This paper examines the contestation over otherness – in the form of ethnicity and national identity – that arose in the U.S. during World War I, culminating in the Red Scare of the 1920s. In the narrative of “Americanization,” immigration policies were joined with a militant nationalism, aiming to eliminate “enemies within” and from without, through a process of deportation, the criminalization of dissent and military interventionism. The demonization of immigrant-otherness became a means of strengthening solidarity among Anglo-Saxons, at a time when their cohesiveness was being challenged internally. As such, the history of America's internal control over its immigrant self is the familiar one of the limits of liberalism.

One of the most interesting scholarly developments in historical circles over the course of the last few years has been the unanticipated rise of the field known as the “new history of American capitalism.” Although most devotees of this new field are not formally trained in economics – indeed, some demonstrate little familiarity with the standard methods informing the discipline – the rise of the field on balance has been salutary for the traditional field to which it is most closely related: economic history. For decades economic history qua field had been shrinking, particularly in history departments, but also in departments of economics, as historians jumped on the cultural bandwagon or set sail with Atlantic history, and economists moved toward theory, models, and abstraction and away from messy empirics and fussy data, especially from the deep recesses of the past (often defined as anything prior to the last quarter). And so, academic scribblers – including this one, alas – anticipating the demise of economic history, were busy penning ex ante epitaphs and memorials to the field, as the remaining practitioners became grayer and longer in the tooth.

Newspaper files for the period 1830–60 indicate that a number of American Minstrel Shows visited Ireland at a time when the Irish Anti-Slavery movement was particularly vigorous. The shows occasioned considerable comment in the press, but, surprisingly, little or none among the abolitionists, who were usually avid readers of anything in the press pertaining even remotely to the U.S.A. and the Negro. Yet the popular Irish image of the Negro must have been in part determined by such performances, and for this reason they deserve some attention. Irish audiences were also, in this period, treated to dramatizations of episodes in Negro life and to the exhibition, as curiosities, of African tribesmen; but by far the most common was the American Minstrel Show.

The explanations for the red scare of the Cold War years have often been concerned with the direction taken by anti-Communist pressures. These have sometimes been represented as welling up from below, perhaps in the form of grassroots anxieties and resentments directed at well-to-do liberals and intellectuals, or as Catholic and immigrant enmity towards the Soviet Union. Such populistic currents may be portrayed as disturbing the normal routines of American politics. More often in recent years anti-Communist sentiments have been presented as elite-inspired influences working their way down in the polity, such as the anti-Soviet rhetoric and policies of the Truman administration, or the partisan opportunism of Republican politicians. The American political process itself may then be held to account. There have been a few attempts to test these interpretations by studies at state level, although it is not self-evident that such studies will favour either of these explanations. Indeed, the more detailed the study the more it is likely to acknowledge the complexity of American anti-communism. The evidence of California suggests that the second great red scare arose out of the convergence of pressures both from above and from below, in a process involving at least three different political dimensions.

In a democratic political system policymaking takes place as a consequence of the clash of competing interests promoted in part by pressure groups. In the past many pressure groups operated in the shadows between the spotlight of intense publicity and the dark spaces where decision-takers and their advisers are to be found. More recently, especially in the case of the “ cause ” groups that form the subject of this analysis, pressure groups are working more consciously in the public arena both to arouse support and to widen the general understanding of the causes they espouse. Broadly speaking the political function of a pressure group is to recognize and publicize deficiencies in governmental activity; to try to influence in their favour governmental decisions; to provide information about events or problems that otherwise might not be available for decision-takers to consider; and, in some instances, to focus public attention on and increase public understanding of particular issues of wide social and moral significance.

Richard Nixon gained a poor reputation as President for his work as leader of the Republican Party. His attitude towards the party was seen as neglectful at best, destructive at worst. It was clear that Nixon revelled in the details of electoral politics as far as his own position was concerned, but it seemed equally clear that he had little concern for the political fortunes of his party at large. Among the most partisan of American politicians during his earlier career, Nixon seemed to shrug off this partisan past when he reached the White House in 1969. But this understanding of Nixon's relationship with the Republican Party is in some respects misleading. Although it is true that his record provides significant examples of presidential neglect of the party, it also contains equally significant examples of presidential concern about the party's future. Few American Presidents of the modern era paid much attention to their responsibility for party leadership, so the nature of Nixon's support for the Republicans distinguishes him as a party leader of notable strength rather than notable weakness.

In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson became the first American to put history to work to create a nation. He blazed a path that historians have been following ever since. Consider the difficulty Jefferson faced. Different events were happening in thirteen intensely local and isolated colonies among people with different traditions, languages, religions, and circumstances. Jefferson turned these scattered events into a national narrative. Behind these individual acts by agents of the British Crown aimed at different colonies was a single menace, Jefferson insisted, that should inspire these isolated individuals to discover and act upon what they shared as bearers of the traditional liberties of Englishmen. To introduce his stunning attempt to fit isolated events into a single narrative, Jefferson began by boldly declaring that it was “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds that have connected them with another.” The colonists, Jefferson proclaimed, were “one people.” Jefferson knew that the colonists were not “one people.” But in order to invent one nation, Jefferson had to invent one people, and in order to invent one people Jefferson had to invent one history that might unite that “one people.” It has been hard work ever since.

From 1776 until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, it was possible to believe – indeed, it was hard to question – that nations were, or even should be, the embodiment of people's destinies – that nations could express their identities, solve their problems, and be entrusted with their dreams and fates. The modern practice of history was born a couple of centuries ago to serve this process, to invent narratives and persuade peoples to interpret their personal experiences within national terms and narratives.

In 1970, Robert W. Peterson, the author of Only the Ball Was White, one of the first and most influential books on the Negro leagues, wrote: ‘‘Negro baseball was at once heroic and tawdry, a gladsome thing and a blot on America’s conscience.’’ When this appraisal was first made, every team in the Major Leagues had been ‘‘integrated’’ for at least ten years, and, as Peterson notes, ‘‘Negro baseball had virtually been forgotten.’’ This was perhaps willful on the part of many white people. At the time, Leroy ‘‘Satchel’’ Paige (1906–82) and Josh Gibson (1911–47) had neither been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame nor had they been transformed into national icons, and there was a general ignorance, even among most sports fans and scholars, about the Negro leagues.

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

This essay surveys George W. Bush's public statements from 1993 to 2001 to examine the evolution of his religious and political rhetoric. Bush's personal religiosity and his use of religious rhetoric during his campaigns for the presidency and in his two terms in office have received extensive comment from the press as well as from scholars. Yet very little scholarly work has considered the role of religion in his earlier political career. Although Bush had evinced a deep and genuine evangelical faith for years before he launched his bid for the governorship, he did not begin his political career as an overtly Christian leader. Instead, over the course of his governorship, he gradually incorporated Christian tropes in his speeches to develop, explain, and gain support for his “compassionate conservative” policies and to build rapport with voters.

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.

The St. Louis Hegelians existed as a loosely organized group from approximately 1858 to 1880. Before the Civil War they participated in the St. Louis Literary and Philosophical Society which dissolved when most of its members left the city to fight in the war. After the guns fell silent, a few of these “respectable vagabonds,” most notably Henry Conrad Brokmeyer and William Torrey Harris, organized the St. Louis Philosophical Society in January 1866. Both organizations were part of a larger “St. Louis Movement” which included an art club, an Aristotle club, a Shakespeare society, the St. Louis Academy of Science, the St. Louis Philharmonic Society, and the Academy of Useful Science. All of these organizations were primarily composed of local professionals – public school teachers and administrators, judges, and attorneys.

Though now seen as a key turning point in the Cold War, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act provoked considerable opposition in the United States. The principal line of criticism was that the United States had given away too much in the negotiations and had required little of the Soviets. The Helsinki Final Act initially was unpopular domestically with Eastern European ethnic groups as well as members of Congress due to concerns about its implications for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe. At the root of many of these complaints was a larger critique of United States President Gerald Ford's policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Understanding the sources of opposition to the Helsinki Final Act in the United States illuminates the potential conflict between foreign policy formulation and domestic politics, and it reflects the Ford administration's inability to explain his support for the agreement to the American public. Furthermore, the controversy engendered by the Helsinki Final Act illustrates how contentious Cold War politics remained even in an era of supposed détente with the Soviet Union and demonstrates the extent to which the pact's long-term benefits were unforeseen by participants at the time. The Ford administration was never able to counter condemnation of the Helsinki Final Act sufficiently, enhancing existing skepticism about his leadership and policy toward the Soviet Union.

This article will examine the ways in which the people of Northern Ireland and African American troops stationed there during the Second World War reacted to each other. It will also consider the effect of institutional racism in the American military on this relationship, concluding that, for the most part, the population welcomed black soldiers and refused to endorse American racial attitudes or enforce Jim Crow segregation. This piece argues that, bearing in mind the latent racism of the time, the response of the Northern Irish to African Americans was essentially colour-blind, and this was true in both the Protestant and Catholic communities.

Surveying the American scene in 1958, Aldous Huxley recorded his dismay over the speed with which Brave New World was becoming realized in contemporary developments: “The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Having struck a keynote of urgency Huxley then lines up a series of oppositions between limited disorder, individuality and freedom on the one hand, and order, automatism and subjection on the other in order to express his liberal anxieties that political and social organization might hypertrophy. Huxley sums up an abiding fear which runs through American dystopian fiction of the 1950s that individuals will lose their identity and become the two-dimensional stereotypes indicated in two catch-phrases of the period: the “organization man” and the “man in the grey flannel suit. ” William H. Whyte's 1956 study diagnoses the demise of the Protestant ethic in American life and its replacement by a corporate one which privileges “belongingness. ” The result might be, he warns, not a world controlled by self-evident enemies familiar from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an antiseptic regime presided over by a “mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into “ Michael Gold,” published “ Towards Proletarian Art” in The Liberator. This essay has been described as “ the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture.” What Gold meant by “ proletarian art” remains unclear. He uses “ proletarian” interchangeably with “ masses,” and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — “ The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy ” — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold's thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism.

The rise of the ekphrastic poem at the turn of the twenty-first century speaks of a preoccupation with the mediated representations that are increasingly a part of perceived reality. In the wake of “terror,” what we know and how we know it are subjects of fundamental importance. Mixed-media poet Claudia Rankine turns a revealing lens on the ontological implications of how combinations of words and images construct the world, taking in the virtual and material nature of contemporary existence as well as questioning the commercial and political image-texts that constitute reality for most people. I will argue that Rankine's hybrid and complex texts are representative of an increasingly urgent need to attend to the heavily mediated nature of experience and the emotional disconnect this often entails, revealing the need for a reassessment of the responsibilities involved in making representations for public consumption.

This paper posits a socioeconomic explanation for the popularity of the slasher film genre. These films created a unique sub-genre in which teenage protagonists had to contend with unstoppable forces, in the form of manic killers, while every aspect of modernity and the middle-class lifestyle failed them. Cars and telephones die, the suburbs offer no sanctuary, and adults are absent or ineffectual. The slasher genre rose in popularity as the American economy spiraled into recession. By examining the big three franchises of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street this paper analyzes the slasher films of the 1980s and their remakes in the late 2000s. It argues that slasher films symbolized a cathartic release for their mainly adolescent audiences at a time in their lives when impending adulthood and an unfavorable economic climate seemed to conspire against them.

This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005), and the short stories of Philip K. Dick. The final section of the article discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) within the contemporary political context of accelerationist anticapitalism, whose advocates propose working with “the machines” rather than against them.