Commentators noted the role of the religious right in the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004. This essay suggests that such assessments are ahistorical and flawed, and illustrates the ways in which evangelical Protestantism has shaped American political life. Examples of the intersection of religion and politics include Jefferson's election in 1800, John Brown's trial and execution, Abraham Lincoln's Civil War leadership and William Jennings Bryan's radical democratic politics. The essay concludes by arguing that if American-studies teaching and research marginalizes religion it fails to comprehend a vital component of American society and culture.

In the summer of 1965 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) toured possible locations for a campaign that would highlight the problems African Americans faced in Northern cities.1 Chicago was chosen, primarily due to the presence of an effective local movement.

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.

The study of US politics in Europe has always been small-scale. In the UK, it is often tied to contemporary history. In much of continental Europe, it is distanced from political science (which largely eschews area studies) and is instead, intellectually and institutionally, an adjunct to American studies. Whereas many other fields within political science have been compelled to consider the methodological underpinnings of their work, US politics has yet to do this. In contrast, within the US, political science has, since the behaviouralist revolution, been largely structured around quantitative forms of analysis. There is therefore a significant gulf between the study of US politics in Europe and political science in both Europe and the US. Furthermore, American studies is itself under long-term threat in some European countries because, forecasters suggest, the demand for English-language teaching (to which American studies is generally tied) will decline in the long term. As a consequence of these developments, those who study US politics at university level are not being replaced as they retire and there are few new entrants into the profession. The article suggests that US politics should, as a subdiscipline, seek out openings that might bring the subject back towards political science. In particular, it argues that US politics researchers in Europe should look more closely at developments within historical institutionalism, American political development (APD) and comparative politics.

On several occasions during the late 1860s, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe exhorted readers to adorn their homes with chromolithographs, color prints which reproduced original oil-paintings or, less often, depicted images created specifically for the print medium. In her 1869 domestic advice manual, The American Woman's Home, co-authored with her sister Catharine Beecher, Stowe described chromolithographs (or “chromos,” as they were commonly called) as essential components of a properly embellished home interior. In proposing a hypothetical budget devoted to parlor furnishings, the authors recommended that almost one-fourth of the total be allocated to lithographic reproductions of “really admirable pictures” by some of “America's best artists.” Stowe's advocacy of chromos also appeared in the promotional publications of L. Prang & Company, one of the country's largest publishers of these images. The short-lived quarterly Prang's Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art (published in five issues from January 1868 to April 1869) printed a letter in which Stowe thanked Louis Prang for sending her several free chromolithographs. After praising the “beautiful objects,” Stowe concluded her note with the kind of testimonial Prang no doubt had been seeking when he sent her the complimentary items: “Be assured I shall neglect no opportunity of proving my sympathy with your so charming and beautiful mission, and bringing it to everyone's notice, so far as I can.” And, though it is impossible to know what exact role Stowe's promotions played in the overall sale of chromos, it is clear that she aligned herself with a hot commodity: from 1840 to 1900, chromolithographs in America sold by the millions.

This article seeks to rebalance historical assessment of the debate between “pathologists” and “anti-pathologists” which dominated discussions of black urban life in the United States during the 1960s, and which continues to shape ideas about race and the urban environment today. The heated disagreement between the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (1914–2005) and the critic and novelist Albert Murray (1916–) presents an opportunity to consider not only the pitfalls and unintended consequences of pathologist representations of black urban life, which have received much attention from scholars in recent years, but also the problematic aspects of anti-pathologist discourse, which have largely been overlooked. The dispute between Clark and Murray also illuminates the intense competition among some African American intellectuals to claim the personal authenticity and disciplinary authority to define and represent black urban life – and to adjudicate the authenticity and authority of others.

This essay reflects on the use of competing rhetorical frames of fear strategically used by the academic community of The University of Texas at Austin in the debate on Campus Carry policy. With the legalization of concealed handguns on campus, fear emerged as a prominent trope in public discussions, albeit used in very different ways by supporters or opponents of the law. Against the more standard interpretation of fear-based rhetoric as an exploitation of others’ insecurities, this essay draws on mixed-methods research to examine expressions of fear by activist opponents of Campus Carry and the way in which supporters of the law sought to deconstruct it.

Anna Hartnell's “When Cars Become Churches” begins by establishing a helpful context for understanding and fully appreciating the most recent gift to readers from Jesmyn Ward, her 2013 memoir titled Men We Reaped. In the wake of the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, and Eric Gordon, Ward's memoir is a critically important addition to our understanding of the fragility of the lives of young black men. These are lives that matter deeply to Ward and to the community of DeLisle, Mississippi – and because of Ward's fearless, honest, and emotionally searing story, they are lives that matter to her readers. She realizes one of the great achievements of literature: the transformation of the reader who looks at the other from a distance into a reader who sees with the other. As such, her work – especially Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped – helps to enhance affective and cognitive understanding of others and cultivate moral imagination.

By the mid-1960s, American writer Kay Boyle was in possession of a three-book contract from Doubleday publishers in New York. The cornerstone of this deal was to be a history of Germany, a manuscript she began in the late 1950s. Boyle encountered difficulties completing this work, and after lobbying successfully to write a history of German women instead, she eventually abandoned the project altogether. To help her meet her professional obligations, Boyle hoped that Doubleday would accept a new plan to republish Three Short Novels, a work that had appeared under the Beacon imprint in 1958. That publisher still had four thousand copies of the book in its warehouse, however, and Doubleday editor Ken McCormick was unable to agree to Boyle’s proposal. McCormick suggested instead that she undertake work revising Robert McAlmon’s 1938 autobiography, Being Geniuses Together. Indeed, in the years following his death in 1956, Boyle had been unsuccessful in locating an American publisher for her friend’s book, so when Doubleday brought forward an edition of the work in 1968, it contained alternate chapters written by Kay Boyle, herself. McAlmon’s original text is approximately one hundred and ten thousand words in length; Boyle’s edition is one hundred and sixty thousand words, only seventy thousand of which were written by Robert McAlmon. ‘‘This present book is his,’’ Boyle wrote of McAlmon’s achievement in her 1984 afterword (333), and while one might argue that this is the case, no one can question the fact that his book was altered substantially from its original form.

Revising a century of interpretation that has emphasized the identification of José Martí with Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essay draws on Martí's unpublished and published manuscripts about Emerson to reveal Martí's keen sense of his difference from the New England bard. When we read Martí's 1882 eulogy to Emerson alongside contemporaneous essays about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the War of the Pacific, Martí's epiphany – which he calls the “evening of Emerson” – comes to suggest the evanescence of Emerson's influence. Martí here glimpses his contribution: a creative resignification and translation of Emerson and US culture more broadly in order to arrive at a distinct version of nuestra América. Although Emerson's influence persists, as he provides the phrase “our America,” Martí's interpretation transposes the phrase to a minor key and reveals the perspective of the Latin American migrant who presciently observes the threat of imperial expansion.

Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning is a dramatic re-presentation of the last three days of the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Dubbed the “atomic spies” by the media, the Rosenbergs were accused of passing on the “secret” of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The sensational trial provoked widespread attention for its seeming encapsulation of the fault lines in American society opened up by anticommunism and the emergent Cold War. Found guilty, they were the first American nationals to be executed for espionage. This paper analyses the different narrative methods that Coover employs to re-present the past. In particular I focus on Coover's juxtaposition of a third-person, seemingly omniscient, narrator with the first-person narratological voice of then Vice President Richard Nixon. I suggest that we can best understand this not simply as providing objective and subjective versions of the event, as some critics have claimed, but rather as a distinction between history as chronicle (or what I call a synchronic method of history), and history as storytelling (or diachrony). Through this The Public Burning becomes not just a satirical critique of the specific political culture of the time, I contend, but, more fundamentally, a general exploration of the difficulties of reconstituting past events into knowledge. It is here, perhaps, where the novel's continuing relevance for today lies.

In this essay, I examine the hyper-modern apparition with which Don DeLillo concludes Underworld alongside a “real-life” image, said to look like the Virgin Mary, which appeared in April 2005 in Chicago on the wall of a highway underpass. I argue that discussing these two apparitions together highlights how both images transform urban surfaces and waste, creating new sites around which collectivities take shape. The pairing also illustrates the mode of perception that the apparitions engender, one that makes urban realities of class dispossession and minority displacement visible. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's notion of the wish image and Merleau-Ponty's concept of “perceptual faith,” I argue that these apparitions evoke the otherworldly but ultimately insist upon the material dimensions of urban life.

This article unpacks the music of the Townsend Plan, an ambitious Depression-era pension proposal, and the overlooked, yet deeply influential, national movement of its supporters, which aimed to simultaneously eradicate old-age poverty and revive the national economy. As well as providing a musical account of the media strategies, political tactics, and institutional culture of Townsendism, this article charts how different demographics of US society also mobilized popular music in arguments for or against pensions in the 1930s and 1940s. In the process, the article highlights some of the rich discourse about welfare, health, and aging in the mid-twentieth-century USA.

Not many private relationships in history have received as much press attention in recent years as that between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. First alleged in 1802 by the journalist James Callender, who based his account on stories that had been current in Virginia for some years, the affair has since then been debated both in the scholarly community and by the general public to an unparalleled degree. The results of the DNA tests on male descendants of the Jefferson and Hemings families that were published in 1998 have added fuel to the debate. Meanwhile, its focus has shifted. The majority of those who have publicly expressed an opinion on the case, including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation which owns and administers Monticello, now seem to agree that a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings did exist, and that it resulted in a number of children. The questions addressed today primarily concern the implications of the affair. What does the liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings mean for our understanding of the man Thomas Jefferson, and how does it affect the accomplishments he has generally been credited with? Given the little we know about her, how do we view Sally Hemings's role in the relationship, and how do we come to understand her as an individual living out her life in bondage? What, if any, are the consequences the affair has for an evaluation of interracial relationships as they existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?