has been seen as an urgent task, the search for a coherent tradition has carried with it the danger of distortions in the historical treatment of the earlier movements. “Traditional” nineteenth-century black nationalism was essentially a conservative movement advocating racial self-improvement through the “civilizing” influence of Anglo-Saxon values, particularly Christianity. Taking black nationalism to mean the assertion of group identity for political purposes (which need not be separatist), its nature clearly changed during the period 1914–1929 as the nature of the American black community changed. For the first time in American history there existed a sizeable number of black intellectuals and a literate audience for them; the rapid growth in the number of black newspapers and magazines reflected these facts. These intellectuals were responsive to new ideas like socialism, yet the transformation of black nationalist thought during this period did not constitute a complete break with the past. This essay attempts to illustrate continuities with the nineteenth century along with those elements of radicalism that presaged modern black nationalism.

Two discontinuities between modern and “traditional” black nationalism constitute essential reference points for the analysis of black nationalist thought during this period. The first relates to who is perceived as being the principal agent or vanguard of the nationalist movement.

Far from being apolitical, self-indulgent or ineffective, as was suggested by some in the activist community, the NAMES Project Quilt became a symbol of the decimation of AIDS and a beacon for those in the AIDS-affected community, and challenged and transformed public attitudes towards people with AIDS. The NAMES Project Quilt risked sanitizing and homogenizing the particularities of the deceased, but I shall argue that the spectacle of the quilt changed public opinion through its mechanisms of publicity and meaning-making. Building on Michael Warner's notion of the ‘Mass Subject’, the quilt, I will suggest, transformed the mainstream, effectively forcing the formerly abject AIDS-affected community into public consciousness through the mechanisms of mass media.

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black, or Hispanic, or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. However, those cracks tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.

Laws, regulations, guidelines, and judicial opinions are social artifacts which provide evidence about how a society deals with certain perceived problems. Laws are designed to serve social purposes and change as the purposes change; the specific form they may take reflects a need for congruence between laws as instruments of policy, and the purposes of policy. A survey of laws on race and ethnicity suggests three different policy aims: (1) laws mandating separation and disparate treatment, (2) laws prohibiting disparate treatment, and (3) laws encouraging aggregate changes in ethnic representation. Each purpose had a corresponding form of definition. If the purpose of a law is to mandate diverse treatment of individuals based on race or ethnicity, the law must be quite precise about who falls into which category, because an administrator is expected to make clear distinctions in individual cases.

The rise of support for national parks in the United States after 1900 occurred amid a transnational circulation of information on the apparent destruction of – or imminent threat to – nature on a global level. Arguments for creating and protecting national parks included preservation of “wild” areas, proto-ecological ideas, and social reformist and economic utilitarian pressures during the Progressive Era. Advocacy for park protection as it developed to 1916 reflected this complex cluster of ideas rather than any clearly articulated concept of wilderness. It was influenced by international sensibilities on the social construction of nature and its putative preservation at the moment of industrialization in Europe and the American Northeast, the intrusion of mechanization into the countryside and, outside the metropolitan centres of the Euro-American world, high imperialism that exposed widespread destruction of nature in Europe's colonies. The case of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society (ASHPS), an elite organization that combined national park, public-park and human-heritage advocacy in a continuum of values, is examined as a transnational conduit for and shaper of these socially constructed ideas in the United States, and as a neglected aspect of Progressive Era development of national parks.

Nearly every handbook of critical theory acknowledges Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) to be the twentieth-century North American critic who was most ahead of his time. Yet he seems to have been so ambitious that we still do not know how to place him. Indeed, it would require the space of a whole book to trace the extensive but scarcely documented impact which he has had. Concepts for which many other critics became famous may be traced back to him: ‘‘the order of words’’ (Frye); ‘‘the rhetoric of fiction’’ (Booth); ‘‘blindness and insight’’ (De Man); ‘‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’’ (Jameson); ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ (Bloom). Indeed, it may well be that very anxiety which has led so many contemporary critics to repress his memory. But there is a change in the critical climate, corresponding to the global. This article is written in the hope that Burke will shortly be recognized as the first critic systematically to analyse culture and literature from an ecological perspective. As the dating of our epigraph indicates, he initiated this project over half a century before the rise of ecocriticism in the United States. Moreover, this was no passing phase for him; his whole career may be understood as a profound experiment in green thinking.

This article examines forty years of historical writing on the Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that this historiography has now reached maturity. It evaluates key publications on the BPP, splitting the historiography into three periods. The first phase, the article asserts, was dominated by accounts written by participants and observers of the BPP in action. These offered insight into the personalities of the BPP leadership but included relatively little on other BPP members. They were supplemented by a collection of friendly academic studies, a number of which emphasized the role of the FBI in precipitating the BPP's decline. The article identifies the 1994 publication of Hugh Pearson's biographical study of Huey P. Newton as the beginning of a second phase. Pearson's work, which built on a collection of accounts written by observers and right-wing writers during the first phase, precipitated an outpouring of new studies that opposed its conclusions. These works overwhelmingly focussed on individual BPP chapters and the experiences of the BPP rank and file; they were generally friendly towards the party and often appraised the BPP's actions through the 1970s. A second wave of participant accounts also emerged in this period which offered a more personal interpretation of the BPP's decline. A third period emerged in the early 2000s that abandoned the obsession with Pearson's study and focussed instead on the BPP's contribution to African American and American culture beyond its political program and violent image. The article reveals the paradox at the heart of the local approach, one which recent studies addressed in their focus on the BPP's Oakland chapter and their return to a tight chronological approach that focussed on the BPP's peak years. It concludes by noting the remaining omissions in the BPP's historical record and anticipating further studies.

If uncertainty and anxiety are the troubling but potentially radical qualities of gothic narrative, suburban gothic has typically been understood in terms of a banal unhomeliness which merely confirms reassuring commonplaces about the postwar American suburbs. In such readings, the suburbs are supposed to embody a desire to stand outside history: either they are places in which people seek refuge from their own pasts, or they represent an idealized past removed from the challenges of the present. This article argues that Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides undermines easy assumptions about the suburbs' atemporality. The novel's various gothic motifs suggest the difficulty of abandoning European pasts in order to adopt the white American identities required for a life in the suburbs; repressed ethnic difference haunts the suburban landscape. Yet Eugenides's suburban gothic also complicates the process of remembering such acts of forgetting: the difficulty of explicating suburban pasts, the novel insists, is precisely a measure of their having become historical. The drive to present comforting, codified narratives of the suburbs is shown to be part of a move – which always fails – to disassociate the present from these sites of conflict and trauma.

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction.2

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

If John Cage, for instance, says, “I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I nowwillthis to bemusic.” After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice.

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

This essay examines two of the best-known postbellum representations of country doctors, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884). While they have often been considered from a feminist point of view, this essay seeks both to complement and to argue against these existing readings by bringing a specifically geo-medical framework to bear on the texts. I consider both the thematic and the generic implications of representing country doctors in the postbellum era, exploring how they reflect, refract and encode the state of medical knowledge in postbellum America. I argue that literary representations of country doctors can contribute to an understanding of postbellum medical modernization by decentring it – by, in a sense, allowing us to comprehend the course of modern medical knowledge from a place usually assumed to remain outside modernity's transformations. Whilst I do, therefore, approach both these novels from a loosely new historicist perspective, I also want to think about how the social context they were engaging with determined, constrained and embedded itself into the thematic, formal and generic makeup of the novels themselves. Ultimately, this essay not only offers fresh readings of two important late nineteenth-century novels, but makes an intervention within the wider debates about nineteenth-century medical history and geography.

At the close of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a novel which exploits the conventions of slave narrative to dramatize gendered rather than racial oppressions, a set of “Historical Notes,” the partial transcript of a lecture in 2195 by Professor Pieixoto, the editor of the text, provides a wicked satire on academic commodification. Professor Pieixoto, a major scholar from Cambridge, who is slumming it at the University of Denay, Nunavit, is introduced obsequiously by the fawning Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, and proceeds to patronize his chairperson, his audience and his eponymous subject, demonstrating that patriarchal prejudice remains almost unchanged over the centuries. Pieixoto analyses the technology of the tapes on which a story was recorded, considers the possibility of forgery, earnestly discusses the possibility of using musical traces as dating devices, attempts to trace the history of the house where the tapes were found and offers a great deal of information about each of the two men who might have been the handmaid's master, but discovers absolutely nothing about the handmaid herself: not her name, not her origins, not even whether she escaped from bondage. Pieixoto is sharing the conference podium with Professor Sieglinda Van Buren from the Department of Military History at the University of San Antonio, Republic of Texas. Clearly, despite the presence at the conference of women professors and ethnic minority speakers (Professor Johnny Running Dog, for example), not much has changed, and the supposed admission of women and minorities to the academic mainstream is merely a smokescreen for their continued domination.

The study of Africa began long before African studies in America. In the United States today the words ‘African studies’ imply a formalized, academic structure of centres, programmes, institutes, postgraduate theses, publications, professional associations, conferences, finances from the foundations, grants from the government, etc., etc. Three and a half centuries ago, when the first blacks came to the New World, the study of Africa in America was outrageously informal: the cherishing of the memories of the ancestral continent from which the slaves had been forced.

Granville Sharp (1735–1813) was the son of Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, and grandson of John Sharp, Archbishop of York. He first became well known through his persistent efforts to secure a judgement from the courts that no man could be a slave in England—efforts which were crowned with success in the Somerset case of 1772. Sharp's attack on slavery attracted the attention of the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet (1713–84), one of the pioneer opponents of slavery in the colonies. Benezet and Sharp opened a correspondence about colonial opposition to the slave-trade, especially the Virginia petition to the Crown against it. This correspondence in its turn induced Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a physician in Philadelphia, to write to Sharp. Thus began the exchange of letters, destined to continue for thirty-six years, which is printed here.

United States foreign-policymakers have enthusiastically backed policies of promoting democracy abroad. But do the American people support these plans? Evidence from polls reveals that while people generally like the idea of exporting freedom, they do not view it as a top priority. Other concepts such as political and economic security are valued more by the American public. Backing for democracy promotion also seems to be waning in recent years. I examine these issues and offer possible reasons for this “gap” in response to democracy promotion among American people. I also explain the implications of these findings for America's foreign policy, including the types of government the US appears to support in the wake of military operations. I conclude with an examination of why the policy of democracy promotion has not been more popular with the American people, evaluating competing arguments that the policy is flawed, as opposed to simply a case of poor public relations.

At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their book Beyond the Melting Pot traced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for die New York Times and author of The American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.

In 1964 US Surgeon General Luther L. Terry published a report on smoking and health which concluded that “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.” Publication of this report marked the beginning of contemporary governmental efforts to control smoking. Over the next 40 years a range of legislative and regulatory action at all levels of government sought to restrict an activity that had become widely identified as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Warning labels were required on cigarette packages, restrictions placed on advertising, controls introduced on the sale of cigarettes, lists of additives in cigarettes submitted to the federal government, excise taxes increased, and restrictions introduced on smoking in public places. Efforts to assert some control over the content of cigarettes, however, were unsuccessful. Exemptions for tobacco products can be found in virtually all federal consumer safety laws.